CHATEAUBRIAND.
THE old town of St. Malo—the quaint fortress-port of the Surcoufs and Duguay TrouMs—celebrated this week the memory of one of its sons who, in his day, wielded a literary sceptre for which many hands have since competed, but which has never since become the possession of any claimant. The middle of the eighteenth century was hardly more truly the age of Voltaire, than was the commencement of the nineteenth the age of Chateau- briand. We, in England, have so completely outlived any impressions. of Chateaubriand's genius, that it is with something between a smile and a yawn that the most of us glance over the perfervid eulogies with which the principal actors in the scene of Sunday last felt themselves bound to salute the illustrious dead; and besides, Protestant England had least of all the countries of the world been brought within the influence of the author of the " Ginie du Christianisme." Even in France there has reigned a powerful reaction from the modes of thought and style which were the force and the originality of the gifted Breton, and where there has not been reaction there has been divergence. The school of Louis Veuillot can still, perhaps must still, exhibit a decent veneration for the enthusiastic apologist of Catholicism, but at bottom the fierce zeal of the absolutist Ultramontane must cherish a profound contempt for the writer who could commit himself to many of the constitutional views of the " Monarchie scion la Chaste," and whose Liberal backslidings went so far as to cause him to declare that if entire liberty of the Press had existed irt France previous to the Revolution, Louis XVI. would not have perished on the scaffold. There are pages in the "Etudes Historiques" which would send a shudder through the souls of many a modern ecclesiastical camarilla, and when, for instance, Chateaubriand recalls, with hardly veiled reproaches against the latter-day Papacy, the days when Rome fulminated its thunders against the encroachments of princes in the name of the natural rights of peoples, who does not feel that, ultra-royalist though he often was, the Breton noble had caught in some things the inspi- rations of the democratic revolution ?
In one respect, and whatever may happen, the influence of Chateaubriand in his native country will never diminish. He was in himself a literary era, and there is no French writer of eminence since his time who does not bear the traces of the impulse which he communicated, and indeed originated. With much in him of Bernardin de St. Pierre and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and in spite of rhetoric sentimentality, and egotism, there was in his very exaggerations a strength and genius, an incarnation, as it were, of the highest spirit of his age, the power of which over his gene- ration and his successors can only be measured when we have compared the finest descriptions of such a writer as Georges Sand with the scenes portrayed in "Rene," " Atala," the "Natchez," the "Martyrs," the "Itineraire," and the "Memoires d'Outre-tombe." A critic so difficult to please as Sainte-Beuve, and whose nice talent for belittling is nowhere more characteristically exercised than in the course of his lectures on Chateaubriand in 1848, has yet penned lines in recognition of his unquestionable supremacy which might satisfy the exigencies of the most devoted admirer. "Fifteen years, said Tacitus, is a large space in human life : Quindecim annos, grande mortalis i spatium Well, there is a man who has had the privilege of continuing and persisting, let us rather say, to reign during the three periods, the thrice fifteen years which we have traversed. Under the Con- sulate and the Empire he shines from the first day, from the first morning, like a meteor. Under the Restoration he is at his zenith ; he fills it. Under the last regime—the July Monarchy— he holds himself aloof, and only at intervals comes forth from his tent; he has no more, if you please, but an honorary reign, espe- cially in recent times ; but admiration and respect have not been withdrawn from him for a single day There is here a literary destiny, and more than a literary one, a destiny truly historical and monumental In this sense one can say that M. de Chateaubriand is and will remain the first, the greatest of the French men of letters of his age."
Chateaubriand, as we know, fancied that but for his literary reputation he would have become a still greater man, a creative statesman, a world-healing Richelieu. If people had not early found out from his books how clever he was, and so been placed in a manner on their guard, he would have escaped the hostilities which were to shipwreck his political career. "Happily for Richelieu," wrote this great would-be politician of the great would-be litterateur who had sighed for the triumphs of Corneille, while dictating the destinies of Europe, "happily for Richelieu, his genius was suspected by nobody, and so he became Secretary of State under the protection of the Marechal d'Ancre." Let us, however, leave these ludicrous regrets, and with them, let us leave untouched the political fiasco of Chatea.ubriand's Ministerial career. It is not assuredly in the statesmanship of this ultra- Bourbonist, who bad, nevertheless, paid courtliest court to the mighty Corsican, and then turned against the hand he had kissed, but who, with all his Bourbonism, could hardly speak in private with decent respect of the Royalty his public declarations proclaimed as the salvation of France, it is not in Chateaubriand the Minister that the world has much to admire. Chateaubriand is the author of the "Genie du Christianisme," the apologist, special pleader, bard, and prophet of the Catholic reaction at the commencement of the present century. This is the foundation of his reputation, and never did reputatiun have its rise under circumstances or amid surroundings more propitious. There was a great part to be taken in 1800, after all those convulsions and devastations of society, after all those guillotinades and noyades, those excesses of the Terror and frivolities of the Directory, those vivacious assaults upon the old faith, and those endless failures to substitute a new one,—and this part was that of "Poetical Advocate of Christianity," as Sainte-
Beuve has so well expressed it. Chateaubriand felt him- self strong enough to take it, and the "Genie du Cluistianisme," or as he himself described it, "The moral and poetical beauties of the Christian religion, and its superiority over all the other worships of the earth," was the result of his conviction. At the same moment, Napoleon was planning the Concordat with Rome, and on the very day which witnessed the solemn Te Deum in Notre Dame for the restoration of religious worship in France, the official columns of the Ilioniteur announced, by the pen of Fon- tanes, the praises of the epoch-making work of "the young writer who dares to re-establish the authority of ancestors and the tra- ditions of ages." Chateaubriand's ratiocination, his logic, his erudition, were the weakest part of the work, for in truth the world was weary of ratiocination, of logic, of erudition, of all that under the name of " philosophy " stood in place of a religion to the epoch of the Rncyclopdists and the Revolution. And as a rule, Chateaubriand did not trouble himself or his readers with polemics. He was the greatest master of description, the first of landscape-painters in words whom the French language knew, I and all that wealth of colour, all that ravishing beauty of outline and form which dazzled and melted the public in his pastoral romances of innocence that was never insipid and passions that were always pure,—all this, and more, were now devoted to extolling the perfections of Christianity, or as the theosophic Saint-Martin complained, of Catholicism, for with Chateaubriand Christianity and Catholicism were one. He tells us himself in the opening chapter the whole of his plan,— not to prove that Christianity was excellent because it came from God, but that-it came from God because it was excellent. There could be no more complete appreciation of what the social situation required. What though there were great faults, great gaps and hia- tuses in the structure which Chateaubriand raised, much absurd rhetoric, much sickly sentimentality ? The public of his time had got what it wanted, and the sons of the men who, from consider- ing Christianity absurd, had come to proscribe it as noxious and frightful, were now prepared to accept it as sublimely wise, because they had been taught to see associated with it loveliness and harmony and majesty and peace and poetry ; the solemn chant of processions, the glorious roofs of grand cathedrals, the plenteousness of monastic hospitality, the valour of crusading heroes, the virtues of devoted missionaries ; and not only these things, but relieving them and illustrating them, the number- less charms of the animate and inanimate creation, the foliage of the forest, the odour of the rose and violet, the thunder of the cataract, the song of the nightingale, the music of running streams.
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