Whenever Julie pities Raphael, he answers her with pious outbursts in which he compares her and himself to Abélard and Héloïse. "Have I ever let you feel that I desire ought else than to share this suffering with you? Does it not make both of us voluntary and pure victims? Is not this the eternal burnt-offering of love, which has perhaps not been offered before the eyes of the angels since the days of Héloïse until now?"
When, after studying _Raphael_, we re-read Lamartine's poems to Elvire, we have a new key to the understanding of the idealism and vagueness of this poetic love, which, obliged to renounce sensual pleasures, pretends that the corporeal world does not exist for it. A distinction must, however, be drawn between the later poems and some written much earlier and in a perfectly different tone, a tone which recalls the eighteenth century. Take as examples the poems _À Elvire_ (which is in reality addressed to _Graziella_) and _Sapho_.
We have now enough of examples; let us consider to what conclusion they have led us. Choosing a simple emotion, but one of those which every school of literature sets itself to express and interpret, and which each expresses and interprets in a characteristic manner, we have examined a number of different specimens of the manner in which it is interpreted by this particular school. Here, as in all the other domains of literature which we have inspected, we have found the natural side of life ignored, or concealed, or blackened, or represented as something to be ashamed of. Chateaubriand and Madame de Krüdener seek out cases in which love is considered to be criminal and sinful, and either describe the triumphant yells of the powers of hell when the hero succumbs or the jubilations of the principalities and powers when the infamy is not perpetrated. We have the same paraphernalia in Alfred de Vigny's writings:
Les Chérubins brûlants qu'enveloppent six ailes, Les tendres Séraphins, Dieux des amours fidèles, Les Trônes, les Vertus, les Princes, les Ardeurs, Les Dominations, les Gardiens, les Splendeurs, Et les Rêves pieux, et les saintes Louanges, Et tous les Anges purs, et tous les grands Archanges.
De Vigny makes Satan speak like Eros, that is to say, Eros like Satan. Lamartine enthrones love in his poetry as seraphic, as emancipated from all earthly passion, but in _Raphael_ describes it as what it really was, ethereal against its will--which, however, only adds to the merit of the lovers and provides angels and burnt-offerings, these latter of a sweet savour unknown since the days of poor Abélard.