Think of it! This was written half a century ago, and in spite of it the Music Hall more than ever sways the masses, and the cheap inanities of the comic opera are the rage with the rest of the community. I shall review the remainder of this essay in the next article.
Dionysus was the productive or bountiful power of Nature, and the earlier and pure conception of him was of a beauteous but manly figure, attended by the Graces and presiding over dramatic representations of Nature’s mysteries. It was only in later times that he appeared as Bacchus, the God of wine and intoxication, attended by Bacchantes, and presiding over sensual and drunken orgies.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE. IV. POET, DIPLOMAT, TRAVELLER.
Lamartine spent two winters at Paris after the Restoration. His former acquaintances were scattered, and he had new ones to make. He was for a time solitary and little occupied. He was, nevertheless, resolute in his quest for an opening into public life. His friend Virieu and others introduced him to persons of distinction and one step led presently to another. The passion for literature served to place him on a friendly footing with others of similar tastes, and he became able after a while to enumerate among his acquaintances Chateaubriand, the “Napoleon of French literature,” Lamennais, the French Savonarola, Rocher, Aimé Martin, De Vigny.
The epoch of the Restoration was also the epoch of the Revival of Letters in France. The Revolution had sent scholars and literary men to the scaffold or driven them into exile, and Bonaparte had attempted to level all learning and philosophic culture to the plane of physical and mathematical science. Whatever might elevate the human soul was not tolerated. He aspired to restore the Sixteenth century at the end of the Eighteenth and required literature to be adapted to that end.
Louis XVIII. was always broad and liberal in his sentiments, and even before the Revolution he had cherished familiar relations with literary men and men of learning. His long term of enforced leisure, during his absence from France, and a weakness in his limbs which compelled him to sedentary life, had tended to deepen his interest in such pursuits. He was emphatically a king of the fireside.