L'Harmonie selon Lamartine. Utopie d'un lieu commun (review)

Two questions inevitably come to mind when Lamartine's poetic achievement is considered. First, how do we explain the extraordinary success of the Méditations? Loiseleur's answer is that Lamartine invented a new musicality, an harmonious fluidity of sound that transcended the neo-classical rhetoric to which the poet remained attached. At the same time Lamartine's writing gave expression to a sense of inwardness conjoined with a sense of nature that was quite at odds with the descriptive poetry produced by Delille. Lamartine's verse explored the post-revolutionary self and the sense of alienation that sprang from a new relationship to time.

The second common question concerns Lamartine's gradual abandonment of verse. On this matter Loiseleur has much to say that is persuasive, stressing the hostile reception given to La Chute d'un ange and the rise and catastrophic fall of Lamartine's political career. However, Loiseleur also emphasises the extent to which the idea of poetic harmony that sustained Lamartine's verse production from the 1820s to the 1840s no longer meshed with the literary climate of the 1850s and 1860s. The very elements of spontaneity, sincerity and authenticity that had impressed earlier readers struck a new generation as hackneyed and jaded. Even worse for Lamartine was the realisation that he no longer possessed 'l'intuition et le désir du rapport, principe de l'harmonie, qui permettait à la poésie d'avoir lieu' (626). In Loiseleur's words Lamartine's poetry matters because it signalled 'l'apparition et l'affirmation de la voix lyrique, irréductible à toute règle, et par là même extrêmement aléatoire à fixer' (140). In his more religiously-oriented poetry the self was symbolically sacrificed in order to allow the emergence of a mysterious music that tended towards silence.

During the 1830s he moved from a static, nostalgic perception of harmony to a more dynamic understanding, one that knitted with his new engagement within the field of politics. Loiseleur helpfully situates Lamartine's idea of harmony within the currents of Romantic thought that have been explored by Frank Paul Bowman. However, Lamartine emerges as being more interested in the cultivation of origins than with the advent of the Kingdom. His understanding of harmony reflected his general espousal of the spirit of moderation. Harmony was associated with the idea of reciprocity and with an idealistic representation of rural reality. Lamartinian harmony rested on a sense of participation, on an awareness of linkages and correspondences that united humankind with the cosmos but which bore little resemblance to the pseudo-mathematical notion of analogy that fired the minds of the followers of Charles Fourier. Lamartine's fluid sense of harmony fostered the creation of a poetry of echoes and reflected images. As time passed, however, the lyrical voice faltered. The quest for communication and participation yielded to a growing sense of isolation.

This massive and comprehensive book marshals an impressive amount of material. The focus is firmly placed on the verse which Loiseleur sensibly considers as forming a single continuum that defies strict generic categories. A real strength of the volume is the amount of space that is given over to the close reading of individual poems. Observations by contemporary critics such as Laprade, Sainte-Beuve and Vinet are well chosen and often illuminating. The argument that Lamartine's aesthetic was musical rather than visual is well made. In Loiseleur's view Lamartine successfully fused Neo-classicism with Pre-Romanticism to produce a new type of richly sonorous verse that displaced the constricting mythologies of the past and gave voice to a new lyrical sensibility.