CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM
Chateaubriand and the French Revolution.
There are some men who seem epitomes of their periods, of all the weaknesses, strengths, ideals and follies and wisdoms of their times. All the tangled skeins of different movements seem embroidered into the pattern of a face; and that face is theirs. We seek in them the years in which they lived, and are never disappointed. Sir Philip Sidney means the age of Elizabeth, Dr. Johnson the common-sense English eighteenth century, Rousseau the stirring of revolutionary France, Goethe the awakening of Germany. Of these men was Chateaubriand. He was born before the storm and died after it. He gathered up the best of the things that were before the revolution, and handed them on to the men who, when the revolution had left a new France, were to make that new country the centre of European literature. Rousseau and the Romantics meet in him. He wrote when France, her eyes still bright and wide after the sight of blood, was seeking in religion for one thing, at least, that might be covered by the tossing waves of revolution and yet survive. Christianity in his finest story is the rock on which his lovers break themselves. And Christianity was the first earthwork attacked before the revolution, and the first reoccupied afterwards.
Chateaubriand stands curiously in the midst of the opposing elements. Like Byron he was a patrician and a fighter. He too would have died for freedom. But whereas Byron fought, contemptuously sometimes, for revolutionaries, Chateaubriand fought against them.
When some of the ragged ones marched joyously down his street carrying the heads of two of their enemies bleeding on the ends of pikes, he cried at them, 'Brigands! Is this what you mean by Liberty?' and declared that if he had had a gun he would have shot them down like wolves. And if Chateaubriand had not been an aristocrat, he could never so well have represented his times. He would have fought and written as a revolutionist, instead of caring passionately for one party, and pinning to it the ideals of the other, so claiming both for his own. Everything that could make him one with his period and country was his. After a childhood of severe repression, he had seen the fall of the Bastille, and then sought liberty and the North-West Passage, coming back from America to find the revolution successful against himself. Could any man's life be so perfect an analogy of the meteor-like progress of France? France also sought liberty and a North-West Passage, quicker than all others; France also was to return and find the ground aquiver beneath her feet.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
After that she was to be mistress of Europe. The three stages of Romanticism correspond with these three stages of France; the last that of Hugo and Gautier and Dumas, the Romanticism of 1830, promised by that of Chateaubriand, itself made possible by the unrestful writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is impossible to understand any one of the three without referring to the others. Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker, in a day when superiority of intellect in a man of low birth won him either neglect or the most insufferable patronage. His mother died in bearing him, and his father, although he made a second marriage, never mentioned her without tears. He seems to have been a very simple-hearted man, and found such pleasure in romances that he would sit up all night reading them to his little son, going ashamedly to bed in the morning when the swallows began to call in the eaves. These two traits in his father are characteristic of the work of Rousseau himself. His life was spent in emphasising the compatibility of low birth with lofty animation, and so in preparing that democratisation of literature that generously attributes humanity to men who are not gentlemen. Richardson gave him a suitable narrative form for what he had to say, and La Nouvelle Héloïse is a novel in letters whose hero is a poor tutor in love with his pupil. The book is full of an emotional oratory so fresh and sincere that it seems as if the ice of fifty years of passionless reasoning has suddenly broken over the springs of the human heart. There is in it too an Ossianic sharing of feelings with Nature, as if man had realised with the tears in his eyes that he had not always lived in towns.
The world of the Revolution.
Chateaubriand had not Rousseau's birthright of handicap. He could not feel the righteous energy of the watchmaker's son against a people who did not know their own language and were yet in a position to employ him as a footman. He was outside that quarrel. He left Rousseau's social reform behind him on the threshold of his world, but had learnt from him to carry his heart upon his sleeve, and to cry, like Ossian, 'The murmur of thy streams, O Lara! brings back the memory of the past. The sound of thy woods, Garmallar, is lovely in mine ear.' He took with him Rousseau's twin worships of passion and nature into the melancholy turmoil that was waiting for him, sad with an unrest not of classes but of a nation. He knew, like France, what it was to question everything while standing firm upon nothing. In that maelstrom nothing seemed fixed; there was nothing a man might grasp for a moment to keep his head above the waters of infinite doubt. Everything seemed possible, and much of the Romantic melancholy is a despairing cry for a little impossibility from which at least there could be no escape. It is one thing to question religion by the light of atheism, or atheism by the light of religion; it is another thing, and far more terrible, to question both while sure of neither, and to see not one word in all the universe, not God, nor Man, nor State, nor Church, without a question mark at its side, a ghastly reminder of uncertainty, like, in some old engravings, the waiting figure of Death muffled in each man's shadow.
Atala.
That was the world of the Revolution, a world whose permanent instability had been suddenly made manifest by a violent removal of the apparently stable crust. With the overturning of one mountain every other shuddered in its bed, and seemed ready at any moment to shake with crash and groan into the valleys. This was the world for whose expression the face of Chateaubriand, nervous, passionate, the fire of vision in his eye, the wind of chaos in his tempestuous hair, seems so marvellously made. This was the world in which, like the spirit of his age, he wrote the books the times expected because they were their own. Atala and René, but particularly Atala, seemed to be the old, vague promises of Rousseau and Ossian, reaffirmed with the clarity of a silver trumpet. Chactas and Atala, those savage lovers, who 'took their way towards the star that never moves, guiding their steps by the moss on the tree stems,' walked like young deities of light before these people who had known the half-mummied courtesies of an eighteenth century civilisation. 'She made him a cloak of the inner bark of the ash, and mocassins of the musk rat's skin, and he set on her head a wreath of blue mallows, and on her neck red berries of the azalea, smiling as he did so to see how fair she was.' The world is young again, and man has won his way back into Eden, conscious of sorrow, conscious of evil, but alive and unafraid to be himself.
Nature and emotion.
Chateaubriand carried further than Rousseau the transfiguration of nature by emotion, although in Atala nature is still a stage effect, subjected to its uses as illustration of the feelings of the humans in the tale. Chateaubriand tunes up the elements with crash of thunder, bright forked lightning, and fall of mighty tree, to the moment when, in the supreme crisis the hand of Atala's God intervenes between the lovers, and the bell of the forest hermitage sounds in the appropriate silence. But in those vivid, fiery descriptions there is already something besides the theatrical, a new generosity of sentiment that was to let Barye make lions and tigers instead of what would once have been rather impersonal decorations, and to allow Corot to give landscapes their own personality without always seeking to impose on them the irrelevant interest of human figures. Nature is never excluded from the story, and when the action is less urgent the setting is given a greater freedom. The lovers never meet on a studio background, but are always seen with trees and rivers, and forest dawn and forest night, more real than any that had been painted before. Chateaubriand is never content to call a tree a tree or a bird a bird, but gives them the dignity of their own names. Aurora no longer rises from her rosy bed in the approved convention for the dawn, but a bar of gold shapes itself in the east, the sparrow-hawks call from the rocks, and the martens retire to the hollows of the elms.
FRANÇOIS RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND
Particularity in setting.
It was through caring for his setting in this way that Chateaubriand came as if by accident to the discovery of local colour. He wanted his savages to love in the wilderness, and happening to have seen a wilderness, reproduced it, and made his savages not merely savages but Muskogees, fashioned their talk to fit their race, and made it quite clear that this tale, at any rate, could not be imagined as passing on the Mountains of the Moon. When the older story-tellers named a locality they did little more than the Elizabethan stage managers, who placed a label on the stage and expected it to be sufficient to conjure up a forest or a battlefield. Chateaubriand, in making his writing more completely pictorial, visualised his scenes in detail, and so showed the Romantics the way to that close distinction between country and country, age and age, race and race, that made the artists of the nineteenth century richer than any who were before them in variety of subject, and in the material of self-expression.
Christianity.
The Christianity of Atala was the religion that Chateaubriand offered to his country in Le Génie du Christianisme. I can never be quite sure that it was his own, but in that amazing book, divided and subdivided like an ancient treatise on some occult science, he showed with passionate use of reasoning and erudition that Christianity was not the ugly thing that it had been pictured by the eighteenth century philosophers, and, more, that it at least was older than France, and permanent in a world where kings, emperors, and republics swung hither and thither like dead leaves in the wind. The teaching came to Paris like a gospel. These people, anchorless as they were, were not difficult converts, because they were eager to be converted, and to be able, if only for a moment in their lives, to whisper, 'I believe' in something other than uncertainty. All society became Christian for a time, and when that time passed, the effects of the book did not all pass with it. The artists of a younger generation had learned that Christianity was the belief that had brought most loveliness into the world, and that the Gods of Antiquity were not the only deities who were favourable to beautiful things. The false taste of the end of the eighteenth century had been pierced by Gothic spires, and through the dull cloud of correct and half-hearted imitation showed again the pinnacles and gargoyles and flying buttresses of the naïve and trustful mediæval art. Atala joins hands with Nicolete, and links Victor Hugo with the builders of Notre Dame.
The art of Chateaubriand survives the battle in which it was used.
There is little wonder that a writer who answered so fully the needs of his own generation, and did so much to cut a way for the generation to come, became instantly famous, immediately execrated. Chateaubriand wrote: 'La polémique est mon allure naturelle.... Il me faut toujours un adversaire, n'importe où.' In 1800 he had no difficulty in finding them. But it takes two to make a quarrel. It would not have been surprising if books that belonged so absolutely to the battles of their times should have struck their blows, and been then forgotten for want of opposition. Manifestations of the time spirit, and particularly fighting manifestations, not infrequently manifest it only to the time, and are worthless to future generations. Atala, after setting in an uproar the Paris of 1802 is for us but a beautiful piece of colour whose pattern has faded away. Unless we can feel with the men of the dawn that we are tossing on mad waves, clutching at religion as at a rock beneath the shifting waters, and breathlessly thankful for any proof of its steadfastness and power: unless we can remember with them the old love of drawing-rooms and bent knees and kisses on gloved hands, and feel with them a passionate novelty in the love of wild things in the open air; unless we can remember the tamed, docile nature of the pastorals, and open our eyes upon a first view of any sort of real country; unless, in a word, we can dream back a hundred years, the beauty of Atala is like that of an old battle-cry:—
'So he cried, as the fight grew thick at the noon,
Two red roses across the moon!'
The cry no longer calls to battle. The combatants are dead. The bugle sounds to armies of white bones, and we who overhear it think only of the skill of the trumpeter. And Chateaubriand had something in him that was independent of his doctrines, independent of his enemies. Flaubert, looking back to him over the years, saw in his books, when the dust of their battles settled about them, early examples of a most scrupulous technique. Chateaubriand the fighter, the man of his time, was forgotten in the old master of a new prose. These books shaped in the din of battle were models for men writing in a fat, quiet day of peace. Then it was possible, the clangour no longer sounding in the ears, to notice the mastery of form, the elaboration, carried so far and no further, of the main idea into the significant detail that was to make the idea alive; then became clear the economy that makes of every fact a vivid illustration of some trait in the people of the story, a heightening of the lights or a deepening of the shadows of the tale.