over the general bias of men's minds that to combat Leibnitz he wrote
_Candide_. He took up a curious whim against final causes, optimism,
free will, in short, against all the philosophical opinions that exalt
the dignity of man; and he composed _Candide_, that work of a
diabolical gayety, for it appears to be written by a being of a
different nature from ourselves, insensible to our condition, well
pleased with our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or an ape at
the miseries of that human species with which he has nothing in
common....
_Candide_ brings into action that scoffing philosophy, so indulgent in
appearance, in reality so ferocious; it presents human nature under
the most lamentable point of view, and offers us, in the room of every
consolation, the sardonic grin which frees us from all compassion for
others by making us renounce it for ourselves.
When Madame de Stael comes in due course to speak of the masterpiece of
Goethe, his "Faust," she prepares her French readers to be shocked with
a first disappointment. She says:
Certainly we must not expect to find in it either taste, or measure,
or the art that selects and terminates, but if the imagination could
figure to itself an intellectual chaos, such as the material chaos has
often been described, the _Faust_ of Goethe should in propriety have
been composed at that epoch.... The drama of _Faust_ certainly is not
a good model. Whether it be considered as an offspring of the delirium
of the mind, or of the satiety of reason, it is to be wished that such
productions may not be multiplied; but when such a genius as that of
Goethe sets itself free from all restrictions the crowd of thoughts is
so great that on every side they break through and trample down the
barriers of art.
We close our series of extracts by giving what this most brilliant among
the French women that have been at the same time great talkers and great
writers found to say of that high art of conversation in which her
countrymen surpass the world and in which she surpassed her countrymen:
The _bon-mots_ of the French have been quoted from one end of Europe
to the other. Always they have displayed the brilliancy of their merit
and solaced their griefs in a lively and agreeable manner; always they
have stood in need of one another, as listeners taking turns in mutual
encouragement; always they have excelled in the art of knowing under
what circumstances to speak, and even under what circumstances to keep
still, when any commanding interest triumphs over their natural
liveliness; always they have possessed the talent of living a quick
life, of cutting short long discourses, of giving way to their
successors who are desirous of speaking in their turn; always, in
short, they have known how to take from thought and feeling no more
than is necessary to animate conversation without overstaking the
feeble interest which men generally feel for one another.
The French are in the habit of treating their own misfortunes lightly
from the fear of fatiguing their friends; they guess the weariness
which they would occasion by that which they would experience.... The
desire of appearing amiable induces men to assume an expression of
gayety, whatever may be the inward disposition of the soul; the
physiognomy by degrees influences the feelings, and that which we do
for the purpose of pleasing others soon takes off the edge of our own
individual sufferings.
_A sensible woman has said that Paris is, of all the world, the place
where men can most easily dispense with being happy._ [The foregoing
italicized passage was, Madame de Stael says, "suppressed by the
literary censorship under the pretext that there was so much happiness
in Paris now that there was no need of doing without it."] ... But
nothing can metamorphose a city of Germany into Paris.
... To succeed in conversation one must be able clearly to observe the
impression produced at each moment on people, that which they wish to
conceal, that which they seek to exaggerate, the inward satisfaction
of some, the forced smile of others; one may see passing over the
countenances of those who listen half formed censures which may be
evaded by hastening to dissipate them before self-love is engaged on
their side. One may also behold there the first birth of approbation,
which may be strengthened without, however, exacting from it more
than it is willing to bestow. There is no arena in which vanity
displays itself in such a variety of forms as in conversation.
I once knew a man who was agitated by praise to such a degree that
whenever it was bestowed upon him he exaggerated what he had just said
and took such pains to add to his success that he always ended in
losing it. I never dared to applaud him from the fear of leading him
to affectation and of his making himself ridiculous by the heartiness
of his self-love. Another was so afraid of the appearance of wishing
to display himself that he let fall words negligently and
contemptuously; his assumed indolence only betrayed one more
affectation, that of pretending to have none. When vanity displays
herself, she is good-natured; when she hides herself, the fear of
being discovered renders her sour, and she affects indifference,
satiety, in short, whatever may persuade other men that she has no
need of them. These different combinations are amusing for the
observers, and one is always astonished that self-love does not take
the course, which is so simple, of naturally avowing its desire to
please, and making the utmost possible use of grace and truth to
attain the object.
There is something in the foregoing strain of ascription from Madame de
Stael to the social virtues of the French which recalls that remarkable
character given by Pericles, in his noble funeral oration reported by
Thucydides, to the national spirit and habit of the Athenians in
contrast with those of their Spartan neighbors and enemies.
If of Madame de Stael the woman we shall in any respect have failed to
give a just idea, it will be by not having adequately represented the
generosity of her character. Her desire and her ability to shine should
not be permitted, in any one's conception of her, to obscure her
fondness and her fitness for loving and for being loved. Those who knew
her intimately bear touching testimony to this quality of womanliness in
the personal character of Madame de Stael. She was fundamentally an
amiable, as she was conspicuously a strenuous, spirit, and no mutations
in fashion or in taste will ever reduce her to less than a great
tradition in literature.
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.