branche de corail. La Mer, livre ii
Page 24. 1. 1. lubriques. Recalls Matthew Arnold's protest against ' the great goddess of lubricity ', worshipped by the baser kind of French novelists.
1. 20. raboteux, ' jerky,' or ' jolty ' ; properly of rough wood that has to be planed. Cf. Boileau, Art Poétique, ' Sophocle enfin . . . des vers trop raboteux polit l'expression.'
1. 22. Sa phrase bat. Impossible to render literally ; we must bring out the latent metaphors : ' He hammers, he lays abouthim, he thunders like a breaking billow.'
1. 31. les Galls. In the first volume of the History, which treated of the Celts down to the Carlovingians.
1. 32. les cathédrales. Gothic architecture is treated at the end of the second volume. Michelet made a very complète study of the cathedrals of Normandy, in which he was aided by bis friend Quicherat.
1. 34. saint Louis. In the second volume, France féodale. Jeanne d'Arc forms the most popular chapter of the History. Michelet sees in La Pucelle an embodiment of France. With her mediaevalism ends and the new era begins. ' En elle apparurent à la fois la Vierge ... et déjà la Patrie.' ' Le sauveur'de la France devait être une femme. La France était femme elle-même.'
1. 35. Luther. Mémoires de Luther, in two volumes, appeared in 1835. It consists of extracts from his works, with running comments, so as to form a biography.
Page 25. 1. 3. tempête £ octobre 1859. La Mer, livre i. 7. Witnessed by Michelet at Saint-Georges, near Royan, at the mouth of the Gironde. The storm lasted six days, and (according to Michelet) threatened to blow away his cottage. He lost for the time the power of writing rhythmical prose.
1. 25. il sait interroger les textes. Taine, who in part went over the same ground and could check Michelet's exactitude, bears a striking testimony to his fidelity as an historian : ' Lorsqu'on étudie les documents d'une époque qu'il a étudiée, on éprouve une sensation semblable à la sienne et l'on trouve qu'en définitive les conclusions de son lyricisme divinatoire sont presque aussi exactes que celle de la patiente analyse et de la lente généralisation.'
Page 26. 1. 15. Ses sorciers, Sec. Referring to La Sorcière
(1862), a somewhat gruesome romance, half historical and half a philosophie treatise on witcheraft.
1. 16. Des Jésuites (1843), Du Prêtre, de la femme et de la famille (1844), Du Peuple (1845). Counterblasts to Veuillot and the clerics' attack on the freethinking professors of the Collège de France.
Page 27. 1. 13. satanique. Hère merely a ' swear word', and has nothing to do with Robert Buchanan's ' Satanic school of literature '.
1. 14. le nom de Dieu dans Shakspeare. As a matter of curiosity we turned to Cowden Clarke's Concordance and found that the name of God occurs 1,875 times.
1. 3 1. discours de Wolsey. Henry VIII, Act iii, Scène 2 : ' Cromwell, I did not think to shed a tear.'
1. 36. risquer un aperçu, ' take a snap-shot,' ' draw a bow at a venture.'
Page 28. 1. 3. la Révolution française. Scherer shows only the reverse of the medal, the sentimentality and false rhetoric of Michelet's Révolution, and omits the sterling merits : the force of simple narrative, as in the taking of the Bastille (voir et ressusciter) ; the combination of history and the philosophy of history (récit et système) ; the poetic unity of the work — it is a great epic with the people for hero.
1. 18. la Grâce. This is fancifully expressed, but there is a real idea behind it. We may compare Matthew Arnold's définition of religion as ' morality touched with émotion '. Thus, of the taking of the Bastille, Michelet writes : ' L'attaque de la Bastille ne fut nullement raisonnable. Ce fut un acte de foi.'
Page 29. 1. 19. mucus. ' Cet élément visqueux, blanchâtre qu'offre l'eau de la mer . . . une matière à demi organisée et déjà tout organisable ... le premier degré des corps organiques.' — La Mer, livre ii. 2. We are reminded of the supposed discovery of protoplasm in the slime brought up by deep-sea dredgings in the Atlantic, a gelatinous substance which Professor Huxley in a rash moment named Bathybius.
1. 31. prend. Prendre, intransitive, is said of liquids passing into solids, as of milk into cream, or of water into ice.
I.35. vibrion. Michelet's vibrios, ' tout petits serpentaux ou anguilles microscopiques,' are a genus unknown to zoology.
Page 31. 1. 3. une femme marine. Compare the Scandinavian myths incorporated in Hans Andersen's Fairy Taies and Matthew Arnold's Forsaken Merman. In the Sirens of the Odyssey we see mythology in the process of formation. Thèse are (by dérivation)
the Drawers, the reefs and sunken rocks that draw mariners to their destruction.
1. 27. une chaîne des êtres, &c. Scherer can hardly hâve been aware of the Origin of Species, published two years before this was written, or he would hâve looked with more favour on Michelet's spéculations. True, they are wild surmises, but none the less they are guesses at the truth, feelings after the law of natural sélection, which was in the air. Michelet had read the Voyage of the Beagle.
Chateaubriand.
We prefix a brief sketch of Chateaubriand's life and principal writings.
François Auguste de Chateaubriand, born September 4, 1768, the youngest of ten children of an ancient Breton family, in a house abutting on the ramparts, Rue des Juifs, St. Malo. In 1787 sub-lieutenant in the Navarre régiment. In 1790 he was in Paris, attracted the attention of Fontanes, his life-long friend, and made his literary début in the Almanach des Muses. In 1791 he started for America, to discover the North-West passage 5 travelled from the Mississippi to Labrador, and camped for some months with the Red Indians of Canada. In 1792, on learning the flight of the King, he returned to France and threw in his lot with the émigrés, to whom he ofïered his sword. Wounded at the siège of Thionville, and at the point of death from dysentery, he escaped to England, and barely supported himself by giving lessons in French and translating for publishers. In 1797 his first work, Essai sur les Révolutions anciennes et modernes, was published in London. Its thesis was the déniai of human progress — men move in a vicious circle. This work conciliated Napoléon, who as First Consul permitted his return to France in 1800. He collaborated with Fontanes in the Mercure de France, in which journal Atala first appeared, 1801. The following year saw Le Génie du Christianisme, of which Atala was originally an épisode. Napoléon, who saw in it an apology for the Concordat, April 18, 1802, rewarded him by the appointment of secretary of embassy at Rome. The judicial murder of the Duc d'Enghien (March 21, 1804) caused him to send in his résignation. In 1807 he published René, intended, like Atala, to be an épisode in the Génie. In 1809 he published Les Martyrs, a romance of the Diocletian persécution. In 181 1 appeared the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, a picturesque narrative of his Eastern tour, and Aventures du dernier des Abencêrages, the fruit of his travels in Spain. His political pamphlet, De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, L 2
was written after the fall of Napoléon ; Louis XVIII said of it, 1 qu'il valut une armée aux Bourbons.'
On the return of Napoléon he fled with Louis to Ghent. j After theHundredDays he was rewardedwith a peerage,andchampioned the Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber of Peers. On the fall of the Decazes Ministry, in 1821, when the Right came into office, he was made ambassador, first at Berlin, then at London. He attended the Congress of Verona, 1822, and promoted the intrigue which led to the war with Spain. The same year he succeeded to the Ministry of Foreign Âfïairs ; but showed little capacity as a Minister of State, quarrelled with Villèle, the Prime Minister, and was relieved of his office by royal ordinance in 1824. Under the Martignac Ministry, in 1828, he again was sent to Rome as ambassador, but this honour was really a shelving, and closed his public life. He has written his own political epitaph : ' Bourbonnien par honneur, royaliste par raison et par conviction, républicain par goût et par caractère.' Henceforward he devoted himself to literature. In 1826 he edited a complète édition of his works, for which a syndicate paid him half a million of francs. The famous Mémoires d 'Outre-tombe was an autobiography, intended to appear after his death. His ' eternal lack of pence ' made him mortgage it to another syndicate, which paid him a lump sum of a quarter of a million francs and an annuity of £480. It appeared prematurely as a feuilleton in the Presse. A complète édition in twelve volumes was published 1849-50. Chateaubriand died July 4, 1848, and was buried, in accordance with his will, on the rock of Grand-Bé, ofï Saint-Malo.
In addition to the works above noticed may be mentioned Les Natchez, a romance of the extinct American Indian tribe ; Essaisur laLittêrature anglaise; and a prose translation oiParadise Lost, which date from his résidence in England. He was elected to the Académie in 181 1, in succession to Chénier, but did not take his seat till 18 16.
As a supplément to Scherer's essay we may give some salient features from Faguet's portraiture (Etudes sur le XIX" Siècle).
His character. ' Une tristesse incurable est bien, en effet, le fond permanent de son caractère. Une jeune Anglaise lui disait à Londres, vers 1795 : " You carry your heart in a sling." ' Il a porté son cœur en écharpe toute sa vie.'
Pride is at the bottom of this deep-rooted melancholy. He writes : ' I hâve seen Washington and Buonaparte ; no human form will dazzle me (m'étonnera).' Instead of ' I was born in the same year as Napoléon,' he writes, ' In the year of my birth there was born in Corsica,' &c.
But for his wit he would hâve been ridiculous. ' D'un imbécile
l'orgueil fait un sot. Chateaubriand fut sauvé de la vanité mesquine parce qu'il avait de l'esprit.' And he had a pretty wit, as appears eminently in a part of the Natchez, imitated from the Lettres Persanes, and reminding us of Voltaire's romances [the part where the Indian Sachem Chactas visits Paris]. It is this devouring pride that makes him say of action, of love, of glory : ' A quoi bon ? ' Eudore in the Martyrs, Chactas, René, are ail variations on the same thème.
His gênerai ideas. For him, as for Hamlet, the time was out of joint, ' et bien vite il rompt en visière avec elle.' Even his earliest essay on révolutions is a revolt against the optimistic philosophy of the eighteenth century. There is no such thing as progress. Ail past history has been a see-saw, and the future will resemble the past. It was a revolt against the ideas of his time that made Chateaubriand in 1795 a sceptic in politics and a sceptic in morals, and such he remained to the end of the chapter. It was his artistic tempérament that attracted him to Christianity. Beautés de la religion chrétienne was the original title of the Génie. The work was a counterblast to the Encyclopedists, a démonstration that Christianity was not a vulgar superstition, but there is the same underlying pessimism as in the Révolutions. In politics he is an aristocrat, but his main quarrel with democracy is that it weakens a nation in its foreign relations. His idéal is an intelligent despotism.
In his political philosophy, his morals, and his religion, there is little profundity. He proves that Christianity is beautiful, but he is not concerned, like Pascal, to prove that it is essential, or, like Bossuet, that it is true.
In his revolt against the eighteenth century Chateaubriand was no less breaking with the literary traditions of the seventeenth century. Voltaire followed the tradition of Ronsard and his school, while Ronsard modelled himself on the Latin and Greek classics. Thus the protest of Chateaubriand was against imitators of imitators, writers who were at two removes from nature. He rejects ancient mythology as a dégradation of nature ; he admires, it is true, the poetry of Homer and Virgil, but insists that it is inferior to the poetry of the Bible; the Stoic virtue of Corneille's heroes pales before the humility of Christian martyrs. That Corneille, Racine, or even Voltaire, were great, he does not deny, but his explanation is that they were better than their theory, that they infused into their pagan heroes their own Christian virtues.
The marvellous is an intégral part of the pagan epic. Chateaubriand holds that the mysteries of the Christian religion can supply, and more than supply, the place of heathen mythology. This may be true in an âge of faith, it is true for Dante and for
Milton, but for an âge which has ceased to believe in miracles, and for Chateaubriand himself, who was Christian only by sentiment, it was a risky experiment. The modem Christian poet must show us heaven and hell only subjectively — as they reveal themselves in his characters.
His genius. Chateaubriand has the two qualities that go to the making of a poet, sensitiveness (sensibilité) and imagination, but he possesses the former gift in a higher degree. He is acutely sensitive to ail impressions, but he is an absolute egoist. Thus he is an ardent lover, but he loves only to be loved. ' Il ne se donne jamais. Il se prête avec prodigalité.' In his romances and poems, no less than in his memoirs, he is the central hero. This egotism was compatible with an almost boundless imagination. He can conceive himself as the anima mundi, and interpret the soûl of désert solitudes or project himself into the distant past. As he says somewhere, ' Une épopée doit renfermer l'univers,' and, as he makes René say in the prairie, ' Il me semblait que j'aurais la puissance de créer des mondes.' He enlarged the borders of literature, showing that beauty was not confined to one country or to one âge. His predecessors had painted from models, he painted straight from nature.
But he has the defect of his qualities. He sees and can portray himself in René, in Chactas, in Eudore, but his heroines, Atala, Céluta, Cymodocée, Villéda, and ail his secondary characters, are shadowy and unconvincing. This defect is not apparent in René, a single-hero romance, but in the Martyrs it is glaring.
The plan or plot (composition) of his works, from an artistic point of view, is admirable, as in the Natcbez and the Itinéraire, but contemptible in the Essai, considered as a philosophie treatise. The Martyrs was planned as a thesis ; it is nothing but a poem, and that is its making.
In spite of thèse grave defects, ail Chateaubriand is worth reading, and there are four or five incomparable volumes— René, Atala, the Récit d' Eudore in the Martyrs, the pictures of religious life in the Génie du Christianisme ; Sparta, Athens, Jérusalem in the Itinéraire ; and lastly the Natchez, the most natural and varied of ail his works.
His style. The real Chateaubriand is seen in his second manner, that of the Natchez, René, Atala, and the Itinéraire. ' Eclat, nombre et harmonie, voilà de quoi il est fait avant tout.' He has the artist's eye, that seizes on some characteristic détail, which brings the object into full relief — the Roman centurion patrolling before the stacked arms, ' en balançant son cep de vigne ' ; the Arab patriarch haranguing his tribesmen seated round the camp fire, with the camels tethered in an outer ring. ' Quelques têtes
de chameaux s'avançaient au-dessus de la troupe et se dessinaient dans l'ombre.'
By nombre is meant rhythmical prose, and Plato, Cicero, and Bossuet are quoted as the three masters of rhythm. Chateaubriand rediscovered this secret of prose composition, almost lost since Bossuet. By harmonie is meant the power of evoking by the magie of words some scène or phase of nature. Thus of moonlight on the prairie, ' sa lumière gris perle descendait sur la cime indéterminée des forêts.'
Conclusion. Chateaubriand is the chief landmark in theliterary history of France since the Pléiade. He ends a literary évolution of nearly three centuries, and inaugurâtes a new movement which will last long.
Ail Lamartine, ail Vigny, Victor Hugo's first manner, George Sand's first manner, part of Musset, the greater part of Flaubert, are derived from him, and it was by reading him that Thierry discovered the art of the modem historian. ' Il est l'homme qui a renouvelé l'imagination française.'
Page 33. 1. 8. je ne m' explique pas, &c. Theexplanationis very simple, and may be given in the form of an apologue. It is told of Jowett that when he was on his deathbed he was visited by an old friend and pupil, an eminent statesman, who said to him, ' You hâve known ail the distinguished men of the day. Tell me, Master, whom you would put in the first class.' The Master replied, ' There are no great men now,' and the statesman went away sorrowful.
1. 26. la statue dans la poussière. An allusion to the fall of Sejanus. Cf. Juvenal, Sat. x. 58 ' descendunt statuae restemque sequuntur ' (the statues topple down and are dragged at the rope's end).
Page 34. 1. 16. événements . . . œuvres. The results of his environment, not the expression of his original and créative genius.
1. 19. le dédoubler, ' to split him in two,' ' to dissect him.'
1. 27. Marengo. Hère Napoléon defeated the Austrians, June 14, 1800, and became master of Italy.
1. 28. on se reprenait à quelque chose, ' interest in life was reviving.'
1. 32. Madame de Staël, née Necker, the famous authoress. The habitués of her salon in 1802 were Mme de Récamier, Mme Visconti, Count Louis de Narbonne, and its shining light was Benjamin Constant. The First Consul, who had no love for femmes d'esprit, closed her salon by a decree of exile.
Madame Récamier, née Julie Bernard (1777-1849). Her salon at l'Abbaye-au-Bois was a shrine where the most dis-
tinguished intellects of France adored the goddess of their affections, chief among them Chateaubriand. ' On y restait plongé dans une demi-obscurité ; on parlait à voix basse ; une occupation suffisait aux habitués : regarder, admirer, adorer.'
1. 33. Madamejoseph Bonaparte, née Julie Clary, wife of Napoléon's elder brother, first king of Naples, and then king of Spain.
1. 37. Madame de Beau-mont. Of her salon in the Rue Neuvedu-Luxembourg, Sainte-Beuve writes : ' Le petit salon de Mme de Beaumont, à peine éclairé, nullement célèbre, fréquenté seulement de cinq ou six fidèles qui s'y réunissaient chaque soir, offrit tout alors ; c'était la jeunesse, la liberté, le mouvement, l'esprit nouveau comprenant le passé et le réconciliant avec l'avenir.'
Mme de Beaumont, a daughter of M. de Montmorin, the statesman, was the most devoted of Chateaubriand's women friends, followed him to Italy, and died in his arms, November 4,
Page 35. Lu. La duchesse de Duras, wife of the Duc de Duras, first gentleman of the king's chamber under Louis XVIII. She was the author of Ourika and Edouard, sentimental novels in the style of Paul et Virginie.
1. 12. Pasquier, 1767-1862. His father fell a victim during the Reign of Terror, and he himself barely escaped the same fate. He began his public life in 1806 as a member of the Council of State ; was Prefect of Police under Napoléon ; offered his services to the Bourbons in 18 14, and served under each government, and in nearly every ministry up to the révolution of 1848, so that he was known as V Inévitable.
1. 13. Guéneau de Mussy, 1776-1834. A French publicist ; Secretary of the University in 18 15. A friend of Fontanes, who nominated him Inspector-General andCouncillor of State. Wrote in the Mercure and Journal des Débats.
1. 16. Chénedollé, 1769-1833. Sainte-Beuve says of his Etudes: 'Ce volume forme véritablement l'anneau de transition de l'ancien genre avec la manière des générations poétiques nouvelles.' In other words, he formed a link between Delille and Lamartine. He was patronized by Mme de Staël, with whom he stayed for two years at Coppet, and who pronounced his poetry ' haute comme les cèdres du Liban,' and an intimate friend of Chateaubriand for a brief period, when the two exiles returned at the same time to Paris. He was an admirer of English poetry, and many of his poems are unacknowledged translations from Byron, Moore, &c.
1, 21, M, Mole, 1781-1855. Like Pasquier he saw his father
executed under the Révolution, and was himself pardoned only on account of his youth. Introduced to Napoléon by Fontanes in 1806 as a promising young writer, he quickly made his way and entered the cabinet when he was barely thirty. ' Monarchiste par tempérament plus encore que par conviction, il acceptait, d'ailleurs, les gouvernements comme des faits, les servait sans grand amour, les voyait tomber avec indifférence et se tournait vers les nouveaux pour en tirer parti.'
1. 25. d'une instruction superficielle. He was admitted to the Académie in 1840, on the strength of an early political work, Essais de morale et de politique.
1. 32. Fontanes, 1757-1821, attracted attention by a poem, La Forêt de Navarre, written in his twenty-first year. This was sustained by other poetical works, including a translation of Pope's Essay on Man. He was in Lyons when it was besieged in 1790, and provoked the wrath of the Convention by drawing up a pétition for mercy, which was presented by the inhabitants after its fall. Returning to Paris after 9 Thermidor, he founded the Mercure. Napoléon enlisted him in his service, and appointed him Président of the Corps Législatif. In 1808 he was made Grand Master of the University, and in 18 12 was raised to the Senate. He was an admirable host, kept open house, and his dinners and réceptions were known as the choicest in Paris. To Chateaubriand he was a very Mentor, moderating his passions and pruning his periods.
Page 36. 1. 2. Villemain, 1790-1870, inaugurated the school of comparative criticism. He was as good a classical scholar as the old génération of critics, and he was besides thoroughly acquainted with modem European literature. His Tableau de la Littérature au XVIIIe Siècle is still a standard work. See essay on Sainte-Beuve, p. 123, 1. 35.
1. 21. Joubert, 1754-1824, known to us solely by the Pensées collected from his MS. and published by Chateaubriand, fourteen years after his death, and a fuller édition of the Pensées, including letters published by his nephew, M. Raynal. He read everything and published nothing. For a full and even too generous appréciation of Joubert, see Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism.
1. 32. par un mot. He described himself as tormented by the ambition of putting a book into a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word.
1. 35. subtil. Joubert says himself : ' Souvent on ne peut éviter de passer par le subtil pour s'élever et arriver au sublime, comme pour monter aux cieux il faut passer par les nuées.'
Page 37. 1. 2. qui lui est propre. Sainte-Beuve sums him up : ' Enfin, pour tout dire, il a de la singularité et de V humeur individuelle dans ses jugements. ... Il a une manière qui fait qu'il ne dit rien, absolument rien, comme un autre.'
1. 3. difficile, ' fastidious.' A number of the epithets in this paragraph are hard nuts for the translator to crack. We may supply a few hints. Spiritualiste : the English équivalent has been degraded, or, some would say, specialized, in meaning ; ' spiritual-minded ' has a too narrow sectarian connotation ; ' deeply religious ' is nearer the mark. Fin implies at once the sharpness and the polish of a needle, keenness of wit and delicacy of taste ; it is hopeless to search for an exact English équivalent. Délicat is not ' délicate ', but ' dainty.' Précieux : ' euphuist ' is the literary équivalent in English.
1. 8. novateur, Sec. So Sainte-Beuve, ' M. Joubert n'est pas un classique, mais un moderne.'
1. 24. René is a Werther touched with Christianity, and Chateaubriand, if we may adapt Matthew Arnold's phrase on Byron, 'through the désert bore the pageant of a bleeding heart.' For Amélie, the heroine of the romance, it is said that his sister Lucile served as model. Sainte-Beuve calls her ' un génie-femme '.
1. 37. la paix d'Amiens: between France and England, Spain, and Holland, signed March 25-27, 1802.
Page 38. 1. 2. concordat. The first concordat was concluded between Napoléon and Pope Pius VII, July, 1801, by which the First Consul was made virtually head of the Catholic Church in France, bishops receiving their nominations from him and their investiture from the Pope.
The first Bill presented to the Corps Législatif in an extraordinary session was a confirmation of the concordat. On Easter Day, April 18, a solemn Te Deum was sung at Notre- Dame to celebrate at once the peace and the restoration of public worship.
Sainte-Beuve describes graphically the year that preceded the publication of the Génie : ' St. Denis was abandoned ; the moment had not yet come for Napoléon to remember that he would need a tomb. A favourite pienic of the day was to visit the ruins of monasteries and churches that were being demolished.' 1. 22. Deux perspectives de la nature form chapter xii of the Génie, a seascape and a landscape. Two sentences may be quoted as giving the motif of the two. ' Dans ces nuits où, suspendu entre les astres et l'Océan, j'avais l'immensité sur ma tête et l'immensité sous mes pieds.'. . . ' Dans ces régions sauvages l'âme se plaît à s'enfoncer dans un océan de forêts, à planer sur
le gouffre des cataractes, à méditer au bord des lacs et des fleuves, et, pour ainsi dire, se trouver seul avec Dieu ' (this scène is near the Falls of Niagara).
Page 40. 1. 1. /' Institut. See Introduction. Chateaubriand refused to make any changes in his introductory discours, which offended the conservative susceptibilities of the Forty.
1. 5. si la convenance faisait défaut, ' if it showed a lack of literary propriety.'
1. 11. passionneV opinion, 'stirs and impresses public opinion.' 1. 20. les Débats. In 1824, after the successful war in Spain, Villèle, in order to raise money to pay the indemnity, promised to the émigrés, of a milliard (£40,000,000), proposed a conversion of funds and a lowering of the rate of interest. The measure was carried by the Commons, but defeated by the Peers. Chateaubriand, who was strongly opposed to the measure, was dismissed by Louis XVIII, and in the Journal des Débats espoused the cause of the fallen Ministers, and attacked Villèle so violently that the government in self-defence re-established the censure of the Press. In a political satire of the day Villèle is made to say : —
La Chambre a, par mes soins, accordé sans scandale Un large milliard à la faim féodale.
Rothschild a fait jaillir de mon cerveau pensant Sur les débris du cinq l'illustre trois pour cent.
Chateaubriand received his congé on June 5, 1824. The comment of the Journal des Débats ran thus : ' This is the second time that Monsieur de Chateaubriand has been dismissed. He was dismissed in 1816 from his Ministry of State for having attacked in his immortal work, La Monarchie selon la charte, the famous ordinance of September 5, which dissolved la chambre introuvable of 18 15 ; MM. Villèle and Corbière were then simple deputies, leaders of the royalist opposition, and it was for undertaking their defence that Monsieur de Chateaubriand became the victim of ministerial wrath. Now in 1824, when thèse same gentlemen are Ministers, he is dismissed by them for keeping silence.'
1. 23. Decazes. Called upon by Louis XVIII to form a ministry in 18 18, he took himself le portefeuille de l 'intérieur (the Home Office), and afterwards became Président of Council. He was unpopular in the country, and at each annual élection (a fifth of the Chamber retired each year) an increasing number of Libérais was returned. An accusation of complicity in the assassination of the Duc de Berri, though wholly unfounded, was the coup de
grâce, and in 1820 he resigned, and accepted as a solatium the embassy of London.
1. 28. la révolution de Juillet.. Chateaubriand ma de one appearance in the Chamber of Peers, to plead for the Duc de Bordeaux and utter a protest against the proclamation of Louis-Philippe. He refused to take the oath of allegiance, and handed in his résignation.
Page 41. Lu. Mémoires d'outre-tombe. It is curious to compare the very différent judgements passed on this work by the two leading English historians of French literature. Professor Saintsbury calls it ' affectedly-named, but admirable ; an autobiography which, though marred by some of his peculiarities, contains much of his most brilliant writing.' Professor Dowden writes : ' Its egotism, its vanity, its malicious wit, its fierce reprisais on those whom the author regarded as his enemies, its many beauties, its brilliance of style, make it an exposure of ail that was worst and much of what was best in his character and genius.'
Page 42. 1. 10. au Rhin. To Strasbourg, which was the headquarters of the émigrés. He tells us that he picked up by chance a fragment of an English newspaper with the headline ' Flight of the King '.
1. 17. jeter en prison. In 1832 he was condemned to a short imprisonment for an offence against the Press law.
1. 36. Lamennais, 1782-1854, began as an Ultramontane and ended as a Freethinker. In 1840 he was condemned to a year's imprisonment for a pamphlet, Le Pays et le Gouvernement. The book hère referred to is Paroles d'un Croyant, 1834, which was put on the Index, and straightway became famous throughout Europe.
Page 43. 1. 25. l'ordonnance du 5 septembre. See note to p. 40, 1. 20.
I.30. solidaire du plus odieux despotisme. An active partner in despotism of Ferdinand VII. The first act of Ferdinand after his deliverance by the French army, October 3, 1823, was a batch of wholesale exécutions.
Page 44. 1. 10. Prague. After the July Révolution Charles X took up his abode first at Holyrood, then at Prague.
1. 23. n'était pas madame de Chateaubriand. He married, in 1792, Mlle de Lavigne, the daughter of a naval officer, and a bosom friend of his sister, who arranged the match. He writes himself of his marriage in his grandiose style : ' Chez moi l'homme publique est inébranlable, l'homme privé est à la merci de
quiconque veut s'emparer de lui.' She had, he tells us, a dot of nearly half a million francs, and (what counted more with Chateaubriand) she admired his works, though she had never read two Unes of them.
I.32. Ce pieux voyage, Sic. Chateaubriand left Paris July 13, 1806, and was back in France May 3, 1807. The principal étapes were — Milan, Venice, Greece, the Archipelago, Anatolia, Constantinople, Rhodes, Jafïa, Bethlehem, Jérusalem, Egypt, Tunis, Spain. The inamorata referred to was Mme de Mouchy, for whose beaux yeux he deserted Mme de Custine.
Page 45. 1. 3. Von se passait. ' He took the liberty of employing thèse high-sounding phrases without debarring himself thereby from the use of equally fine language.'
1. 25. Et de trois ! ' Three différent reasons ! ' 1. 37. plus bonnement. There is no denying the charge that Chateaubriand did not stick to facts, and would, like the Paris correspondent of the Daily Telegrapb, hâve invented a full moon on occasion, but the letter quoted is hardly évidence. A man who writes to a friend, ' I'd hâve begged, borrowed, or stolen, to help you,' does not write himself down a thief.
More to the point is a criticism in the American Quarterly Review : ' A person capable of peopling the banks of the Mississippi with parrots, monkeys, and flamingoes, can never hâve been there.' His description of ' bears intoxicated with grapes and staggering on the boughs of elm-trees ' was a standing joke against him.
Page 46. 1. 18. Byron did not treat his putative father with due respect. In his Age of Bronze he wrote : ' There [at the Congress of Verona] Chateaubriand forms new books of martyrs,' and appends a note : ' Monsieur Chateaubriand, who has not forgotten the author in the minister, received a handsome compliment from a literary sovereign : "Ah ! Monsieur Chateaubriand, are you related to that Chateaubriand who — who — who has written something {écrit quelque chose !) ?" It is said that the author of Atala repented him for a moment of his legitimacy.'
Page 47. 1. 18. Lamartine. The Méditations poétiques, by which Lamartine leapt into sudden famé, appeared in his thirtyfirst year (1840). We may quote as a spécimen of his tender melancholy the last stanza of L'Automne :
La fleur tombe en livrant ses parfums au zéphire ; A la vie, au soleil, ce sont là ses adieux ; Moi, je meurs, et mon âme, au moment qu'elle expire, S'exhale comme un son triste et mélodieux.
Page 48. 1. 12. l'élégie passe, &c. This thesis is hardly tenable. The élégies of Bion on Moschus, Propertius on Cornelia, Lycidas, Adonais, Thyrsis, and Musset's A la Malibran, are no more perishable than the impersonal form of poetry with which they are hère contrasted.
Page 49. 1. 26. aussi savantes que celles de Lamennais. Savantes is not the epithet we should hâve expected. Lamennais is éloquent, imaginative, and metaphysical, as in his Esquisse d'une Philosophie, but he is the prophet, not the doctor.
I.28. Bossuet. The epithets apply pre-eminently toBossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1681), and to his Histoire des variations des Eglises protestantes (1688). There is no depth of thought, but both in method and style he is great.
Page 50. 1. 5. Etudes historiques, published in 183 1, sketches in the manner of Bossuet, the ruling idea being that Christian philosophy supplies the due to history. In the préface he tells us, ' I can say, like Herodotus, I write for the glory of my country, and because I hâve seen the sufïerings of mankind.'
1. 6. Histoire de la Littérature anglaise, published in 1836. The exact title is Essai sur la Littérature anglaise. It was written as an introduction to the translation of Paradise Lost. Chateaubriand's knowledge of English literature was superficial. He appréciâtes Shakespeare, but he speaks of Dower (not a misprint, for it is thrice repeated) as a contemporary of Chaucer. Of the Canterbury Taies, ail he has to say is that they are written in the form of the Decameron, and show the subservience of English to Italian literature ; of Burns, that he has not the verve of Désaugiers, and is not to be named in the same breath with Béranger.
1. 14. Ce poème. Les Martyrs, a prose epic as it has been called, was inspired mainly by Milton's Paradise Lost. The scène alternâtes between the pagan and the Christian world, between earth and heaven.
1. 33. Nul doute que le christianisme, &c. See Matthew Arnold's ' Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment ', in Essays in Criticism. Musset's famous couplet sums up the change :
Une immense espérance a traversé la terre, Malgré nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
(Hope like a rainbow arch has spanned this earth, We needs must lift our eyes to heaven.)
Page 51. Lu. Maistre: Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821). The champion of Catholic dogma and papal authority. The phrase occurs in the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg.
1. 15. les explications d1 Evhèmère. Euhemerus, a Greek writer, about b.c. 300. He rationalized Greek mythology. Zeus and Héraclès were actual kings and heroes magnifled by popular superstition. He gave the name to Euhemerism.
