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.