Chateaubriand is positively jocose in his attempts to prove the divine purpose evident in nature. He declares that the birds of passage come to us at a season when the earth yields no crops on purpose to be fed; and he maintains that the domestic animals are born with exactly the amount of instinct required to enable us to tame them.
When the Neo-Catholic authors embark on any subject connected with natural science, they at once become extremely comic. Any one interested should read (in his review of Bonald's La législation primitive) Chateaubriand's outburst of horror at having heard a little boy answer his teacher's question: What is man? with the words: A mammal. And in the same spirit De Maistre repeatedly asserts that the whole science of chemistry requires to be placed on a different, a religious basis, or declares his conviction that some honest scientist will certainly succeed in proving that it is not the moon, but God, who produces the ebb and flow of the tide, as also that water, which is an element, cannot be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. He is of opinion that birds are a living proof of the incorrectness of the law of gravitation. In this connection one of the characters in his Soirées de St. Pétersbourg remarks that there is more of the supernatural in birds than in other animals, a fact witnessed to by the signal honour shown them in the choice of the dove to represent the Holy Spirit. That alligators should lay eggs, that birds should fly—such feats are miracles in the eyes of the Neo-Catholics.
On the dogmatic part of the work follows the æsthetic, which is the more important. In it Chateaubriand endeavours to prove that "of all the religions which have ever existed, the Christian religion is the most poetical, the most human, the most favourable to freedom, to art, and to literature—that to it the modern world owes everything, from agriculture to the abstract sciences, from asylums for the unfortunate to churches built by Michael Angelo and ornamented by Raphael—that there is nothing more divine than its morality, nothing more beautiful and noble than its dogmas and its rites—that it favours genius, purifies taste, approves and stimulates virtuous passion, invigorates thought, provides poets and artists with the noblest themes, &c., &c."
For two hundred years the great dispute had been going on as to the comparative superiority of the works of ancient and modern literature. It had occupied the minds of Corneille and Racine; it had produced the earliest translations of Greek and Roman poetry; and it had by slow degrees led the modern mind to recover its self-confidence, after the first overpowering impression of the grandeur of ancient literature had worn off. It was this two hundred years' long discussion which Chateaubriand revived in a new form, namely, as the question of the value of the Christian religion to poetry and the arts, compared with that of the old mythologies. In the most remarkable manner he ignores the fact that the great question in the case of a religion is not whether or in what degree it is poetical, but whether it has the truth on its side or not. Very remarkable, too, are the arguments to which he has recourse to support his assertions! He vaunts, for example, the æsthetic superiority of the Christian hell to the heathen Tartarus. Is it not infinitely grander—"poetry of torture, hymns of flesh and blood"?
He poetically jingles hell's instruments of torture, employs them as æsthetic rattles for the old, dull children of the new century, and brings into fashion a sort of drawing-room Christianity, specially adapted to the requirements of the blasés upper classes of France. In the seventeenth century men believed in Christianity, in the eighteenth they renounced and extirpated it, and now, in the nineteenth, the kind of piety was coming into vogue which consisted in looking at it pathetically, gazing at it from the outside, as one looks at an object in a museum, and saying: How poetic! how touching! how beautiful! Fragments from the ruins of monasteries were set up in gardens, with a figure dressed as a hermit guarding them; a gold cross was once more thought a most becoming ornament for a fashionable lady; the audiences at sacred concerts melted into tears. Men were touched by the thought of all the comfort religion affords to the poor and the suffering. They had lost the simple faith of olden days and now clung to externals, to the significance of the Catholic church in literature and art, its influence on society and the state. To make the antiquated principle of authority look young and attractive they painted it with the rouge of sentimental enthusiasm; but they only succeeded in making the principle that had once been so awe-inspiring, ridiculous.
Constant wrote his book on religion in the house of his friend, Madame de Charrière, Chateaubriand wrote his in the companionship of his devoted and intimate friend, Madame de Beaumont, who assisted him by searching for the quotations he required. His mind does not seem to have been taken up with his work to the exclusion of all mundane thoughts.
We know how grandiloquently Chateaubriand inveighed during Louis XVIII.'s reign against the married priests, in what a bitter spirit he stirred up the royalist and church party against them, how determined he was that they should be deprived of every sou of their pay, to punish them for having taken advantage of the laws of the Republic to marry like other citizens. Yet was not he himself, as the author of Le Génie du Christianisme (in the preface to which he writes of himself as "the humble Lévite"), a kind of priest, nay, more than a common priest? And was not he married, and that, too, without the aid of a priest? I draw attention to this because it is one of the thousand signs of something that is to be detected everywhere throughout this religious reaction, something to which I believe we are justified in applying, ugly as it is, the word "hypocrisy."
Such, then, is Chateaubriand's book, and such are the circumstances in which it came into being. To its unprecedented success and enormous influence it owes an importance greater than its proper due. It was the book of the moment; it smuggled in, well packed in sentimentality, that principle of authority which was soon to ascend the throne.
[1] Emigrant Literature, pp. 17, 33.