The Poet of Love and Beauty

In these days when young people flock to the reading of novels — the romantic ones in particular — I should like to present to women in general and to the young girl in particular a sweet and worthy novel, hoping that in presenting it to them I may stir in their souls the longing to read it. This novel is “Raphaël” by Lamartine, rendered into Arabic by Mr. Hasan al-Zayyat. When we are fortunate enough to read literature that is delicate and strong, we help to form our character well and firmly; and someone once said: Tell me what you read and I will tell you who you are.

The book “Raphaël,” by Lamartine, the French poet of love and beauty, is a true story of its author's life — indeed, it is the tragedy of his youth. He called it the pages of the age of twenty, because it is the history of that age overflowing with emotions and bursting with youth. You know from your reading of this book and of Lamartine's other works that the French poet was a contemporary of Napoleon, for he was born in 1790; but he hated Napoleon and called him the tyrant. Perhaps that tender spirit in Lamartine — the spirit that made him in his old age a father to all the children of the village, and that made the birds his friends, entering his room and leaving it as if it were their own nest — that spirit is what made him look upon the conqueror as a bloodthirsty tyrant.

Lamartine visited Lebanon and stayed as the guest of Emir Bashir al-Shihabi. The visitor today to the Emir's castle at Beiteddine in Lebanon sees a room that is the poet's room, on whose door is written this sentence: “Keep the hour of goodness and you shall win contentment.” Then inside the room he sees a metal tablet bearing a relief bust of the French poet and the date of the poet's visit to the Emir in 1833; and he sees, among the beech and willow trees, a rushing waterfall beside which the poet used to spend most of his hours dreaming. And if you ask any villager about these waters tumbling down like snows, he answers you artlessly that it is Lamartine's waterfall.

As for the story of his love — or the tragedy of his youth, as it ought to be called — it is that at the age of twenty, while taking the cure at the baths of Aix-les-Bains, he met a captivating young woman who was likewise there for her health; he loved her and she loved him. But she was a wife in name only to a generous old scholar who had adopted her as a child and then, fearing evil gossip for her when she grew to young womanhood, had married her.

After that you can imagine this burning passion between the two lovers: the young poet of twenty, his heart beating for the first time, and the girl not yet twenty, virgin in heart and in body alike... The summer months pass, and the two unhappy lovers part in their chaste love... The wife goes off to her palace, and the young man takes to visiting her... And in the story appears a third, noble figure: the old husband... He notices the love between his wife and this young man, but he trusts in the sanctity of the soul of the woman who lives at his side, and so he opens his house to the young man... He notices that this young man visits the palace only with caution, guarding the reputation of the woman he loves and fearing lest evil tongues chew over her name; he notices too that this noble youth fights the impulses of passion and tries to conquer his heart — and so he holds him in all reverence and esteem...

Summer comes again, and behold, the girl wilts like a thirsting flower; behold, she walks toward death with rapid steps; behold, she knows she is within a bow's length of death. Yet though those forces had gathered against her — love, then deprivation, then despair of love and of life — her firm character refuses to let her betray that generous old man and defile the name he had bestowed upon her.

The young woman goes on suffering between her love and her duty until, feeling death draw near, she fears to meet it with her beloved grieving at her side; so she chose that he should go before her to the resort where they had met for the first time, hoping the sweetness of memories might soften the pain of the blow — denying herself the consolation she would have found in closing her eyes for the last time upon his beloved face. And so she wrote to him to precede her to the lake, for she would meet him there. And the young man went and waited for her, ignorant of how gravely her life was in danger; and he kept on waiting — until the news of her death reached him.

In the story, as you see, there are two noble men: a noble husband and a noble lover. But behind this nobility in their characters stands a saintly woman: a wife who was able to win her husband's trust, so that he permitted her to meet her beloved alone and in his own palace; and a beloved who was able to win her lover's reverence, so that he wrote of her: “In her tenderness she rose above being a goddess, and in her sanctity she was exalted above being a woman.” That loving and beloved woman stood like a heroine in the battle, duty wrestling with love in her soul and her mind wrestling with her heart, until, when mind and duty triumphed and heart and love were struck down, the body that was the field of battle had been shattered — and life went out.

And in the poet's life there is another noble woman: his wife. A woman who knew that she was binding her life to the life of a man whose heart was not wholly hers; yet her tenderness and her self-sacrifice reach such a height that they make her help her husband bring out the story of his first love... She sits beside him to copy with her own hand the pages that carry the sighs, to hear the moans and set down the whispers of passion that her husband once whispered in the ear of the first beloved — that beloved whose death by then was ten years past; and yet the passages of the book oozed with pain as though the adored woman had died only yesterday. What feeling, then, stirred the good wife in those hours? Did she forgive the dead beloved? — and the cruelest thing in life is that the dead should monopolize the hearts of those we love, for death, with its sanctity and its majesty, sheds upon the beloved person a sanctity and a majesty that no living rival can contest. Or was she, like a great woman, giving of herself and sacrificing, to offer French literature a pure, fragrant flower, and thereby making her slow, measured way toward his heart? All we know is that we stand before another woman whose mind conquered her passion — a woman so reasonable that she agreed with her husband to name their first little girl Julia, the name of the husband's beloved and a stranger to the wife: that little girl who died in Beirut during the poet's journey to the East, making her father taste the anguish of bereavement a second time.

And after all this — if you were to read “Raphaël,” you would see how this good virgin passed over the earth like a hurrying angel, leaving behind her the loveliest and purest of traces: the trace a noble woman leaves in a man, so that his soul and his pen brim over with everything beautiful and delicate. And what beauty is more beautiful than the philosophy of contentment in love, which the poet's pen sets apart for her when he says: “He who has waited has, as it were, beheld.” Or the philosophy of chastity, summed up in this sentence: “The pleasure of love in contemplation and deprivation is greater than in indulgence and surfeit.” Or the philosophy of utter devotion, summed up in this sentence: “Death is accomplished not by loss but by forgetting.” Or the philosophy of happiness in love, summed up in this sentence: “I am no longer a human being at all; I am one great hymn of praise. I have seen her, and that suffices me as nourishment for my contemplation.” Or the philosophy of purity, summed up in this sentence: “I seek from love no reward but the happiness of loving, and my secret communing.” Or the philosophy of... but no — read “Raphaël,” and let it leave its good trace in your soul. In it is a love that rises above itself, a fidelity without equal, devotion, reason, and a poetry that is the poetry of the tender Frenchman whom they called the poet of love and beauty — though had they been just, they would have added: and the poet of fidelity and deprivation.

Acre — Palestine