In justice to the literary men of France, however, it must be stated that, of late years at least, they have been exposed to an amount of temptation, and of food for their self-love, much exceeding anything previously seen among men, and which may go far to account for the extraordinary vanity which they have everywhere evinced. In England, literary distinction is neither the only nor the greatest passport to celebrity. Aristocratic influences remain, and still possess the deepest hold of the public mind: statesmen exist, whose daily speeches in parliament render their names as household words. Fashion exercises an extraordinary and almost inexplicable sway, especially over the fairest part of creation. How celebrated soever an author may be, he will in London soon be brought to his proper level, and a right appreciation of his situation. He will see himself at once eclipsed by an old nobleman, whose name is fraught with historic glory; by a young marquis, who is an object of solicitude to the mothers and daughters in the room; by a parliamentary orator, who is beginning to acquire distinction in the senate house. We hold this state of things to be eminently favourable to the right character of literary men; for it saves them from trials before which, it is all but certain, both their good sense and their virtue would succumb. But in Paris this salutary check upon individual vanity and presumption is almost entirely awanting. The territorial aristocracy is confiscated and destroyed; titles of honour are abolished; historic names are almost forgotten in the ceaseless whirl of present events; parliamentary orators are in general unpopular, for they are for the most part on the side of power. Nothing remains but the government of mind. The intellectual aristocracy is all in all.
It makes and unmakes kings alternately; produces and stops revolutions, at one time calls a new race to the throne, at another consigns them with disgrace to foreign lands. Cabinets are formed out of the editors of newspapers, intermingled with a few bankers, whom the public convulsions have not yet rendered insolvent; prime ministers are to be found only among successful authors. Thiers, the editor of the National and the historian of the Revolution; Guizot, the profound professor of history; Villemain, the eloquent annalist of French literature; Lamartine, the popular traveller, poet, and historian, have been the alternate prime ministers of France since the revolution of 1830. Even the great name of Napoleon cannot save his nephew from the irksomeness of bending to the same necessity. He named Thiers his prime minister at the time of the Boulogne misadventure, he is caressing him now in the salons of the Elysée Bourbon. Successful authors thus in France are surrounded with a halo, and exposed to influences, of which in this country we cannot form a conception. They unite in their persons the fame of Mr Fox and the lustre of Sir Walter Scott: often the political power of Mr Pitt with the celebrity of Lord Byron. Whether such a concentration is favourable either to their present utility or lasting fame, and whether the best school to train authors to be the instructors of the world is to be found in that which exposes them to the combined influence of its greatest temptations, are questions on which it is not necessary now to enter, but on which posterity will probably have no difficulty in coming to a conclusion.
But while we fully admit that these extraordinary circumstances, unparalleled in the past history of the world, go far to extenuate the blame which must be thrown on the French writers for their extraordinary vanity, they will not entirely exculpate them. Ordinary men may well be carried away by such adventitious and flattering marks of their power; but we cannot accept such an excuse from the first men of the age—men of the clearest intellect, and the greatest acquisitions—whose genius is to charm, whose wisdom is to instruct the world through every succeeding age. If the teachers of men are not to be above the follies and weaknesses which are general and ridiculous in those of inferior capacity, where are we to look for such an exemption? It is a poor excuse for the overweening vanity of a Byron, a Goethe, a Lamartine, or a Chateaubriand, that a similar weakness is to be found in a Madame Grisi or a Mademoiselle Cerito, in the first cantatrice or most admired ballerina of the day. We all know that the professors of these charming arts are too often intoxicated by the applause which they meet with; we excuse or overlook this weakness from respect due to their genius and their sex. But we know, at the same time, that there are some exceptions to the general frailty; and in one enchanting performer, our admiration for talents of the very highest order is enhanced by respect for the simplicity of character and generosity of disposition with which they are accompanied. We might desiderate in the men who aspire to direct the thoughts of the world, and have received from nature talents equal to the task, the unaffected singleness of heart, and sterling good sense, which we admire, not less than her admirable powers, in Mademoiselle Jenny Lind.
The faults, or rather frailties, we have alluded to, are in an especial manner conspicuous in two of the most remarkable writers of France of the present century—Lamartine and Chateaubriand. There is some excuse for the vanity of these illustrious men. They have both acquired an enduring fame—their names are known all over the world, and will continue to be so while the French language is spoken on the earth; and they have both, by their literary talents, been elevated to positions far beyond the rank in society to which they were born, and which might well make an ordinary head reel from the giddy precipices with which it is surrounded. Chateaubriand powerfully aided in crushing Napoleon in 1814, when Europe in arms surrounded Paris: with still more honourable constancy he resisted him in 1804, when, in the plenitude of his power, he executed the Duke d'Enghien. He became ambassador to London for the Restoration—minister of foreign affairs, and representative of France at the Congress of Verona. He it was who projected and carried into execution the French invasion of the Peninsula in 1823, the only successful expedition of the Restoration. Lamartine's career, if briefer, has been still more dazzling. He aided largely in the movement which overthrew Louis Philippe; by the force of his genius he obtained the mastery of the movement, "struggled with democracy when it was strongest, and ruled it when it was wildest;" and had the glory, by his single courage and energy, of saving the character of the revolution from bloodshed, and coercing the Red Republicans in the very tumult of their victory. He has since fallen from power, less from any known delinquencies imputed to him, than from the inherent fickleness of the French people, and the impossibility of their submitting, for any length of time, to the lead of a single individual. The autobiography of two such men cannot be other than interesting and instructive in the highest degree; and if we see in them much which we in England cannot altogether understand, and which we are accustomed to stigmatise with the emphatic epithet "French," there is much also in them which candour must respect, and an equitable spirit admire.
The great thing which characterises these memoirs, and is sufficient to redeem a multitude of vanities and frailties, is the elevated and chivalrous spirit in which they are composed. In this respect they are a relic, we fear, of the olden time; a remnant of those ancient days which Mr Burke has so eloquently described in his portrait of Marie Antoinette. That is the spirit which pervades the breasts of these illustrious men; and therefore it is that we respect them, and forgive or forget many weaknesses which would otherwise be insupportable in their autobiographies. It is a spirit, however, more akin to a former era than the present; to the age which produced the crusades, more than that which gave birth to railways; to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon, rather than those which raised a monument to Mr Hudson. We are by no means convinced, however, that it is not the more likely to be enduring in the future ages of the world; at least we are sure it will be so, if the sanguine anticipations everywhere formed, by the apostles of the movement of the future improvement of the species, are destined in any degree to be realised.
Although, however, the hearts of Chateaubriand and Lamartine are stamped with the impress of chivalry, and the principal charm of their writings is owing to its generous spirit, yet we should err greatly if we imagined that they have not shared in the influences of the age in which they lived, and become largely imbued with the more popular and equalising notions which have sprung up in Europe during the last century. They could not have attained the political power which they have both wielded if they had not done so; for no man, be his genius what it may, will ever acquire a practical lead among men unless his opinions coincide in the main with those of the majority by whom he is surrounded. Chateaubriand's earliest work, written in London in 1793—the Essai Historique—is, in truth, rather of a republican and sceptical tendency; and it was not till he had travelled in America, and inhaled a nobler spirit amid the solitudes of nature, that the better parts of his nature regained their ascendency, and his fame was established on an imperishable foundation by the publication of Atala et René, and the Génie du Christianisme. Throughout his whole career, the influence of his early liberal principles remained conspicuous: albeit a royalist, he was the steady supporter of the freedom of the press and the extension of the elective suffrage; and he kept aloof from the government of Louis Philippe less from aversion to the semi-revolutionary spirit in which it was cradled, than from an honourable fidelity to misfortune and horror at the selfish corrupt multitude by which it was soon surrounded. Lamartine's republican principles are universally known: albeit descended of a noble family, and largely imbued with feudal feelings, he aided in the revolt which overturned the throne of Louis Philippe in February 1848, and acquired lasting renown by the courage with which he combated the sanguinary spirit of the Red Republicans, when minister of foreign affairs. Both are chivalrous in heart and feeling, rather than opinions; and they thus exhibit curious and instructive instances of the fusions of the moving principle of the olden time with the ideas of the present, and of the manner in which the true spirit of nobility, forgetfulness of self, can accommodate itself to the varying circumstances of society, and float, from its buoyant tendency, on the surface of the most fetid stream of subsequent selfishness.
In two works recently published by Lamartine, Les Confidences and Raphael, certain passages in his autobiography are given. The first recounts the reminiscences of his infancy and childhood; the second, a love-story in his twentieth year. Both are distinguished by the peculiarities, in respect of excellences and defects, which appear in his other writings. On the one hand we have an ardent imagination, great beauty of language, a generous heart—the true spirit of poetry—and uncommon pictorial powers. On the other, an almost entire ignorance of human nature, extraordinary vanity, and that susceptibility of mind which is more nearly allied to the feminine, than the masculine character. Not but that Lamartine possesses great energy and courage: his conduct, during the revolution of 1848, demonstrates that he possesses these qualities in a very high degree; but that the ardour of his feelings leads him to act and think like women, from their impulse rather than the sober dictates of reason. He is a devout optimist, and firm believer in the innocence of human nature, and indefinite perfectibility of mankind, under the influence of republican institutions. Like all other fanatics, he is wholly inaccessible to the force of reason, and altogether beyond the reach of facts, how strong or convincing soever. Accordingly, he remains to this hour entirely convinced of the perfectibility of mankind, although he has recounted, with equal truth and force, that it was almost entirely owing to his own courage and energy that the revolution was prevented, in its very outset, from degenerating into bloodshed and massacre; and a thorough believer in the ultimate sway of pacific institutions, although he owns that, despite all his zeal and eloquence, the whole provisional government, with himself at its head, would on the 16th April have been guillotined or thrown into the Seine, but for the determination and fidelity of three battalions of the Garde Mobile, whom Changarnier volunteered to arrange in all the windows and avenues of the Hotel de Ville, when assailed by a column of thirty thousand furious revolutionists.
Chateaubriand is more a man of the world than Lamartine. He has passed through a life of greater vicissitudes, and been much more frequently brought into contact with men in all ranks and gradations of society. He is not less chivalrous than Lamartine, but more practical; his style is less pictorial but more statesmanlike. The French of all shades of political opinion agree in placing him at the head of the writers of the last age. This high position, however, is owing rather to the detached passages than the general tenor of his writings, for their average style is hardly equal to such an encomium. He is not less vain than Lamartine, and still more egotistical—a defect which, as already noticed, he shares with nearly all the writers of autobiography in France, but which appears peculiarly extraordinary and lamentable in man of such talents and acquirements. His life abounded with strange and romantic adventures, and its vicissitudes would have furnished a rich field for biography even to a writer of less imaginative powers.
He was born on the 4th September 1768—the same year with Napoleon—at an old melancholy chateau on the coast of Brittany, washed by the waves of the Atlantic ocean. His mother, like those of almost all other eminent men recorded in history, was a very remarkable woman, gifted with a prodigious memory and an ardent imagination—qualities which she transmitted in a very high degree to her son. His family was very ancient, going back to the year 1000; but, till illustrated by Francois René, who has rendered it immortal, the Chateaubriands lived in unobtrusive privacy on their paternal acres. After receiving the rudiments of education at home, he was sent at the age of seventeen into the army; but the Revolution having soon after broken out, and his regiment revolted, he quitted the service and came to Paris, where he witnessed the horrors of the storming of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, and the massacre in the prisons on 2d. September. Many of his nearest relations—in particular his sister-in-law, Madame de Chateaubriand, and sister, Madame Rozambo—were executed along with Malesherbes, shortly before the fall of Robespierre. Obliged now to fly to England, he lived for some years in London in extreme poverty, supporting himself by his pen. It was there he wrote his earliest and least creditable work, the Essai Historique. Tired of such an obscure and monotonous life, however, he set out for America, with the Quixotic design of discovering by land journey the North-west passage. He failed in that attempt, for which, indeed, he had no adequate means; but he dined with Washington, and in the solitudes of the Far West imbibed many of the noblest ideas, and found the subjects of several of the finest descriptions, which have since adorned his works. Finding that there was nothing to be done in the way of discovery in America, he returned to England. Afterwards he went to Paris, and there composed his greatest works, Atala et René and the Génie du Christianisme, which soon acquired a colossal reputation, and raised the author to the highest pinnacle of literary fame.
Napoleon, whose piercing eye discerned talent wherever it was to be found, now selected him for the public service in the diplomatic line. He gives the following interesting account of the first and only interview he had with that extraordinary man, in the saloon of his brother Lucien:—