Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848

"They (the Girondists) possessed three virtues which in the eyes of posterity atone for many faults. They worshiped liberty; they founded the Republic – this precautions truth of future governments; – at last, they died, because they refused blood to the people. Their time has condemned them to death, the future has judged them to glory and pardon. They died because they did not allow Liberty to soil itself, and posterity will yet engrave on their memory the inscription which Vergniaud, their oracle, has, with his own hand, engraved on the wall of his dungeon: 'Rather death than crime!' 'Potius mori quam foedari!'"

Lamartine is visibly inclined in favor of the Girondists – the founders of the Republic; but his sense of justice does not permit him to condemn the Jacobins without vindicating their memory from that crushing judgment which their contemporaries pronounced upon them. He thus describes, in a few masterly strokes, the character of Robespierre:

"Robespierre's refusal of the supreme power was sincere in the motives which he alleged. But there were other motives which caused him to reject the sole government. These motives he did not yet avow. The fact is that he had arrived at the end of his thoughts, and that himself did not know what form was best suited to revolutionary institutions. More a man of ideas than of action, Robespierre had the sentiment of the Revolution rather than the political formula. The soul of the institutions of the future was in his dreams, but he lacked the mechanism of a popular government. His theories, all taken from books, were brilliant and vague as perspectives, and cloudy as the far distance. He contemplated them daily; he was dazzled by them; but he never touched them with the firm and precise hand of practice. He forgot that Liberty herself requires the protection of a strong power, and that this power must have a head to conceive, and hands to execute. He believed that the words Liberty, Equality, Disinterestedness, Devotion, Virtue, incessantly repeated, were themselves a government. He took philosophy for politics, and became indignant at his false calculations. He attributed continually his deceptions to the conspiracies of aristocrats and demagogues. He thought that in extinguishing from society the aristocrats and demagogues, he would be able to suppress the vices of humanity, and the obstacles to the work of liberal institutions. His notion of the people was an illusion, not a reality. He became irritated to find the people often so weak, so cowardly, so cruel, so ignorant, so changeable, so unworthy the rank which nature has assigned them. He became irritated and soured, and challenged the scaffold to extricate him from his difficulties. Then, indignant at the excesses of the scaffold, he returned to words of justice and humanity. Then once more he seized upon the scaffold, invoked virtue and suscitated death. Floating sometimes on clouds, sometimes in human gore, he despaired of mankind and became frightened at himself. 'Death, and nothing but death!' he cried, in conversation with his intimate friends, 'and the villains charge it upon me. What memory shall I leave behind me if this goes on? Life is a burthen to me!'"

Once, says Lamartine, the truth became manifest. He (Robespierre) exclaimed, with a gesture of despair, "No, I was not made to govern, I was made to combat the enemies of the people!"

These meditations on the character of Robespierre, show sufficiently that Lamartine, though he may not as yet have taken a positive direction in politics, has at least, from his vague poetical conceptions, returned to a sound state of political criticism, the inevitable precursor of sound theories. His views on the execution of the royal family are severe but just.

"Had the French nation a right to judge Louis XVI. as a legal tribunal?" demands Lamartine. "No! Because the judge ought to be impartial and disinterested – and the nation was neither the one nor the other. In this terrible but inevitable combat, in which, under the name of revolution, royalty and liberty were engaged for emancipating or enslaving the citizen, Louis XVI. personified the throne, the nation personified liberty. This was not their fault, it was their nature. All attempts at a mutual understanding were in vain. Their natures warred against each other in spite of their inclination toward peace. Between these two adversaries, the king and the people, of whom the one, by instinct, was prompted to retain, the other to wrest from its antagonist the rights of the nation, there was no tribunal but combat, no judge but victory. We do not mean to say that there was not above the parties a moral of the case, and acts which judge even victory itself. This justice never perishes in the eclipse of the law, and the ruin of empires; but it has no tribunal before which it can legally summon the accused; it is the justice of state, the justice which has neither regularly appointed judges, nor written laws, but which pronounces its sentences in men's consciences, and whose code is equity."

"Louis XVI. could not be judged in politics or equity, but by a process of state. Had the nation a right to judge him thus? As well might we demand whether she had a right to fight and conquer, in other words, as well might we ask whether despotism is inviolable – whether liberty is a revolt – whether there is no justice here below but for kings – whether there is, for the people, no other right than to serve and obey? The mere doubt is an act of impiety toward the people."

So far the political philosophy of Lamartine, the legal argument against the king, strikes us as less logical and just. We may agree with him in principle, but we cannot assent to the abstract justice of his conclusions.

"The nation," says the head of the present provisional government of France, "possessing within itself the inalienable sovereignty which rests in reason, in the right and the will of each citizen, the aggregate of which constitutes the people, possesses certainly the faculty of modifying the exterior form of its sovereignty, to level its aristocracy, to dispossess its church of its property, to lower or even to suppress the throne, and to govern themselves through their proper magistrates. But as the nation had a right to combat and emancipate itself, she also had a right to watch over and consolidate the fruits of its victories. If, then, Louis XVI., a king too recently dispossessed of sovereign power – a king in whose eyes all restitution of power to the people was tantamount to a forfeiture – a king ill satisfied with what little of government remained in his hands, aspiring to reconquer the part he had lost – torn in one direction by a usurping assembly, and in another by a restless queen or humble nobility, and a clergy which made Heaven to intervene in his cause, by implacable emigrants, by his brothers running all over Europe to drum up enemies to the Revolution; if, in one word, Louis XVI., KING, appeared to the nation a living conspiracy against her liberty; if the nation suspected him of regretting in his soul too much the loss of supreme power – of causing the new constitution to stumble, in order to profit by its fall – of conducting liberty into snares to rejoice in anarchy – of disarming the country because he secretly wished it to be defeated – then the nation had a right to make him descend from the throne, and to call him to her bar, and to depose him in the name of her own dictatorship, and for her own safety. If the nation had not possessed this right, the right to betray the people with impunity, would, in the new constitution, have been one of the prerogatives of the crown."

This is a pretty fair specimen of revolutionary reasoning; but it is rather a definition of Democracy, as Lamartine understands it, than a constitutional argument in favor of the decapitation of "Louis Capet." Lamartine is, indeed, a "Conservative Democrat," that is, ready to immolate the king to preserve the rights of the people; but he does not distinguish in his mind a justifiable act from a righteous one. But it is a peculiarity of the French mind to identify itself so completely with the object of its reflection, that it is impossible for a French mind to be impartial, or as they will have it, not to be an enthusiast. The French are partisans even in science; the Academy itself has its factions.

We have thus quoted the most important political opinions expressed in his "Girondists," because these are his latest political convictions, and he has subscribed to them his name. We look upon this his last work, as a public confession of his faith – as a declaration of the principles which will guide him in the administration of the new government. Lamartine has been indoctrinated with the spirit of revolution; but it is not the spirit of his youth or early manhood. Liberty in his hands becomes something poetical – perhaps a lyric poem – but we respectfully doubt his capacity to give her a practical organization, and a real existence. High moral precepts and sublime theories may momentarily elevate a people to the height of a noble devotion; but laws and institutions are made for ordinary men, and must be adapted to their circumstances. Herein consists the specific talent of the statesman, and his capacity to govern. Government is not an ideal abstraction – a blessing showered from a given height on the abiding masses, or a scourge applied to mortify their passions; it is something natural and spontaneous, originating in and coeval with the people, and must be adapted to their situation, their moral and intellectual progress, and to their national peculiarities. It consists of details as well as of general forms, and requires labor and industry as well as genius. The majority of the people must not only yield the laws a ready submission, but they must find, or at least believe, it their interest to do so, or the government becomes coercion. The great problem of Europe is to discover the laws of labor, not to invent them, for without this question being practically settled in some feasible manner, all fine spun theories will not suffice to preserve the government.

Lamartine closes his history of the Girondists with the following sublime though mystic reflection: "A nation ought, no doubt, to weep her dead, and not to console itself in regard to a single life that has been unjustly and odiously sacrificed; but it ought not to regret its blood when it was shed to reveal eternal truths. God has put this price on the germination and maturation of all His designs in regard to man. Ideas vegetate in human blood; revolutions descend from the scaffold. All religions become divine through martyrdom. Let us, then, pardon each other, sons of combatants and victims. Let us become reconciled over their graves to take up the work which they have left undone. Crime has lost every thing in introducing itself into the ranks of the republic. To do battle is not to immolate. Let us take away the crime from the cause of the people, as a weapon which has pierced their hands and changed liberty into despotism. Let us not seek to justify the scaffold with the cause of our country, and proscriptions by the cause of liberty. Let us not pardon the spirit of our age by the sophism of revolutionary energy, let humanity preserve its heart; it is the safest and most infallible of its principles, and let us resign ourselves to the condition of human things. The history of the Revolution is glorious and sad as the day after the victory, or the eve of another combat. But if this history is full of mourning, it is also full of faith. It resembles the antique drama where, while the narrator recites his story, the chorus of the people shouts the glory, weeps for the victims and raises a hymn of consolation and hope to God."

All this is very beautiful, but it does not increase our stock of historical information. It teaches the people resignation, instead of pointing to their errors, and the errors of those who claimed to be their deliverers. Lamartme has made an apotheosis of the Revolution, instead of treating it as the unavoidable consequence of misgovernment. To an English or American reader the allusion to "the blood sacrifice," which is necessary in politics as in religion, would border on impiety; with the French it is probably a proof of religious faith. Lamartine, in his views and conceptions, in his mode of thinking and philosophizing, is much more nearly allied to the German than to the English schools; only that, instead of a philosophical system, carried through with a rigorous and unsparing logic, he indulges in philosophical reveries. As a statesman Lamartine lacks speciality, and for this reason we think that his administration will be a short one.

With respect to character, energy, and courage, Lamartine has few equals. He has not risen to power by those crafty combinations which destroy a man's moral greatness in giving him distinction. "Greatness" was, indeed, "thrust upon him," and thus far he has nobly and courageously sustained it. He neither courted power, nor declined it. When it was offered, he did not shrink from assuming the responsibility of accepting it. He has no vulgar ambition to gratify, no insults to revenge, no devotion to reward. He stands untrammeled and uncommitted to any faction whatever. He may not be able to solve the social problem of the age; but will, in that case, surrender his command untarnished as he received it, and serve once more in the ranks.

SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT

BY HENRY W. LONGFELLOW

[When the wind abated and the vessels were near enough, the admiral was seen constantly sitting in the stern, with a book in his hand. On the 9th of September he was seen for the last time, and was heard by the people of the Hind to say, "We are as near Heaven by sea as by land." In the following night the lights of the ship suddenly disappeared. The people in the other vessel kept a good look out for him during the remainder of the voyage. On the 22d of September they arrived, through much tempest and peril; at Falmouth. But nothing more was seen or heard of the admiral. Belknap's American Biography, I. 203.]

Southward with his fleet of ice
Sailed the Corsair Death;
Wild and fast, blew the blast,
And the east-wind was his breath.

His lordly ships of ice
Glistened in the sun;
On each side, like pennons wide,
Flashing crystal streamlets run.

His sails of white sea-mist
Dripped with silver rain;
But where he passed there were cast
Leaden shadows o'er the main.

Eastward from Campobello
Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed;
Three days or more seaward he bore,
Then, alas! the land wind failed.

Alas! the land wind failed,
And ice-cold grew the night;
And nevermore, on sea or shore,
Should Sir Humphrey see the light.

He sat upon the deck,
The book was in his hand;
"Do not fear! Heaven is as near,"
He said "by water as by land!"

In the first watch of the night,
Without a signal's sound,
Out of the sea, mysteriously,
The fleet of Death rose all around.

The moon and the evening star
Were hanging in the shrouds;
Every mast, as it passed,
Seemed to rake the passing clouds.

They grappled with their prize,
At midnight black and cold!
As of a rock was the shock;
Heavily the ground-swell rolled.

Southward through day and dark,
They drift in close embrace;
With mist and rain to the Spanish main;
Yet there seems no change of place.

Southward, forever southward,
They drift through dark and day;
And like a dream, in the Gulf-Stream,
Sinking vanish all away.

THE NIGHT

The day, the bitter day, divides us, sweet —
Tears from our souls the wings with which we soar
To Heaven. All things are cruel. We may meet
Only by stealth, to sigh – and all is o'er:
We part – the world is dark again, and fleet;
The phantoms of despair and doubt once more
Pursue our hearts and look into our eyes,
Till Memory grows dismayed, and sweet Hope dies.