HISTORIC DOCUMENTS.
No. I.
The Viscount de Châteaubriand to M. Guizot.
Val-de-Loup, May 12th, 1809.
Sir,
I return you a thousand thanks. I have read your articles with extreme pleasure. You praise me with so much grace, and bestow on me so many commendations, that you may easily afford to diminish the latter. Enough will always remain to satisfy my vanity as an author, and assuredly more than I deserve.
I find your criticisms extremely just; one in particular has struck me by its refined taste. You say that the Catholics cannot, like the Protestants, admit a Christian mythology, because we have not been trained and accustomed to it by great poets. This is most ingenious; and if my work should be considered good enough to induce people to say that I am the first to commence this mythology, it might be replied that I come too late, that our taste is formed upon other models, etc. etc. etc.... Nevertheless there will always be Tasso, and all the Latin Catholic poems of the Middle Ages. This appears to me the only solid objection that can be raised against your remark.
In truth, and I speak with perfect sincerity, the criticisms which, before yours, have appeared on my work, make me feel to a certain extent ashamed of the French. Have you observed that no one seems to have comprehended its design? That the rules of epic composition are so generally forgotten, that a work of thought and immense labour is judged as if it were the production of a day, or a mere romance? And all this outcry is against the marvellous! Would it not imply that I am the inventor of this style? that it has been hitherto unheard of, and is singular and new? And yet we have Tasso, Milton, Klopstock, Gessner, and even Voltaire! And if we are not to employ the marvellous in a Christian subject, there can no longer be an epic in modern poetry, for the marvellous is essential to that style of composition, and I believe no one would be inclined to introduce Jupiter in a subject taken from our own history. All this, like every thing else in France, is insincere. The question to be decided was, whether my work was good or bad as an epic poem; all was comprised in this point, without attempting to ascertain whether it was or was not contrary to religion; and a thousand other arguments of the same kind.