its worship. Each part, too, has the appearance of rigid analysis. Thus the second elaborately compares classical and Christian poetry, and closes with an antithetical study of the Bible and Homer. Each section, also, is analyzed. If the apologist is contrasting pagan and Christian character, he speaks first of husbands and wives, then of fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, priests, and warriors; and in every case he finds that the Christian author has refined and embellished the classic ideals. The true faith is also the more beautiful and the more sympathetic. But if this description applies to a great part of the "Genius," the author rises also at times to veritable theological dithyrambics, as when, for instance, he undertakes to prove the existence of God from the marvels of Nature; and some of his finest passages are descriptive panegyrics, such as the remarkable chapters on the Mass that open the concluding part, or the subsequent section on Christian missions, where the little story of “Atala" may have had its original place.

Such a book draws more from imagination than from reason, and appeals to the emotions more than to the sober sense of its readers. Here one is asked to consider" whether the divinities of paganism have poetically the superiority over the Christian divinities" (1. iv. ch. 4). Here foi (faith) is commended for its supposed connection with foyer (hearthstone); the three Graces are adduced to prove the Trinity, and teleology finds its reduction to the absurd in the migration of birds precisely at the time when they are convenient for human food, and in the assumption that "domestic animals are born with exactly enough instinct to be tamed." Yes, Chateaubriand will offer the constellation of the Southern Cross as a witness of

Christianity, and defend the celibacy of the clergy by Malthus' Law! And yet the student of literary evolution will perceive that it is just such a revindication. of the rights of sentiment that was a necessary condition of the revival of the personal forms of literature, and especially of lyric poetry. It is the spirit of the “Genius" that inspires the first utterances of Hugo and Lamartine. Chateaubriand supplements and continues the protest of Rousseau's "Savoyard Vicar" against the Gradgrind materialism of the Encyclopædists.

"René" had formed part of the "Genius;" but it had closer affiliations with "Atala" than with Christianity, and was reprinted separately in 1807, possibly, as has been suggested, to induce those to read it who would not read the " Génie," and those to read the Génie" who did not care to find " René " there. This mouthpiece of Chateaubriand's dilettante pessimism had been the supposed narrator of "Atala," and the scene is once more laid in the primeval forests of the Mississippi valley. Chactas reappears; and there is a mission priest, more human than Aubry, who speaks for Chateaubriand the Christian idealist, while René exhibits the blasé aristocrat, nursing his world-pain like another Werther.

This disconsolate young man had passed most of his boyhood" watching the fugitive clouds" and listening to the rain. He had a sister1 who presently turned nun, but natural inconstancy aided prejudice to divert him from a like design. He nursed the germs of melancholy amid the ruins of Greece and Italy. Modern civilization accentuated his idle ennui. He sought the gentle children of Nature, the Indians of

1 Obviously studied from Chateaubriand's own sister Lucile, who died in 1804.

French Louisiana, who, more sensible and happy than he, had let life slip by," seated tranquil beneath their oaks," their only melancholy an excess of bliss that they checked by a glance at heaven. Still, brief experience sufficed to convince him of his incompatibility even with this society; and he renounced all intercourse, save with Chactas and the priest, to whom he related his" secret sentiments" and the "languid struggles of his "Romanesque spirit" against the necessary evil of life.

"

It is these " secret sentiments," of which those of René's sort had always enough and to spare, that were the charm of "René," and the literary source and origin of the paralysis of the will nursed by vain dreams, that maladie du siècle that has sicklied o'er the thought of so many in France who seemed capable of better things, - of Lamartine, of De Vigny, and in another way of De Musset and the young George Sand. It blights the Joseph Delorme of Sainte-Beuve and the Antony of Dumas. It may be traced also, though masked by the stronger power of Byron, in the dramas of Victor Hugo.

This little tale of morbid, introspective pessimism struck a note that swayed the whole fabric of society by the responsive vibrations that it awakened. It did this because, though it was unnatural, it was genuine. The book was affected, but so were the man and the age. If René tells us that " people weary him by dint of loving him," the private correspondence of Chateaubriand is full of the same aristocratic melancholy, full of assurances that he is "quite blasé and indifferent to everything but religion," dragging dreamily his ennui with his days, and crying for some one to deliver him from the "insane impulse to live." That sigh of Job,

“My soul is fatigued with my life," is the burden and refrain of" Natchez."

Not

"Les Martyrs" exhibits the "Genius" applied to Romantic fiction. In a cadenced style and epic diction that need only rhyme and metre to make a poem, Chateaubriand has contrasted the morals, sacrifices, and ceremonial of pagan and Christian worship in the times of Diocletian. Here the reader may find "the language of Genesis beside that of the Odyssey," and see" the Jupiter of Homer beside the Jehovah of Milton." But Chateaubriand has fallen into the snare that is stretched for every historical novelist. only has he forced chronology and geography in his zeal to include the principal characters of the anteNicene church, but he has enlarged his scope so that he takes in the philosophes of the eighteenth century, and even the French Revolution. Julian the Apostate reaches the hand to Voltaire, and Homer to Volney. The result, as his most generous critic has admitted, is a grandiose failure, composite and artificial, original only when it gives up the vain attempt to imitate Dante and Milton, and abandons the religious epic for the historical novel. But even here the author staggers a little under the weight of his antiquarian lore. He seems intent on describing the whole of the then known world, from Rome to the Thebaid and from the Netherlands to Arcady; and in later editions he fortified the book with prefaces, analyses, and notes, that might find a more appropriate grave in the "Revue des questions historiques." In its day, however, the book was repeatedly reprinted, and critics still couple the name of its hero, Eudore, with Corneille's Polyeucte, to prove how narrowly false it is to exclude, with Boileau, "the terrible mysteries

of the Christian faith" from the realm of literary art.

The "Journey from Paris to Jerusalem" illustrates from another side the same combination of fiction and guide-book, of pseudo-Christian and crypto-pagan. Here the weary dilettante grows dejected at Troy, and discouraged over the past glories of Sparta and Athens, while he nurses his mind to a proper desolation for the ruins of Jerusalem, Egypt, and Carthage. His powers of natural description, always remarkable, are here at their height; and the sea proves a fruitful inspiration to his mournful muse; but even the best passages are marred by intrusive subjectivity, by what he calls "the secret and ineffable charms of a soul enjoying itself." The Journey Journey" is Chateaubriand's most cited work; but the citations are almost wholly confined to the objective part of the book, his descriptions of Nature and historical evocations.

"

This brings us to speak of one of the most important and enduring results of Chateaubriand's writing. He is the first recreator of the past, the inspirer of the modern popular historian. He first drew attention to the literary mine that lay hid in the middle ages and in Christian antiquity, treasures exploited almost too eagerly by the Romanticists. "Imagination," he had said, "is to erudition the scout that is always reconnoitring." In his hands history became poetry, revealing new possibilities to the student and new fields to literature. The exact studies of his predecessors may have contained the truth; it was reserved for this artist to make that truth live again. But Chateaubriand was also the founder of the modern descriptive school; and he was able to be this, because, as we have seen, he added to his love for the