Jette un cri vers le ciel, ô chantre des enfers!
The notes appended at a later period to this poem betray an astonishing ignorance of Lord Byron's history; almost everything affirmed of him is incorrect. Though Lamartine added a poem to Child Harold, he never so much as learned to spell the name correctly.
The same admonitory tone which he here assumes towards Byron he adopted many years later in writing of Alfred de Musset, to whom he also offered pious and moral truisms as medicaments.
The piety which Lamartine felt in duty bound to display is less offensive, because more sincere, in the ode entitled _L'Immortalité_. This poem is addressed to the beloved of his youth, Elvire, whose scepticism was a great grief to him, and its aim is to comfort her on her death-bed with the prospect of an immortality in which until now she has refused to believe. But even here we have such frigid allegorical ideas as: "And Hope, standing by thy side, O Death! dreaming upon a grave, opens to me a fairer world."
In only one of the poems which invoke the Deity is Lamartine really the lyric poet and not merely the fluent verse-writer, namely in _Le Désespoir_, a Meditation which expresses revolt against our idea of God. In this poem we have rhythmic flow, passion, and two qualities rarely found in Lamartine's productions--vigour and conciseness. What has God seen since the creation of the world?
La vertu succombant sous l'audace impunie, L'imposture en honneur, la vérité bannie; L'errante liberté Aux dieux vivants du monde offerte en sacrifice; Et la force, par-tout, fondant de l'injustice Le règne illimité.
And in its original form the poem contained verses, suppressed at the time of publication, which expressed sentiments far more bitter and impious than these. It is characteristic that almost immediately after the appearance of _Le Désespoir_, Lamartine, at his mother's request, refuted the ideas it expressed in a reply-poem, _Dieu à l'Homme_, which, though not wanting in melodious sonority, is, as even its author perceived, not to be compared with the first. The first, he himself correctly observes, is the product of inspiration, the second of reflection.
But all the theological trappings were, as one might say, only glued on to Lamartine's poetry. Or one might perhaps with more propriety liken them to a carelessly constructed raft, which for a time floats upon the bosom of the stream and then breaks up into its component parts and disappears. All this pious dogmatism soon resolved itself into love of nature, worship of nature, a sincerely religious philosophy of nature.