1768-1848.
Chateaubriand—his is a faded fame. He was a false brilliant from the first, but he glittered during his time like a veritable Mountain of Light. Men hardly found out till he died that instead of being precious stone he was nothing but paste.
Our figure misrepresents the fact. Chateaubriand was not thus spurious through and through. He had streaks of genuine in him. His true symbol perhaps would be a common rubble-stone flawed splendidly with diamond.
The reaction of disparagement, which is now the critical vogue as to Chateaubriand’s personal and literary value, meets occasional stout challenge from redoubtable voices. Mr. Matthew Arnold, for instance, protests against it, triumphantly citing out of the author for whom he stands up what certainly would read like the utterance of a mind both large and noble, could one rid one’s self of the feeling that Chateaubriand in writing it had his own case chiefly in view, as follows:
It is a dangerous mistake, sanctioned, like so many other dangerous mistakes, by Voltaire, to suppose that the best works of imagination are those which draw the most tears.... The true tears are those which are called forth by the beauty of poetry; there must be as much admiration in them as sorrow.
The author of the foregoing, assuredly, excites with his pathos quite as much admiration as sorrow.
Chateaubriand forms an essential link in the chain of literary history for France. He constitutes almost the sole representative of French literature for the period of the First Empire, so-called—that is, the time of the supreme ascendency of Napoleon Bonaparte. Madame de Stael alone needs to be named as his rival and peer. Chateaubriand, in his day—and his day was a long one, for he outlived the empire, the restoration, and the reign of Louis Philippe—was well-nigh an equal power with Napoleon himself. In his own opinion, he was fully such; for his self-complacency was unbounded.
Never in the history of letters did it twice happen to an author to be better served by opportunity than in two cases was Chateaubriand. The Encyclopædists, with Voltaire and Rousseau, had had their hour, and a reaction had set in, when Chateaubriand’s “Genius of Christianity” appeared. It was the exact moment for such a book. It seemed to create the reactionary movement with which it coincided, and it rendered its author not merely famous, but powerful. Napoleon saw his account in making use of a writer who had the secret of such popularity. Besides, the Napoleonic sagacity was equal to perceiving that return to religious belief was needful for France. Napoleon made overtures to Chateaubriand, which Chateaubriand accepted. The author took office at the gift of the dictator.
But Chateaubriand was himself too supremely an egotist to be securely attached to another egotist’s interest by any flattery that could be bestowed upon him. When, at the word of Napoleon, the Duke d’Enghien was murdered, Chateaubriand—let him have the credit of his high spirit—resigned his office and separated himself from the tyrant who had conferred it. Chateaubriand’s first happy synchronism with the course of events was his publishing the “Genius of Christianity” when he did. His second was his publishing the pamphlet “Bonaparte and the Bourbons” at the very moment when that restoration impended which raised Louis XVIII. to the throne of France. The new monarch acknowledged that Chateaubriand’s book had been worth an army to his cause.
Chateaubriand prolonged his literary career to a great age, enjoying almost to the end an undisputed supremacy among the authors of France. There has seldom been a more uncloudedly, more dazzlingly, brilliant contemporary success achieved by any writer of any age or any nation. The renown continues, but the splendor of the renown has passed away. Why? Our answer is, Chateaubriand’s writing is vitiated by a vein of unreality, of falseness, running through it. This character in his writing but reflected, we fear, a character in the writer. There is ground for suspecting that Chateaubriand was at heart lacking in genuineness. It was inseparable defect in the man that gave that hollow ring to the words. It is but a just reprisal upon Chateaubriand that his literary fame should suffer by the fault detected in his personal character. A man’s words are seldom in the long run more weighty than the man.