Chapter XX: Chateaubriand

1768-1848.

Chateaubriand--his is a faded fame. He was a false brilliant from the first, but he glittered during his time like a veritable Mountain of Light. Men hardly found out till he died that instead of being precious stone he was nothing but paste.

Our figure misrepresents the fact. Chateaubriand was _not_ thus spurious through and through. He had streaks of genuine in him. His true symbol perhaps would be a common rubble-stone flawed splendidly with diamond.

The reaction of disparagement, which is now the critical vogue as to Chateaubriand's personal and literary value, meets occasional stout challenge from redoubtable voices. Mr. Matthew Arnold, for instance, protests against it, triumphantly citing out of the author for whom he stands up what certainly would read like the utterance of a mind both large and noble, could one rid one's self of the feeling that Chateaubriand in writing it had his own case chiefly in view, as follows:

It is a dangerous mistake, sanctioned, like so many other dangerous
mistakes, by Voltaire, to suppose that the best works of imagination
are those which draw the most tears.... The true tears are those which
are called forth by the beauty of poetry; there must be as much
admiration in them as sorrow.

The author of the foregoing, assuredly, excites with his pathos quite as much admiration as sorrow.

Chateaubriand forms an essential link in the chain of literary history for France. He constitutes almost the sole representative of French literature for the period of the First Empire, so-called--that is, the time of the supreme ascendency of Napoleon Bonaparte. Madame de Stael alone needs to be named as his rival and peer. Chateaubriand, in his day--and his day was a long one, for he outlived the empire, the restoration, and the reign of Louis Philippe--was well-nigh an equal power with Napoleon himself. In his own opinion, he was fully such; for his self-complacency was unbounded.

Never in the history of letters did it twice happen to an author to be better served by opportunity than in two cases was Chateaubriand. The Encyclopaedists, with Voltaire and Rousseau, had had their hour, and a reaction had set in, when Chateaubriand's "Genius of Christianity" appeared. It was the exact moment for such a book. It seemed to create the reactionary movement with which it coincided, and it rendered its author not merely famous, but powerful. Napoleon saw his account in making use of a writer who had the secret of such popularity. Besides, the Napoleonic sagacity was equal to perceiving that return to religious belief was needful for France. Napoleon made overtures to Chateaubriand, which Chateaubriand accepted. The author took office at the gift of the dictator.

But Chateaubriand was himself too supremely an egotist to be securely attached to another egotist's interest by any flattery that could be bestowed upon him. When, at the word of Napoleon, the Duke d'Enghien was murdered, Chateaubriand--let him have the credit of his high spirit--resigned his office and separated himself from the tyrant who had conferred it. Chateaubriand's first happy synchronism with the course of events was his publishing the "Genius of Christianity" when he did. His second was his publishing the pamphlet "Bonaparte and the Bourbons" at the very moment when that restoration impended which raised Louis XVIII. to the throne of France. The new monarch acknowledged that Chateaubriand's book had been worth an army to his cause.

Chateaubriand prolonged his literary career to a great age, enjoying almost to the end an undisputed supremacy among the authors of France. There has seldom been a more uncloudedly, more dazzlingly, brilliant contemporary success achieved by any writer of any age or any nation. The renown continues, but the splendor of the renown has passed away. Why? Our answer is, Chateaubriand's writing is vitiated by a vein of unreality, of falseness, running through it. This character in his writing but reflected, we fear, a character in the writer. There is ground for suspecting that Chateaubriand was at heart lacking in genuineness. It was inseparable defect in the man that gave that hollow ring to the words. It is but a just reprisal upon Chateaubriand that his literary fame should suffer by the fault detected in his personal character. A man's words are seldom in the long run more weighty than the man.

Chateaubriand was a kind of continuer and modifier of a celebrated French writer that preceded him. He was a better-bred, a much purified, an aristocratic Rousseau. He may be pronounced second greatest in the succession of the literary sentimentalists of France.

Rene Francois Augustus, Viscount de Chateaubriand, to give him now his full name and title, lived a life replete with adventure and vicissitude. At twenty-three years of age he fled from the horrors of the French Revolution to travel in America and to find a north-west passage to the Polar Sea. He called, with a letter of introduction, on President Washington, to whose prudent dissuasion of the young man from his project of arctic exploration, founded on the difficulty of the task, Chateaubriand had the French readiness, together with the necessary egotism, to make the complimentary reply: "But, sir, my task is not so difficult as yours was, that of creating a state." In his posthumous biography, the "_Memoirs d'Outre Tombe_" [Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb], Chateaubriand, alluding to this interview of his with Washington, said, sententiously and loftily, "There is a virtue in the look of a great man."

Our adventurer never found that north-west passage which he came to seek, but he took impressions of a strange new world, impressions that he afterward turned to various literary account. His "Rene" was one fruit of these experiences of his. The "Rene" is a romantic and sentimental tale, the main interest of which, where it possessed interest, lay in the seductive style of the composition, the idealizing descriptions occurring in it of American landscape, and the tone of melancholy reflection that pervaded it. The "noble red man" is made in it to talk like a Socrates come again, or like a French Christian philosopher born "the heir of all the ages." Such absurd inconsistency with the truth of things well illustrates that taint of lurking falseness which to such a degree vitiates all Chateaubriand's work.

The French Revolution had made great strides while Chateaubriand was discovering the north-west passage by musing and dreaming in the woods and by the streams of the New World. Learning that many members of his social class, the aristocracy of France, had fled from their homes and were rallying in other lands to make a stand against their enemies, Chateaubriand resolved to join them. He was nigh to shipwreck on his way. In a siege, after his arrival, he was saved from death by the chance of his having the manuscript of his "Atala" in the right spot on his person to intercept a ball from the enemy. But he was severely wounded nevertheless, and, worse still, was attacked with the small-pox. Thus disabled, he started on foot to make a journey of hundreds of miles. He, of course, suffered many hardships, and one night gave up to die in a ditch in which he lay down to rest. He was picked up and carried to Namur. Here, as he crawled on hands and knees through the streets, he was befriended by some women who saw his condition. After many adventures, he found himself in London, where he lived squalidly on what he could earn by hack-work with his pen.

His family meantime were suffering in France. Some of them had actually been guillotined, and some were imprisoned, among them his wife, his sister, and his mother. The mother died praying for her son's conversion from infidel error. The sister wrote to her brother the pathetic story, but she too had died before her letter reached that brother's hand. "These two voices," Chateaubriand says, "coming up from the grave, ... struck me with peculiar force.... I wept and believed." The "Genius of Christianity" was written in the spirit of this sentimental conversion of the author.

We pass over, with mere mention of some principal titles, his other books, not previously named, as his "Itinerary," a volume of travels; his "Moses," his "Martyrs," his "Essay on English Literature," his "Translation of the Paradise Lost," to make the brief extracts for which we have room from the "Genius of Christianity."

This work is designed as a manual of Christian evidence, an argument for the truth of the Christian religion. It is written, of course, from a Roman Catholic point of view, but it may be described as liberal and literary, rather than strict and ecclesiastical. It is far from being closely reasoned. There is, in fact, a great deal of digression and discussion in it. The aim of the author was evidently more to make a readable book suited to the times than to produce an apologetic work that would stand four-square against all hostile attack. The author's question with himself as he wrote seemed to have been, not, Is this valid, and necessary to the demonstration? but, Will this be interesting? The consequence is that the "Genius of Christianity" is now worthy of note rather as a book that has had a history than as a book that possesses permanent value. It contains, however, writing that will satisfactorily exhibit the style of Chateaubriand--a clear, pure, brilliant, harmonious poetic prose.

Chateaubriand raises and answers the question why the ancients failed in feeling for the beauties and sublimities of nature, thus:

It can scarcely be supposed that men endued with such sensibility as
the ancients could have wanted eyes to perceive the charms of nature
and talents for depicting them, had they not been blinded by some
powerful cause. Now, this cause was their established mythology,
which, peopling the universe with elegant phantoms, banished from the
creation its solemnity, its grandeur, and its solitude. It was
necessary that Christianity should expel the whole hosts of fauns, of
satyrs, and of nymphs, to restore to the grottoes their silence, and
to the woods their scope for uninterrupted contemplation. Under our
religion the deserts have assumed a character more pensive, more
vague, and more sublime; the forests have attained a loftier pitch;
the rivers have broken their petty urns, that in future they may only
pour the waters of the abyss from the summit of the mountains; and the
true God, in returning to his work, has imparted his immensity to
nature.

The foregoing, paradoxical perhaps, is certainly a sharp turning of the tables upon modern paganizers who mourn the dead Greek and Roman divinities of grove and stream.

Here is a passage in description of nature that every reader must acknowledge to be charming. It is throughout thoroughly characteristic of the author. The closing sentence is certainly French rather than Hebrew in spirit--Chateaubriand rather than David:

Penetrate into those forests of America coeval with the world. What
profound silence pervades these retreats when the winds are hushed!
What unknown voices when they begin to rise! Stand still, and
everything is mute; take but a step, and all nature sighs. Night
approaches; the shades thicken; you hear herds of wild beasts passing
in the dark; the ground murmurs under your feet; the pealing thunder
roars in the deserts; the forest bows; the trees fall; an unknown
river rolls before you. The moon at length bursts forth in the east;
as you proceed at the foot of the trees she seems to move before you
at their tops and solemnly to accompany your steps. The wanderer seats
himself on the trunk of an oak to await the return of day; he looks
alternately at the nocturnal luminary, the darkness, and the river: he
feels restless, agitated, and in expectation of something
extraordinary. A pleasure never felt before, an unusual fear, cause
his heart to throb as if he were about to be admitted to some secret
of the Divinity; he is alone in the depths of the forest, but the mind
of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all the solitudes of the
earth are less vast than one single thought of his heart. Even did he
reject the idea of a deity, the intellectual being, alone and
unbeheld, would be more august in the midst of a solitary world than
if surrounded by the ridiculous divinities of fabulous times. The
barren desert itself would have some congeniality with his discursive
thoughts, his melancholy feelings, and even his disgust for a life
equally devoid of illusion and of hope.

There is in man an instinctive melancholy which makes him harmonize
with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hours seated on
the bank of a river contemplating its passing waves? Who has not found
pleasure on the sea-shore in viewing the distant rock whitened by the
billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered in the
ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus! It
was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons
and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an
indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a
vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and
taste the fullness of joy in the presence of its author.

How Roman Catholic, rather than catholic, in tone, is the "Genius of Christianity," the following deliciously written sentiment about the Virgin Mary will sufficiently show:

They who see nothing in the chaste queen of angels but an obscure
mystery are much to be pitied. What touching thoughts are suggested by
that mortal woman, become the immortal mother of a Saviour-God! What
might not be said of Mary, who is at once a virgin and a mother, the
two most glorious characters of woman!--of that youthful daughter of
ancient Israel, who presents herself for the relief of human
suffering, and sacrifices a son for the salvation of her paternal
race! This tender mediatrix between us and the Eternal, with a heart
full of compassion for our miseries, forces us to confide in her
maternal aid, and disarms the vengeance of Heaven. What an enchanting
dogma, that allays the terror of a God by causing beauty to intervene
between our nothingness and his Infinite Majesty.

The anthems of the Church represent the Blessed Mary seated upon a
pure-white throne more dazzling than the snow. We there behold her
arrayed in splendor, as a mystical rose, or as the morning star,
harbinger of the Sun of grace; the brightest angels wait upon her,
while celestial harps and voices form a ravishing concert around her.
In that daughter of humanity we behold the refuge of sinners, the
comforter of the afflicted, who, all good, all compassionate, all
indulgent, averts from us the anger of the Lord.

Mary is the refuge of innocence, of weakness, and of misfortune. The
faithful clients that crowd our churches to lay their homage at her
feet are poor mariners who have escaped shipwreck under her
protection, aged soldiers whom she has saved from death in the fierce
hour of battle, young women whose bitter griefs she has assuaged. The
mother carries her babe before her image, and this little one, though
it knows not as yet the God of heaven, already knows that divine
mother who holds an infant in her arms.

Finally, to illustrate the amusing real lack of logic, masking in logical form, of which Chateaubriand was capable, we give the syllogistic-looking conclusion that sums up the book:

Christianity is perfect; men are imperfect.

Now, a perfect consequence cannot spring from an imperfect principle.

Christianity, therefore, is not the work of men.

If Christianity is not the work of men, it can have come from none but
God.

If it came from God, men cannot have acquired a knowledge of it but by
revelation.

Therefore, Christianity is a revealed religion.

Chateaubriand was long a venerated figure, central in the pure and brilliant _salon_ of Madame Recamier, that later Marchioness Rambouillet at Paris. His easy airs of patriarchal condescension toward the younger generation of authors who drew around him there naturally engaged them to prolong the long days of his triumphs. But his triumphs may be said to have come to an end when Sainte-Beuve was ready to pronounce, as he did, that this defender of Christianity was a skeptic at heart, this preacher and praiser of purity was a libertine in life. We will not say that we accept this destructive view of Chateaubriand's character. But we are bound to confess that we wish there were more internal evidence contained in his writings to throw doubt on the justice of a sentence so severe.

DE MAISTRE (Joseph Marie, 1753-1821), is another author who, like Chateaubriand, a little earlier than he, took up a polemic for Christianity as represented in Roman Catholicism. A truly high and nobly earnest spirit was De Maistre, as such contrasting with Chateaubriand, a far deeper and far more philosophical thinker than his brilliant compeer, but wanting in that grace and seductiveness of style which gave to Chateaubriand his life-long wide supremacy in the empire of French letters. It would be not incongruous, if there were room for it in our volume, to prolong this chapter with some brief notice and exemplification of De Maistre's literary work. We must content ourselves with this respectful bare mention of his name.

The proportionately small space in these pages that, in here ending our notice of him, we allot to Chateaubriand, fails indeed to represent by symbol to the eye the proportionate space that he occupies in the literature of his country. But it has afforded us fairly adequate opportunity to exhibit in description and specimen the characteristic quality of his literary production.