634 FRENCH EPIC POETRY, 



weakens its power. However, its exquisite beauties amply out- 

 balance its defects. 



Jocelyn, far superior to the Chute d'un Ange, was an 

 idealisation of an experience of the Abbe Dumont, a tutor of 

 Lamartine's youth. It was published in 1836, two years before 

 the Chute d'un Ange. In Jocelyn Lamartine has given us an epic 

 tale, which is alternatively familiar and sublime in its features, 

 in which he sings the bliss of country-life, the impressive scenery 

 of the Alps, and the sanctifying power of sacrifice and renuncia- 

 tion. It tells the history of " a human sensitive plant, crushed 

 in the heyday of its bloom, and exhaling its innermost fragrance 

 imder the heel of unspeakable grief." In Jocelyn, we have the 

 peasant's son, who gives up his inheritance to provide his sister's 

 dowry. He goes to the seminary and devotes himself entirely 

 to his theological studies. The Revolution drives him away, and 

 he finds a refuge up on the slopes of the Alps of Dauphine, in 

 a cavern, known as " La Grotte des Aigles." There he hospit- 

 ably receives a forlorn youngster, whose father had just died on 

 the slopes of the mountain. Fifteen months after he discovers 

 that his guest is a woman, and that her real name is Laurence. 

 They fall in love with each other. It is the idyll of Paul and 

 rirglnie and the pathetic story of Edzuin and Angelina over 

 again in the solitudes of an Alpine forest. An unforeseen catas- 

 trophe smashes their happiness. The Bishop of Grenoble sum- 

 mons Jocelyn, has him ordained, and a gulf is opened between 

 the two lovers, who are separated for ever. Seven years later. 

 Jocelyn is called to the bedside of a young woman, who is* 

 dying, and who turns out to be Laurence. He feels blessed tu 

 give her the extreme tmction and absolution, buries her on the 

 top of the Montagne des Aigles, and, in less than a year's time 

 is united with her in death. It is a marvellously beautiful idyll, 

 the pages of which are impregnated with what Pierre Lasserre 

 appropriately calls '' la grande ingenuite homerique," and which 

 has flown from the same poetic vein, from which the last jets 

 were poured out in Frederic Mistral's Mireilho, the vein that 

 had its origin in the Odyssey. 



V/ith regard to Jocelyn, I should like to repeat w^hat Dr, 

 Clark says with respect to the Chanson de Roland: "If anyone 

 has a desire to read something of virginal freshness, to drink 

 for a season of the intcgri fontes of the nobly simple and the 

 intenselv human, to such a one I commend the perusal of Lamar- 

 t'Ue's Jocelyn." 



I have now reached the final chapter of my paper, one epic 

 being left to comment upon. It is Victor Hugo's Legende des 

 Siecles, which, appearing in the second half of the 19th century, 

 darkened the lustre of all those that had appeared before. Its 

 first parts were pubHshed in 1859, but, as these left great gaps 

 in the groundplan of the w^ork, it was continued in 1877 and 

 1883, and finally comnleted bv the posthumous publication of 

 two chapters, entitled Dien and La Fin de Satan. Such as we 

 have it now, it is undoubtedly the most stupendous and colossal 



