"I was in the gallery when Napoleon entered; his appearance struck me with an agreeable surprise. I had never previously seen him but at a distance. His smile was sweet and encouraging; his eye beautiful, especially from the way in which it was overshadowed by the eyebrows. He had no charlatanism in his looks, nothing affected or theatrical in his manner. The Génie du Christianisme, which at that time was making a great deal of noise, had produced its effect on Napoleon. A vivid imagination animated his cold policy; he would not have been what he was if the Muse had not been there; reason in him worked out the ideas of a poet. All great men are composed of two natures—for they must be at once capable of inspiration and action,—the one conceives, the other executes.
"Buonaparte saw me, and knew me I know not how. When he moved towards me, it was not known whom he sought. The crowd opened; every one hoped the First Consul would stop to converse with him; his air showed that he was irritated at these mistakes. I retired behind those around me; Buonaparte suddenly raised his voice, and called out, "Monsieur de Chateaubriand." I then remained alone in front; for the crowd instantly retired, and re-formed in a circle around us. Buonaparte addressed me with simplicity, without questions, preamble, or compliments. He began speaking about Egypt and the Arabs, as if I had been his intimate friend, and he had only resumed a conversation already commenced betwixt us. 'I was always struck,' said he, 'when I saw the Scheiks fall on their knees in the desert, turn towards the east, and touch the sand with their foreheads. What is that unknown thing which they adore in the east?' Speedily then passing to another idea, he said, 'Christianity! the Idealogues wished to reduce it to a system of astronomy! Suppose it were so, do they suppose they would render Christianity little? Were Christianity only an allegory of the movement of the spheres, the geometry of the stars, the esprits forts would have little to say: despite themselves, they have left sufficient grandeur to l'Infame.'[5]
"Buonaparte immediately withdrew. Like Job in the night, I felt as if a spirit had passed before me; the hairs of my flesh stood up. I did not know its countenance; but I heard its voice like a little whisper.
"My days have been an uninterrupted succession of visions. Hell and heaven continually have opened under my feet, or over my head, without my having had time to sound their depths, or withstand their dazzling. I have met once, and once only, on the shores of the two worlds, the man of the last age, and the man of the new—Washington and Napoleon—I conversed a few moments with each—both sent me back to solitude—the first by a kind wish, the second by an execrable crime.
"I remarked that, in moving through the crowd, Buonaparte cast on me looks more steady and penetrating than he had done before he addressed me. I followed him with my eyes.
'Who is that great man who cares not
For conflagrations?'"[6]—(Vol. iv. 118-121.)
This passage conveys a just idea of Chateaubriand's Memoirs: his elevation of mind, his ardent imagination, his deplorable vanity. In justice to so eminent a man, however, we transcribe a passage in which the nobleness of his character appears in its true lustre, untarnished by the weaknesses which so often disfigure the character of men of genius. We allude to his courageous throwing down the gauntlet to Napoleon, on occasion of the murder of the Duke d'Enghien:—
"Two days before the fatal 20th March, I dressed myself, before taking leave of Buonaparte, on my way to the Valais, to which I had received a diplomatic mission; I had not seen him since the time when he had spoken to me at the Tuileries. The gallery where the reception was going on was full; he was accompanied by Murat and his aide-de-camp. When he approached me, I was struck with an alteration in his countenance: his cheeks were fallen in, of a livid hue; his eyes stern; his colour pale; his air sombre and terrible. The attraction which had formerly drawn me towards him was at an end; instead of awaiting, I fled his approach. He cast a look towards me, as if he sought to recognise me, moved a few steps towards me, turned, and disappeared. Returned to the Hôtel de France, I said to several of my friends, 'Something strange, which I do not know, must have happened: Buonaparte could not have changed to such a degree unless he had been ill.' Two days after, at eleven in the forenoon, I heard a man cry in the streets—'Sentence of the military commission convoked at Vincennes, which has condemned to the pain of Death Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon, born 2d August 1772 at Chantilly.' That cry fell on me like a clap of thunder: it changed my life as it changed that of Napoleon. I returned home, and said to Madame de Chateaubriand—'The Duke d'Enghien has just been shot.' I sat down to a table and began to write my resignation—Madame de Chateaubriand made no opposition: she had a great deal of courage. She was fully aware of my danger: the trial of Moreau and Georges Cadoudal was going on: the lion had tasted blood: it was not the moment to irritate him."—(Vol. iv. 228-229.)
After this honourable step, which happily passed without leading to Chateaubriand's being shot, he travelled to the East, where he visited Greece, Constantinople, the Holy Land, and Egypt, and collected the materials which have formed two of his most celebrated works, L'Itinéraire à Jerusalem, and Les Martyrs. He returned to France, but did not appear in public life till the Allies conquered Paris in 1814, where he composed with extraordinary rapidity his famous pamphlet entitled Buonaparte and the Bourbons, which had so powerful an effect in bringing about the Restoration. The royalists were now in power, and Chateaubriand was too important a man to be overlooked. In 1821 he was sent as ambassador to London, the scene of his former penury and suffering; in 1823 he was made Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in that capacity projected, and successfully carried through, the expedition to Spain which reseated Ferdinand on the throne of his ancestors; and he was afterwards the plenipotentiary of France at the congress of Verona in 1824. He was too liberal a man to be employed by the administration of Charles X., but be exhibited an honourable constancy to misfortune on occasion of the Revolution of 1830. He was offered the portfolio of Foreign Affairs if he would abstain from opposition; but he refused the proposal, made a last noble and eloquent speech in favour of his dethroned sovereign in the Chamber of Peers; and, withdrawing into privacy, lived in retirement, engaged in literary pursuits, and in the composition or revising of his numerous publications, till his death, which occurred in June 1848.
Such a life of such a man cannot be other than interesting, for it unites the greatest possible range and variety of events with the reflections of a mind of great power, ardent imagination, and extensive erudition. His autobiography, or Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, as it is called, was accordingly looked for with great interest, which has not been sensibly diminished by the revolution of 1848, which has brought a new set of political actors on the stage. Four volumes only have hitherto been published, but the rest may speedily be looked for, now that the military government of Prince Louis Napoleon has terminated that of anarchy in France. The three first volumes certainly disappointed us: chiefly from the perpetual and offensive vanity which they exhibited, and the number of details, many of them of a puerile or trifling character, which they contained. The fourth volume, however, from which the preceding extracts have been taken, exhibits Chateaubriand, in many places, in his original vigour; and if the succeeding ones are of the same stamp, we propose to return to them.
THE GREEN HAND.
A "SHORT" YARN. PART IV.
"You must surely be tired by this time, ma'am, of this long-winded yarn of mine?" said the commander of the Gloucester to the elder of his fair listeners, next evening they met with the evident expectation of hearing further; "but after all, this must be dull work for you at present, so I daresay you are amused with anything by way of a change."
——Well, one morning when Westwood and I went on deck, it was a stark staring calm; as dead as a mill-pond, save for the long winding heave that seemed to come miles up out of the stale blue water, and get tired with the journey—from the horizon to us in one lazy coil, and on every side, just serving to jerk the wheel a spoke back and forward, with nobody at it. The very bits of pumpkin-paring and fat which the cook had thrown overboard the night before, lay still alongside, with an oily track oozing round about them from the 'slush,'[7]—the sails hanging from the yards, up and down, like clothes on a screen—and when you looked over the side away from the sun, you saw your own face, like a fellow's that had been long drowned, peering back at you as it were round the keel—in fact, there you scarce knew where the water was. Somehow or other the ship kept sheering round, by little and little, till, although one had chosen a shady spot, all of a sudden the blazing sun came right into his eyes; or the single streak of white cloud laying behind you, to starboard, a while after stuck itself before your face from the very opposite quarter—you fancying, too, you had your eye the whole time on the same bit of water. Being lost in a wood or a fog was nothing to it, especially with the sun at noon drawn up right overhead, so that you couldn't look aloft, and staring down into the sea out of a pool of bright light; "like one tremendously keen little eye," as some of the passengers said, "examining a big blind one." "Why," put in one of the "writers," "I fear he wants to take the mote out of his brother's eye,—this vessel, that is to say!" "Hang it, I hope not!" said Winterton, rather alarmed. "He promises well to do it, then," said another young civilian, "but I wish he'd take the beam out of his own, first—ha, Smythe?" However, few men have the spirit to laugh at little in a calm near the Line, so Smythe gave no more than a sickly grin, while Westwood looked the clergyman very properly.
Both passengers and crew, all of us that could swim, gave wistful looks now and then alongside at the water, hot as it seemed, for a bathe; just floating up, as it were, with the mere huge size of it, under a dazzle of light, and so blue and smooth you could'nt see a hair's breadth below; while, a bit off, the face of it, and the very air, appeared to dance and quiver like little streams of glass. However, all thoughts of bathing were put out of your head when you saw the black three-cornered affair, with a rake aft, somewhat like the end of a scythe, that went steering slowly round us; then cruising hither and thither, till its infernal horn was as dry as the deck; and at times driving straight off, as if it ran in a groove through the level surface, when back again it came from the other side, creeping lazily towards us, till it sank with a light tip, and a circle or two on the blue water. The hook and chain were hanging up and down over the taffrail, with the piece of rank pork looking green in the shadow near the rudder, where you read the white figures of her draught as plain as in dock; but the shark, a fifteen-feet customer, if he was an inch, was too knowing to have touched it. "Pity he's gone, Collins," said Ford to me, after we had watched him at last out of sight; "wasn't there any plan of catching him, I wonder! Now we shall have a bathe though, at any rate." "Gone?" said I, "he won't leave us in a hurry, if we don't leave him!" "Poh, man!" said Ford, "I tell you he's tired out and gone away!" Five minutes after, Ford was leaning over the quarter, and wiping his face, while he fanned himself with his straw-hat, which fell out of his hand into the water. He had got over into the mizen-chains to throw a line round it, when he gave a loud shriek, and jumped in-board again. Two or three fathoms of green came up from the keel, balancing on a pair of broad fins under Ford's hat, and a big round snout touched it; then a dozen feet of white belly gleamed in the water, the hat gave a gulp as it was drawn down, and a few small air-bells rose to the top. "He prefers some flavours to others you see, Ford," said I. "'Tis the second hat I've seen you lose: I hope your head won't be in the third; but you mariners, you see——," however Ford had bolted to his cabin. On turning round I perceived Miss Hyde with the General's lady under the awning on the other side, where the old lady leant against a cushion, with her hands crossed, and her bonnet-strings loose—though a strapping raw-boned Irishwoman she was—and kept Miss Hyde's maid fanning her from behind with a large feather punkah. The old lady had started at Ford's cry, and gave a look round at me, half fierce and half order-wise, as if she expected to know what was the matter at once. "Only my friend lost his hat, ma'am," said I, stepping forward. "These cadets are so taygious, my dear!" said she to the young lady, falling back again without the least other notice of me. "They plague the life of me, but the brigadier can't drill them as he would if this were a troop-ship—I wish he could, for the sake of the profession!—now, my dear, dho kape out of the s-hun!" However I stuck where I was, fancying I caught the slightest bit of an arch twinkle in the corner of the young lady's eye, though she didn't look at me. "Keep going, can't ye!" said the old lady crossly to the maid. "No, ma'am, indeed!" said the girl, glancing over to her young mistress, "I'm ready to drop!" "Send up papa's kitmagar, then, Wilkins," said Miss Hyde; and the girl went off toward the gallery stair, muttering she "hoped she didn't come—here to be—made a black Indian slave of—at least to an old"—the remainder being lost in the stair. As I leant on the rail-netting, behind the old lady, I happened to tread on her fat pug-dog's tail, whereupon the ugly brute made its teeth meet without farther notice in the small of my leg, after which it gave a yelp, and ran beneath the chairs. "What's that, Die?" exclaimed its mistress: "good hivens! is that same griffin here yet, my dear! Hadn't he ayven the spirit to take a hint?—I say, was it you hurt Dianny, young man?" "Oh, dear! no, ma'am, not for the world!" said I, looking at my trousers, hard as the thing was to stand, but thinking to smooth her over, though I was'nt quite up to the old Irishwoman, it turned out. "Ha! ha! so she bit you?" said she, with a flash of her hawk's-eye, and leaning back again coolly: "If he'd only kicked poor Die for it under my chair, now, I'd have forgiven him; but he hadn't ayven the heart at the time to drop her a curse,—and I thinking all the while, too, by the luke of his eye, he was from the county Clare! My heart warms to the county Clare always, because, although I'm not Irish myself, you know, I'd once a schoolfellow was born in it—without counting all my relations! Oh, the smooth spalpeen!" continued she, harder than before, glancing at me as I looked all abroad from one to the other;—"listen, niver you let that fellow spake to you, my dear! he's too——." But here I walked quietly off, to put the poop's length betwixt me and the talking old vixen, cursing her and her dog both, quite enough to have pleased her Irish fancy.