AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF CHATEAUBRIAND'S "MgMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE."
The Memoirs of Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chatectubriatui, some- time Ambassador to England. Being a Translation, by Alexander Teixeira de Mattes, of the " Memoires d'Outre-Tombe." With Illustrations from contemporary sources. 6 vols. (Freemantle and Co.)—This is a noble and a timely work, to which we heartily wish the success it deserves. To the four handsome volumes now before us two more have to be added, and when these have appeared we shall be in possession of the first approximately complete English translation of the " Memoires d'Outre-Tombe." We say "approximately complete" because Mr. Teixeira de Mattes explains in his preface that he has for good reasons omitted certain portions of the "Memoires " which, though incor- porated with the autobiography, had not the character of integral parts of the book. And the work is so enormous that any legiti- mate curtailment is to be applauded. But the book in six volumes will be virtually complete, whereas so far there has been no English translation of which so much could be said. Two attempts at translating the " Memoires " have, however, been made before now. In 1849 an "autobiography" in four slight volumes, containing less than half the matter of the original, was published in "The Parlour Library of Instruction." And about the same time Messrs. Colburn began to bring out a translation in parts. The whole was to have run to ten parts, but after the third the publication stopped. That no translation should have been made since is not BO extraordinary as it may seem. It was natural to suppose that if the work did not find a public immediately after Chateaubriand's death, when personal curiosity was keen about him, there would be even less chance of success for a new venture in the same kind when years had taken the edge off such interest as the subject had for the literary world in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet the moment when a man dies is not always the moment when the world is most genuinely inter- ested in his ideas. And 1848—the year of Chateaubriand's death —marks what may perhaps be called the high-tide of political and philosophical tendencies diametrically opposed to the stream of influences represented by the author of "Le Genie du Christianisme." It was a day of democratic and scientific beliefs,--, impatient of the picturesque and the sentimental and the archaic, straining after the actual, and of limited capacity for entering into the mystical. The secret by which the " Memoires d'Outre- Tombe" holds the reader on whom its spell can work is the many- sided personality of the man it reveals. The cross-purposes of temperament and constitution which made Chateaubriand so great as a man of letters had made him disappointing as a man of action. Mighty and wide-spreading as was his contribution to the undercurrents of religious and social—and even political—life in France for nearly half a century, be was yet a figure of little real weight in actual affairs, and the need of the times was for definite expression of hard- and-fast truths, and for leaders whose grasp of the material was not weakened by any unpractical sympathy with lost cause; or poetical aspiration after ideals. It was inevitable that the generation that was to the fore in 1848 should be bored by Chateanbriand, and a natural consequence of that boredom that the generation that came next should contentedly acquiesce at second hand in the verdicts of the criticism that found his senti- ment unprofitable and his voluminousness an excellent excuse for neglecting him. But the apostles of reaction and the interpreters of transition are really the makers of posterity, and in posterity they get their public at last. It is possible that in England, at any rate, the hour has struck when both "Le Genie du Christianisme " and the " Memoires d'Outre-Tombe " may find a large public to appreciate them,—a public much larger than that of the literary circles where a masterpiece of French literature is either not read at all or read in the original. To this larger public Chateaubriand's " Memoires " will be acceptable not chiefly as a literary masterpiece or as a vivid review of an historical period of exceptional interest, but as the experience of a personality electrically sympathetic to the new Zeitgeist.
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