He addresses several poems to Lamartine--it is his desire, he writes, to go into battle on the same war-chariot as his friend, to manage the horses while Lamartine wields the spear--and these poems are among the most attractive of all, partly because they are remarkably beautiful, and testify to the respectful and yet at the same time brotherly feeling of the younger for the elder poet, partly because in them we have, along with Hugo's views on religious and social questions, the expression of his ideas on the subject of art. All the poems prove with what earnestness, but also with what exaggerated and almost offensive self-consciousness, the young poet has apprehended his mission--it is always called a prophet's mission; the poet is a seer, a shepherd of the people; of Lamartine, Hugo goes the length of declaring that one feels as if God had revealed Himself to him face to face. But it is in the poems to Lamartine that we perceive most clearly what is Hugo's conception of the position and relation of the new literature to that of the eighteenth century. It bears a remarkable resemblance to a kindred literary phenomenon in Denmark, namely, Oehlenschläger and his friends' conception of their position to Baggesen. Read, for example, the poem _La Lyre et la Harpe_ (livre iv. ode 2). The lyre represents the frivolous, licentious poetry of the preceding century, which chants the praises of Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, and Eros, and inculcates an intellectual epicureanism, whereas in the tones of the harp we hear the admonition to watch and pray, to remember the seriousness of life, to think of death, to support and help our stumbling brethren. The poem is dedicated to "Alph. de L."; the word harp in itself pointed to Lamartine.
This offensive attitude towards the past is the first symptom of the approaching breach with that past's whole system of ideas, from which Hugo's significance as an author and leader of a literary movement dates.[4]
[1] Villemain, _M. de Féletz et les salons de son temps_.
[2] Any one interested in their real story will find it told according to the original historical documents in Cuvillier-Fleury's _Portraits Politiques_, 1851, pp. 377, &c.
[3] For example, Émile Deschamps, _Poésies_, edition of 1841, p. 124. "Une page des martyrs."