Part 2

The great constraint of young Chateaubriand's upbringing induced in him a wild longing to be free and his own master, while the perpetual surveillance under which he suffered created an overwhelming, misanthropic desire for solitude. When he ran alone down the stairs of the old manor-house, or went out with his gun, he felt all the passions boiling and seething within him in wild ecstasy at being able to dream and long unrestrainedly. Ill at ease in the society of others, he plunged when alone into dreams of happiness and ambition, the dreams of a poet. In this half-sensuous, half-spiritual dreaming and longing, he created the image of a supernaturally charming woman, a youthful queen, bedecked with flowers and jewels, whom he loved and by whom he was beloved in the balmy, moonlit nights of Naples or Sicily. To awake from these dreams and realise the insignificant little Breton that he was, awkward, unknown, poor and possibly without talent, was torture to him. The contrast between what he was and what he longed to be overwhelmed him.

He was at first intended for the navy, but his unconquerable aversion to discipline proved an insurmountable obstacle, and his thoughts turned to the Church, from which, however, a conviction of his unfitness for a life of renunciation made him draw back. In the depth of his despondency he attempted to commit suicide. An irrevocable family decision put an end to his vacillation; he was given a commission as sub-lieutenant in the army, and found the life to his liking. As a cadet of a noble family he was presented to Louis XVI., at whose court he witnessed the last glimmer of the old splendour and ceremony of royalty. Two years later the Revolution broke out, and in 1790 rank, titles, and feudal rights were abolished. Chateaubriand gave up his commission, and, as no occupation offered itself under the new order, or disorder, he conceived the fantastic plan of travelling to America to discover the North-West Passage. Without any of the requisite information, without interest or money, he was inevitably soon obliged to abandon this project. But if he did not find the North-West Passage, he did discover a new race, fresh conditions, and new scenery. In his early youth, after reading Rousseau, he had conceived the idea of writing the Epic of Primitive Man, a description of the ways of the savages of whom he knew nothing. Now he was upon their own soil, in their world, and though they were not as untouched by civilisation as he had imagined, it was not difficult to reconstruct their original condition. The first impression he received of them was undeniably a strange one. On the way from Albany to Niagara, when his guide led him for the first time into the virgin forest, he was seized by one of those transports of delight in his independence which he had felt in his early youth when he went hunting in Brittany. He wandered from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to himself: "Here are no roads, no towns, no monarchies, no republics, no men." Imagining himself to be alone in the forest, he suddenly came upon a score of half-naked, painted savages with ravens' feathers in their hair and rings in their noses, who--marvellous to relate!--were dancing quadrilles to the sounds of a violin played by a little powdered and frizzed Frenchman, once kitchen-boy to a French general, now retained as dancing-master by these savages for a consideration of beaver-skins and bear-hams. What a humiliating introduction to primitive life for a pupil of Rousseau! Subsequent impressions were, fortunately, simpler and more beautiful than this. Chateaubriand purchased clothes and weapons from the Indians, and lived their life for some weeks at least. He was presented to the Sachem, or chief, of the Onondagas (as Byron at a later period was presented to Ali Pasha); he rode through the country, coming here and there upon little European houses, with their pianos and mirrors, close to the huts of the Iroquois; he saw the Falls of Niagara; and in two charming Florida girls found the models for his famous characters, Atala and Celuta.

It was in America that Chateaubriand planned his two brilliant short tales, _Atala_ and _René_, and also the long, somewhat slovenly work of which they form part, _Les Natchez_, a great romance dealing with the destruction of an Indian tribe in its struggle with the whites. _Atala_ was the first to be completed. After a brief stay in France, where he arrived in January 1792, recalled by the news of the fall of the monarchy and the dangerous position of Louis XVI., he again emigrated, this time to London. He made the first rough drafts of _Atala_ and _René_ sitting under the trees in Kensington Gardens, and when he joined the emigrant army on the Rhine, his knapsack contained more manuscript than linen. _Atala_ was revised during the halts of the army, and repacked in his knapsack when the march was resumed, his comrades teasing him by tearing the protruding leaves. In the action in which he was wounded in the thigh by a splinter of shell, _Atala_ proved the means of saving his life, for two spent bullets glanced off his knapsack. He arrived at Brussels after the destruction of the emigrant army, wounded, emaciated, and ill with fever; his brother, with wife and father-in-law, having meanwhile perished on the scaffold in Paris. His mother and two sisters, of whom Lucile was one, had been imprisoned for a time after his flight. In London, in 1797, he published his _Essai historique sur les Revolutions_, which was written in a comparatively liberal and, as regards religion, a distinctly sceptical spirit. It was the death of his mother, he tells us, which led him back to Christianity, but the reactionary spirit of the times probably contributed quite as much to his change of attitude, and when he returned to France in 1800, after Bonaparte had quelled the Revolution, he carried with him his great work, _Le Génie du Christianisme_, in which _René_ was included, and the publication of which coincided with Bonaparte's restoration of Christian worship in France. The book harmonised too well with the plans of the First Consul not to bring its author into favour with that autocrat; Chateaubriand, however, broke with his government after the judicial murder of the Duc d'Enghien in 1804.

These are the principal incidents in the youthful career of the man who became famous in 1800 as the author of _Atala_. His character was even more remarkable than his career. High-spirited, ambitious, vain, and shy, perpetually wavering in his faith in his own powers, he was not only endowed with the self-consciousness of genius, but with an egotism which ignored with absolute indifference all that did not immediately concern himself. He came too late into the world, and was educated under too peculiar circumstances, to have faith in the Revolution or the eighteenth century philosophy which partly inspired it. He came into the world too soon to make acquaintance with the science of the nineteenth century, and through it to win a new faith and a new standpoint. He therefore became a kind of Nihilist in the service of the past, a spirit who, as he repeatedly observes, believed in nothing. He adds, when he remembers to do so, "except religion"; but a man is, according to his nature, either a believer or a sceptic, and the idea that it is possible to be a believer in the matter of religion when one believes in nothing else, is a mere delusion, to which the half-educated are specially liable.

Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ are full of the sort of tirade on the vanity of name and fame which we so often meet with in Byron. There is undoubtedly a good deal of affectation in these outbreaks, but they nevertheless betray genuine ennui and persistent melancholy.

"Unable to believe in anything except religion, I am distrustful of all else.... The trivial and ridiculous side of things is always the first to show itself to me. In reality neither great geniuses nor great deeds exist for me.... In politics the warmth of my conviction does not outlast my speech or pamphlet.... In the whole history of the world I do not know a fame that could tempt me. If the greatest honour in the world lay at my feet and I had but to stoop and take it up, I would not take the trouble. If I had been my own creator, I should probably have made myself a woman, out of passion for the sex; or if I had chosen to be a man, I would first of all have bestowed beauty upon myself; then, to provide against ennui, my worst enemy, I would have been a great but unknown artist, using my talent for myself alone. If we set aside all humbug and examine into what it is that gives life real worth, we find only two things of value, religion in combination with talent, and love in combination with youth, that is to say the future and the present; all the rest is not worth the trouble of thinking about.... I have no belief in anything except religion. If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my staff or sceptre? I should have been equally weary of glory and genius, work and rest, prosperity and adversity. Everything irks me. I drag my weariness painfully after me all day long, and yawn my life away (_et je vais partout bâillant ma vie_)."[1]

How much passion had he not wasted upon fantastic imaginings and poetic dreams before he was reduced to this utter boredom! In _Atala_ the passion still wells up like a hot spring, and its spray stings and scalds.

The old Indian, Chactas, tells the story of his youth to a young Frenchman to whom Chateaubriand has given his own second name, René. Chactas, taken captive by a hostile tribe, is condemned to death upon the pyre. The daughter of the chief of the tribe takes a fancy to him and approaches the place where he lies bound. He mistakes her for the maiden whose part it is to solace the prisoner in the last hour before the consummation of the death sentence; but her intention is to release, not to console. He conceives a sudden passion for her, and entreats her to fly with him and be his; she refuses, and, delayed by her opposition, he is recaptured. He is already adorned for the pyre, crowned with flowers, his face painted blue and red, and beads attached to his ears, when Atala delivers him for the second time and escapes with him. The greater part of the book describes this flight, Chactas's desire, and the mingling of passion and reserve in Atala which makes her constantly vacillate between resistance and surrender. Her behaviour is explained when she tells Chactas that her mother, who was seduced by a white man, had her baptized and made her swear to remain unwed. In her anguish at the vow and her despair of being able to keep it, she takes poison, and dies in her lover's arms, comforted by the old missionary in whose hut the pair have taken shelter.

A full impression of the burning passion and lyrical exaltation of the book can only be gained by reading it, nor can we obtain any idea from descriptions and quotations of the power with which the wonderful scenery is described. It is an easy matter, however, to show how much and how instinctively Chateaubriand relied upon a mingling of the terrible with the erotic to obtain his effects. In the principal love scene we have not only a lavish musical accompaniment of the rattle of snakes, the howling of wolves, the roaring of bears and jaguars, but also a storm which shatters the trees, and impenetrable darkness, torn by flash upon flash of the lightning which finally sets fire to the forest. Round about the lovers the pines are blazing like wedding torches, and Atala is about to yield when a warning flash strikes the ground at her feet. It is after this she takes poison, and the burning passion of her last words to Chactas are in harmony with the conflagration of the forest:

"What torture to see thee at my side, far from all mankind, in these profound solitudes, and to feel an invincible barrier between thee and me! To pass my life at thy feet, to wait upon thee as thy slave, to prepare thy repast and thy couch in some forgotten corner of the universe would have been my supreme happiness. This bliss I had actually attained to, but could not enjoy. What plans have I not planned! what dreams have I not dreamed! Sometimes, looking upon thee, I have been tempted to form desires as wild as they were guilty. I have sometimes wished that thou and I were the only living creatures on earth; sometimes, conscious of a divinity which arrested my horrible transports, I have wished that divinity annihilated, that, clasped in thy arms, I might fall from abyss to abyss amid the ruins of God and the world."

Remarkable as these outbursts of irresistible passion are, and novel as is the scenery which throws them into relief, we feel that both would have been impossible if Rousseau had never lived, and if his literary work had not been carried on by another and greater intellect of another nationality.

[1] _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_, vol. i. p. 207-451; vol. ii. p. 129.

II

ROUSSEAU

Rousseau's chief work as an imaginative writer is _La Nouvelle Héloïse_.

The novelty of the book lay, in the first instance, in the fact that it gave the death-blow to gallantry, and, consequently, to the theory of the French classical period on the subject of the emotions. This theory was that all noble, fine emotions, and chief among them love, were the products of civilisation. It is obvious enough that a certain degree of civilisation was necessary before such a sentiment as love could arise. Until they wore womanly garb women did not exist, but only females, and until there were women there was no love. From this perfectly correct idea had resulted (in the pre-Rousseau period) the belief that the veiling of passion ennobled it and made it worthy. The more it could be shrouded in circumlocutions, hints, and suggestions, the less coarse it was. The morality and the literature of that period were the products of social culture, a culture confined to the highest circles. We need but read Marivaux's plays to find literary evidence of the extent to which courtly formality and refined sentiment were preferred to nature and passion. Marivaux's lovers are always each other's equals in culture, and, what is of still greater importance, in rank. We never find, as in the dramas of our century, the aristocratic lady who loves a man of lower social station, nor such a character, for instance, as Ruy Blas, the lackey who finds favour in the eyes of a Queen. In Marivaux, if a gentleman is disguised as a lackey, or a young lady as a waiting-maid, they always divine each other immediately in spite of their disguise. Their conversation is an incessant pursuit and flight, advance and retreat; it is full of ambiguities and hints and evasions, masked confessions and suppressed sighs, love-sickness expressed in a becomingly conventional manner. In Rousseau's eyes these mannerisms are as ridiculous as they are artificial. He prefers love, like everything else, in its natural state, and to him love in its natural state is a violent, irresistible passion. In his books we are very far removed from those scenes in Marivaux in which the kneeling lover never forgets to preserve a graceful attitude while pressing the tips of a glove to his lips. For all his chivalry and virtue, St. Preux is an electric battery charged with passion; the first kiss in the Grove of Clarens produces the shock, the conflagration of a thunderbolt; and when Julie, bending towards St. Preux and kissing him, swoons away, it is no coquettish faint of the days of the periwig, but the effect of the overwhelming might of passion upon a young and healthy child of nature.

The second novelty in the book is the inequality in station of the hero and heroine. Julie is the daughter of a nobleman, St. Preux is a poor tutor, a plebeian. Here, as in the _Sorrows of Werther_, the passion of love is connected with the equality-loving plebeian's determination to make a name for himself. This is no chance connection, for passion creates equality, whereas love in fashionable society has a tendency to develop into gallantry.

A third significant feature in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ is that, just as we have passion in place of gallantry and inequality of station in place of similarity of rank, we have also the moral conviction of the sanctity of marriage in place of that honour grounded on aristocratic pride and self-respect, which stood for virtue in fashionable literature. This word, Virtue, little in vogue until now, became with Rousseau and his school a watchword which was in perfect harmony with their other watchword, Nature; for to Rousseau virtue was a natural condition. Following the example of society, French literature had been making merry at the expense of marriage; Rousseau, therefore, defied the spirit of the times by writing a book in its honour. His heroine returns the passion of her lover, but marries another, to whom she remains faithful. Here, as in _Werther_, the lover proper loses the maiden, who is wedded to a Monsieur Wolmar (the Albert of _Werther_ and the Edward of Kierkegaard's _Diary of a Seducer_), a man as irreproachable as he is uninteresting. The moral conviction which is vindicated and glorified in Rousseau as Virtue, is the same as that which in Chateaubriand, under the influence of the religious reaction, takes the form of a binding religious vow.

Note, finally, that the watchword Nature is to be taken in its literal meaning. For the first time, out of England, we have the genuine feeling for nature in fiction, superseding love-making in drawing-rooms and gardens. Under Louis XV. and the Regency, people passed their time (in real life as well as in books) in boudoirs, where light conversation and light morals were in place. The rooms, like the verses of Voltaire's _Poesies Fugitives_, were adorned with endless multitudes of Cupids and Graces. In the gardens goat-footed Pans embraced slender white nymphs by the side of artificial fountains. In their pictures of the _fêtes-champêtres_ of those days, Watteau and the less-gifted Boucher and Lancret have preserved for us these gardens with their shady walks and quiet corners, where courtly gentlemen and gay ladies, clad as Pierrots and Columbines, coquetted and whispered, conscious of being on the right stage for such free and frivolous masquerading. Turn from these to the scenery of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_.

Rousseau's statue stands at this day on a little island lying in the Lake of Geneva, at its narrow southern extremity. The spot is one of the loveliest in the world. Pass the island and cross another bridge and you see the Rhone rush, impetuous and foaming white, out of the lake. A few steps further and you can see its white stream joined by the grey snow waters of the Arve. The rivers flow side by side, each retaining its colour. Far away between two mighty ridges you discern the white snow-caps of Mont Blanc. Towards evening, as those mountain ridges darken, the snows of Mont Blanc glow like pale roses. It would seem as if Nature had gathered together all her contrasts here. Even in the warmest season as you approach the grey, foaming mountain torrents, the air becomes icy cold. In the course of a short stroll you may feel the heat of summer in some sheltered nook, and a few steps farther on encounter harsh autumn with its cutting winds. One can form no conception of the cool freshness and strength of the air here. Only the sun and the brilliant shimmer of the stars at night recall the south. The latter are not the bright points in a distant sky which they appear to be in the north; they seem to hang loose in the air; and the air itself, as one inhales it, feels like a strong massive substance.

Sail up the lake to Vevey. Behind that town the Alpine slopes are clad with the trees and vineyards of southern lands. On the farther side of the lake rise great walls of blue rock, solemn and threatening, and the sun plays in light and shade down the mountain-side. No waters are so blue as those of the Lake of Geneva. As you sail down it on a beautiful summer day, it shines like blue satin shot with gold. It is a fairyland, a dreamland, where mighty mountains cast their blue-black shadows down into the azure waters and a brilliant sun saturates the air with colour. Sail a little farther up the lake to Montreux, where the rock fortress of Chillon, the prison in which mediæval cruelty collected all its instruments of torture, projects into the water. This witness to wild and terrible passions lies in the midst of scenery which may well be called enchanted. The lake is more open here, the view less peculiar, and the climate more southern than at Vevey. One sees sky, Alps, and lake, all melting together in a mysterious blue light. From Montreux walk to Clärens and pause in the chestnut grove which is still called the _Bosquet de Julie_. It is situated on a height from which you look down upon Montreux, lying sheltered and hidden in its bay; look round and you will understand how it was from this spot that the love of nature spread throughout Europe. We are standing in Rousseau's country, upon the scene of his _Nouvelle Héloïse_. This was the scenery which supplanted that of the Regency.

It is not difficult to trace the relation between Chateaubriand's first work and Rousseau's famous romance. First and foremost Chateaubriand inherits the love of nature; his strongly coloured pictures of North American scenery have their progenitors in those descriptions of Swiss nature. But there is this difference between Rousseau's and Chateaubriand's landscapes, that the latter's are much more dependent upon the mood of the hero and heroine. If stormy passions rage in their hearts, the storm rages without also; the characters are blent with their natural surroundings, which they permeate with their passions and moods in a manner quite unknown to the literature of the eighteenth century.

The hero and heroine themselves, being savages, have even less suspicion of gallantry about them, are far more the children of nature than Rousseau's lovers; and although expressions occur again and again which are absurd coming from the lips of a Red Indian, yet many of the love-speeches have a touch of primitive poetry in them, a genus of literature which was entirely unknown in France in the eighteenth century. Take for an example the warrior's love-song beginning with the words: "I will fly so fast that before the day has touched the mountain tops I shall have come to my white dove among the oaks of the forest. I have bound a necklace of beads about her neck--three red beads to speak of my love, three violet beads to speak of my fear, and three blue beads to speak my hope," &c.

The inequality of position between Rousseau's lovers, so typical of that revolutionary time, finds its equivalent in _Atala_ in the difference of religion, a matter which in the new century, with its reaction against Voltaire, acquires new importance. The religious reaction also explains the fact that a Catholic vow to remain unwed plays the same rôle in Chateaubriand's story which the dictate of morality does in Rousseau's. We have, then, progress in colouring, in the development of character, in the comprehension of the spirit and racial peculiarities of an uncivilised people, but we have also a deliberate step backward, in the substitution of Catholic conventual piety, with its unnatural renunciation, for morality. Passion is whetted, so to speak, on the altar of Catholicism, and its unnatural suppression creates that unnatural frenzy which causes Atala, the charming young Indian girl, who has so long held the desire of her heathen lover in check, to die with a wish on her lips for the annihilation of God and the world, if at that price she can be clasped for ever to his heart.

III

WERTHER