French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

Chateaubriand was a kind of continuer and modifier of a celebrated French writer that preceded him. He was a better-bred, a much purified, an aristocratic Rousseau. He may be pronounced second greatest in the succession of the literary sentimentalists of France.

René François Augustus, Viscount de Chateaubriand, to give him now his full name and title, lived a life replete with adventure and vicissitude. At twenty-three years of age he fled from the horrors of the French Revolution to travel in America and to find a north-west passage to the Polar Sea. He called, with a letter of introduction, on President Washington, to whose prudent dissuasion of the young man from his project of arctic exploration, founded on the difficulty of the task, Chateaubriand had the French readiness, together with the necessary egotism, to make the complimentary reply: “But, sir, my task is not so difficult as yours was, that of creating a state.” In his posthumous biography, the “Memoirs d’Outre Tombe” [Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb], Chateaubriand, alluding to this interview of his with Washington, said, sententiously and loftily, “There is a virtue in the look of a great man.”

Our adventurer never found that north-west passage which he came to seek, but he took impressions of a strange new world, impressions that he afterward turned to various literary account. His “René” was one fruit of these experiences of his. The “René” is a romantic and sentimental tale, the main interest of which, where it possessed interest, lay in the seductive style of the composition, the idealizing descriptions occurring in it of American landscape, and the tone of melancholy reflection that pervaded it. The “noble red man” is made in it to talk like a Socrates come again, or like a French Christian philosopher born “the heir of all the ages.” Such absurd inconsistency with the truth of things well illustrates that taint of lurking falseness which to such a degree vitiates all Chateaubriand’s work.

The French Revolution had made great strides while Chateaubriand was discovering the north-west passage by musing and dreaming in the woods and by the streams of the New World. Learning that many members of his social class, the aristocracy of France, had fled from their homes and were rallying in other lands to make a stand against their enemies, Chateaubriand resolved to join them. He was nigh to shipwreck on his way. In a siege, after his arrival, he was saved from death by the chance of his having the manuscript of his “Atala” in the right spot on his person to intercept a ball from the enemy. But he was severely wounded nevertheless, and, worse still, was attacked with the small-pox. Thus disabled, he started on foot to make a journey of hundreds of miles. He, of course, suffered many hardships, and one night gave up to die in a ditch in which he lay down to rest. He was picked up and carried to Namur. Here, as he crawled on hands and knees through the streets, he was befriended by some women who saw his condition. After many adventures, he found himself in London, where he lived squalidly on what he could earn by hack-work with his pen.

His family meantime were suffering in France. Some of them had actually been guillotined, and some were imprisoned, among them his wife, his sister, and his mother. The mother died praying for her son’s conversion from infidel error. The sister wrote to her brother the pathetic story, but she too had died before her letter reached that brother’s hand. “These two voices,” Chateaubriand says, “coming up from the grave, ... struck me with peculiar force.... I wept and believed.” The “Genius of Christianity” was written in the spirit of this sentimental conversion of the author.

We pass over, with mere mention of some principal titles, his other books, not previously named, as his “Itinerary,” a volume of travels; his “Moses,” his “Martyrs,” his “Essay on English Literature,” his “Translation of the Paradise Lost,” to make the brief extracts for which we have room from the “Genius of Christianity.”

This work is designed as a manual of Christian evidence, an argument for the truth of the Christian religion. It is written, of course, from a Roman Catholic point of view, but it may be described as liberal and literary, rather than strict and ecclesiastical. It is far from being closely reasoned. There is, in fact, a great deal of digression and discussion in it. The aim of the author was evidently more to make a readable book suited to the times than to produce an apologetic work that would stand four-square against all hostile attack. The author’s question with himself as he wrote seemed to have been, not, Is this valid, and necessary to the demonstration? but, Will this be interesting? The consequence is that the “Genius of Christianity” is now worthy of note rather as a book that has had a history than as a book that possesses permanent value. It contains, however, writing that will satisfactorily exhibit the style of Chateaubriand—a clear, pure, brilliant, harmonious poetic prose.

Chateaubriand raises and answers the question why the ancients failed in feeling for the beauties and sublimities of nature, thus:

It can scarcely be supposed that men endued with such sensibility as the ancients could have wanted eyes to perceive the charms of nature and talents for depicting them, had they not been blinded by some powerful cause. Now, this cause was their established mythology, which, peopling the universe with elegant phantoms, banished from the creation its solemnity, its grandeur, and its solitude. It was necessary that Christianity should expel the whole hosts of fauns, of satyrs, and of nymphs, to restore to the grottoes their silence, and to the woods their scope for uninterrupted contemplation. Under our religion the deserts have assumed a character more pensive, more vague, and more sublime; the forests have attained a loftier pitch; the rivers have broken their petty urns, that in future they may only pour the waters of the abyss from the summit of the mountains; and the true God, in returning to his work, has imparted his immensity to nature.

The foregoing, paradoxical perhaps, is certainly a sharp turning of the tables upon modern paganizers who mourn the dead Greek and Roman divinities of grove and stream.