From this period to the time of his death his life was a singular series of vicissitudes—at one time the brilliant and revered statesman, at another the voluntary abdicator of all his rights and honors; and even, at one bitter passage of his existence, living in an unwarmed London garret and obtaining a precarious livelihood by giving lessons in his native tongue and translating for the booksellers.
The utter upheaval of affairs in France brought the greatest distress upon himself, his family and his immediate friends, and, with the sensitive heart of genius, the blows which had fallen so keenly doubtless engendered the melancholy cast with which his writings are sometimes tinged. His first work, an idyllic poem, showed little of the genius so finely developed in after years; but his finest literary productions—“The Martyrs,” “The Last of the Abencerages” and “The Genius of Christianity,” to which “Atala” and “René” properly belong—remain a splendid monument to his powers and exhibit his earnest desire to be numbered among the benefactors and enlighteners of mankind.
The present work, “Atala,” is the gathered fruit of his previous studies amid the wilds of America. It abounds in sparkling description, romantic incident and sentiments tender and heroic. It is pervaded by purity of tone and elevation of thought, qualities the more commendable and marked because produced in an age proverbially lax and frivolous.
The illustrations of M. Doré have given an additional value to this tale, so simple, so unsophisticated, yet blooming with all the wild luxuriance of nature. The artist has added his gifts to those of the poet; and those acquainted only with his ready and original powers as the delineator of farce and drollery, or of the exceptionally tragic and horrible, will find new cause for admiration in these quiet renderings of the primeval beauties of the American wild—its plains and forests, its still lagoons and roaring cataracts, its mountain slopes and deep defiles—all its aspects of rudest workmanship—and will welcome these efforts of his genius in the lovely realm of descriptive art, wedded as they are to the exquisite simplicity of this Indian romance. As in his other works, here may be noted the same surpassing fertility of resource, the same alertness of intellect and readiness and swiftness of touch; but there may also be found new proofs of his complete sympathy with all that is picturesque in forest beauty and his high intuitive perception of every possible phase of nature in her wildest caprice and most tender bloom.
We append the following extracts from different prefaces to the author’s writings, as constituting what is explanatory of the story that follows:
[From the Preface to the First Edition.]
“I was still very young when I conceived the idea of composing an epic on ‘The Man of Nature,’ to depict the manners of savages, by uniting them with some well-known event. After the discovery of America, I saw no subject more interesting, especially to Frenchmen, than the massacre of the Natchez colony in Louisiana, in 1727. All the Indian tribes conspiring, after two centuries of oppression, for the restoration of liberty to the New World, appeared to me to offer a subject almost as attractive as the conquest of Mexico. I put some fragments of the work to paper; but I soon found that I was weak in local coloring, and that, if I wished to produce a picture of real resemblance, it became necessary for me, in imitation of Homer’s example, to visit the tribes I was desirous of describing.
“In 1789 I made M. de Malesherbes acquainted with my idea of going to America; but, wishing at the same time to give a useful object to my voyage, I formed the project of discovering the overland passage so long sought after, and concerning which even Captain Cook himself had left some doubts. I started, visited the American solitudes, and returned with plans for a second voyage, which was to last nine years. I proposed to traverse the entire continent of North America, afterwards to explore the coasts to the north of California, and to return by Hudson’s Bay, rounding the pole. M. de Malesherbes undertook to submit my plans to the Government, and it was then that he listened to the first fragments of the little work I now offer to the public. The Revolution put a stop to all my projects. Covered with the blood of my only brother, of my sister-in-law, and of the illustrious old man, their father; having seen my mother and another talented sister die in consequence of the treatment they had undergone in prison, I wandered forth to foreign lands, where the only friend I had preserved stabbed himself in my arms.
“Of all my manuscripts upon America, I have only saved some fragments, ‘Atala’ in particular, which was itself but an episode of ‘The Natchez.’ ‘Atala’ was written in the desert, beneath the huts of the savages. I do not know whether the public will like the story, which quits all beaten tracks, and represents a nature and manners altogether foreign to Europe. There is no adventure in ‘Atala.’ It is a sort of poem, half descriptive, half dramatic. It consists entirely in the portraiture of two lovers walking and talking together in the solitudes, and in the picture of the trials of love in the midst of the calm of the desert. I have endeavored to give to this work the most antique forms. It is divided into Prologue, Recital and Epilogue. The principal parts of the story have each a denomination, such as ‘The Hunters,’ ‘The Laborers,’ etc.; and it was thus that, in the early ages of Greece, the rhapsodists sang, under different titles, fragments of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey.’”
“The moralities I have been desirous of inculcating in ‘Atala’ are easily discoverable, and as they are summed up in the Epilogue, I need not speak of them here. I will merely say a word or two concerning Chactas, the lover of Atala.