Confession of the Literary Man

Of all the multiplied men who lived in me, to a certain degree—the man of sentiment, the man of oetry, the man of oratory—nothing remaing in me but the literary man. The literary man himself is far from being happy. Years de not yet bear me down. I bear more heavily the weight of my heart than the weight of my years, These years, like Macbeth’s phantoms, pass their hands over my shoulder, and point out to me, not crowns, but a sepulchre; would to God I was now asleep in it!

I have nothing in me wherewith to smile to the future of the past. I am growing old, without children, in my desolate house, surrounded by the tombs of all those I loved. All that remains to me of life is concentrated in a few hearts and in a modest inheritance. And even these hearts suffer because of me, and I am not sure that I shall not be dispossessed of that inheritance to-morrow, and go and die upon some stranger’s road, as Dante says.

The hearth on which my father placed his feet, and where I now place mine, is a borrowed hearth, which may be torn up at any hour; it may be sold and resold at any caprice of the auctioneer; and so may my mother’s bed; so may the dog which licks my hand in pity when he sees my brow in agony as I look at him. The children of the Samians insulted Homer, because, they said, Homer obstructed the highways of the islands by singing poetry before the houses.

I am not Homer; but my crities are more severe than the Samians. Upon these pages where they reproach me for heaping piles of vanity, it is not ink you read; no, believe me, it is not; but the sweat of my brow.

Itis not my name I seek to magnify, but the pledge of those who have no estate and no existence sava that name. My name !—oh, I know as well as you do what that name is worth, and what will be its fate! I would with all my heart (God is my witness that name had never been uttered. I woul give all that may yet remain to me of life, if it were entirely buried, with him who bears it, in the silence of the tomb—noiselessly borne to the graveyard there, forgotten here.

Life to me now is nothing worth. What have I now, I pray, to regret in life? Have not I seen all my thoughts perish before me?

Do I design again to sing in life, with an extinguished voice, strophes which would end in sobs? Have I taste for returning into those political struggles which, were they even opened again, would no longer recognize my posthumous accents? Have I any firm hope in those forms of government which the people abandon with as much fickleness as they adopted them? Am I so insane as to believe that I shall cast, or that I shall sculpture—I alone—in bronze or marble, a colossal statue of the human race, when God has given wherewith to do so but sand and clay to the greatest of sculptors?

Of what use is life when one can contemplate nothing but the ruins of those things which are recorded in his mind! Happy the men who die at their work, struck down by the revolutions in which they were engaged. Death is their punishment—aye, but it is their refuge!

M. de Lamartene.