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