The author, not many years before he wrote this work, had been a free-thinker, indeed a materialist. We have proof of this in some marginal notes in his own handwriting, discovered by Sainte-Beuve in a book which had belonged to him. Alongside of the words: "God, matter, and destiny are one," Chateaubriand has written: "This is my system; this is what I believe." Alongside of the following sentences: "You say that God has created you free. That is not the point in question. Did he foresee that I should fall, that I should be miserable to all eternity? Yes, undoubtedly. In that case your God is nothing but a horrible and unreasonable tyrant," we read in the margin: "This objection is irrefutable, and completely demolishes the whole edifice of Christian doctrine. But in any case it is doctrine which no one believes in now."
This is the standpoint of Chateaubriand's youth, but one to which he did not long adhere. He was too much the born doubter to be able to hold firmly to even a negative conviction. What there was of faith in the philosophy of the eighteenth century, namely, its belief in the steady progress of humanity, was probably what he first rejected, and on the loss of this conviction quickly followed the loss of all the rest. He himself attributes his conversion to the influence of his mother's dying prayer to him to keep to her faith. "I wept and believed," he says.
Himself converted, or half converted, by means of sentiment, he now endeavoured to influence others in the same manner. Although intellectual receptivity for the dogmas of Christianity was no longer to be looked for, it was surely still possible to arouse sympathy with its touching, noble poetry. It was an idea characteristic of both the period and the man, this of transforming the apology for Christianity into aesthetics. He devotes a whole chapter to the sweet, melodious music of the church bells. He describes the simple village church, with its feeling of innocence and peace. He presents us with pictures and symbols when we expect proofs. Bonald remarked that in books which were works of reason, such as his own, truth displayed itself like a king at the head of his army on the day of battle, while in books like Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme it had more resemblance to a queen on her coronation day, surrounded with everything magnificent and beautiful that could be got together. His meaning is that Chateaubriand aims rather at moving men than at convincing them. In private conversation he expressed himself more bluntly. He said: "I gave my pills as they were; he gave his with sugar."
Certainly no book affords a clearer indication of the want of serious reality in the religious regeneration of the day. Its point of view is that which men have agreed to call the romantic. It is to the past it turns, and as the Romanticist is a man of imagination, he sees the past in an imaginary light. The religion of the Romanticist is a parade religion, a tool for the politician, a lyre for the poet, a symbol for the philosopher, a fashion for the man of the world.
Like the German, the Danish, and, at a later period, the French Romanticists, Chateaubriand loves the mysterious. He begins his vindication of belief in authority by appealing to men's sense of mystery in life generally: "There is nothing beautiful or sweet or great in life that is not mysterious. The most wonderful feelings are those which at once move and perplex us. Bashfulness, chaste love, pure friendship, are full of mystery.... Is not innocence, which in its essence is nothing but holy ignorance, the most ineffable mystery? Women, the more admirable half of the human race, cannot live without mysteries." The transition from this to the dogmas of a so-called revealed religion strikes us as sudden.
De Maistre makes a somewhat similar use of mystery. When he has shown that such and such a social institution is inexplicable, he believes that he has proved it to be divine. There is, in his opinion, no reasonable explanation for hereditary royalty and hereditary nobility—which is proof sufficient that they exist by the grace of God. What is there to be said in defence of war? Hardly anything, thinks De Maistre; consequently war too is a mystery. A little reflection shows us the necessity of such argument. Authority demands mystery as its counterpart. Note what Michaud says in the dedication of his poem, "An Exile's Spring" (Le printemps d'un proscrit), 1803: "Society ought to have its mysterious side as well as religion; I have always thought that we should at times believe in the laws of our country as we believe in the commandments of God. In private as well as in public life there are things which a man does better if he does them without reflecting upon his reason for acting."
The style of Chateaubriand's work is dazzlingly brilliant. But for this it would not have created the sensation it did. It contains descriptions of nature, emotional outbursts, and some few sparsely scattered thoughts of real value. But all that is of genuine value from the literary and poetical point of view is to be found in the tales Atala and René, which, according to Chateaubriand's original plan, were to have formed chapters of the work—where they would have cut a curious figure among such chapters as those on missionaries and sisters of mercy. They were, preliminarily, sent out as feelers long before the main work, and they do not concern us now; we have studied them in their historical significance in their proper place.[1]
In Le Génie du Christianisme Chateaubriand did not, he has himself told us, endeavour to prove that Christianity is excellent because it comes from God, but that it comes from God because it is excellent.
He shows that men have been wrong in despising Christianity, that it has beautiful, noble, poetic qualities. He does not perceive that, even if he succeeds in proving in many instances the narrowness of view of those Encyclopedists whom he is continually attacking, this in itself is no manner of proof of the divine origin of religion.
The whole work is in reality an outcome of the dislike and contempt which he had gradually developed for the philosophy and literature of the eighteenth century. The spirit of this philosophy and literature now appeared to him to be fatal to all the higher desires and aspirations of the human soul. The eighteenth century had misunderstood feeling and poetry. Therefore what it had exalted must be condemned, and what it had dared to disdain must be exalted. And for what had it shown greater contempt than for Christianity!