A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century

And the remarkable interconnection of his works in fiction.

The mere reader of Chateaubriand's novels generally begins with Atala and René, and not uncommonly stops there. In a certain sense this reader is wise in his generation. But he will never understand his author as a novelist if he does so; and his appreciation of the books or booklets themselves will be very incomplete. They are both not unfrequently spoken of as detached episodes of the Génie du Christianisme; and so they are, in the illustrative sense. They are actually, and in the purely constitutive way, episodes of another book, Les Natchez, while this book itself is also a novel "after a sort." The author's work in the kind is completed by the later Les Martyrs, which has nothing to do, in persons or time, with the others, being occupied with the end of the third century, while they deal (throwing back a little in Atala) with the beginning of the eighteenth. But this also is an illustrative companion or reinforcement of the Génie. With that book the whole body of Chateaubriand's fiction22 is thus directly connected; and the entire collection, not a little supported by the Voyages, constitutes a deliberate "literary offensive," intended to counter-work the proceedings of the philosophes, though with aid drawn from one of them – Rousseau, – and only secondarily designed to provide pure novel-interest. If this is forgotten, the student will find himself at sea without a rudder; and the mere reader will be in danger of exaggerating very greatly, because he does not in the least understand, the faults just referred to, and of failing altogether to appreciate the real success and merit of the work as judged on that only criterion, "Has the author done what he meant to do, and done it well, on the lines he chose?" Of course, if our reader says, "I don't care about all this, I merely want to be amused and interested," one cannot prevent him. He had, in fact, as was hinted just now, better read nothing but Atala and René, if not, indeed, Atala only, immense as is the literary importance of its companion. But in a history of the novel one is entitled to hope, at any rate to wish, for a somewhat better kind of customer or client.

According to Chateaubriand's own account, when he quitted England after his not altogether cheerful experiences there as an almost penniless émigré, he left behind him, in the charge of his landlady, exactly 2383 folio pages of MSS. enclosed in a trunk, and (by a combination of merit on the custodian's part and luck on his own) recovered them fifteen years afterwards, Atala, René, and a few other fragments having alone accompanied him. These were published independently, the Génie following. Les Martyrs was a later composition altogether, while Les Natchez, the matrix of both the shorter stories, and included, as one supposes, in the 2383 waifs, was partly rewritten and wholly published later still. A body of fiction of such a singular character is, as has been said, not altogether easy to treat; but, without much change in the method usually pursued in this History, we may perhaps do best by first giving a brief argument of the various contents and then taking up the censure, in no evil sense, of the whole.

Atala.

Atala is short and almost entirely to the point. The heroine is a half-breed girl with a Spanish father and for mother an Indian of some rank in her tribe, who has subsequently married a benevolent chief. She is regarded as a native princess, and succeeds in rescuing from the usual torture and death, and fleeing with, a captive chief of another "nation." This is Chactas, important in René and also in the Natchez framework. They direct their flight northwards to the French settlements (it is late seventeenth or early eighteenth century throughout), and of course fall in love with each other. But Atala's mother, a Christian, has, in the tumult of her early misfortunes, vowed her daughter's virginity or death; and when, just before the crucial moment, a missionary opportunely or inopportunely occurs, Atala has already taken poison, with the object, it would appear, not so much of preventing as of avenging, of her own free will, a breach of the vow. The rest of the story is supplied by the vain attempts of the good father to save her, his evangelising efforts towards the pair, and the sorrows of Chactas after his beloved's death. The piece, of course, shows that exaggerated and somewhat morbid pathos of circumstance which is the common form of the early romantic efforts, whether in England, Germany, or France. But the pathos is pathos; the unfamiliar scenery, unlike that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (to whom, of course, Chateaubriand is much indebted, though he had actually seen what he describes), is not overdone, and suits the action and characters very well indeed. Chactas here is the best of all the "noble savages," and (what hardly any other of them is) positively good. Atala is really tragic and really gracious. The missionary stands to other fictitious, and perhaps some real, missionaries very much as Chactas does to other savages of story, if not of life. The proportion of the whole is good, and in the humble opinion of the present critic it is by far Chateaubriand's best thing in all perhaps but mere writing.

And even in this it is bad to beat, in him or out of him. The small space forbids mere surplusage of description, and the plot – as all plots should do, but, alas! as few succeed in doing – acts as a bellows to kindle the flame and intensify the heat of something far better than description itself – passionate character. There are many fine things – mixed, no doubt, with others not so fine – in the tempestuous scene of the death of Atala, which should have been the conclusion of the story. But this, in its own way, seems to me little short of magnificent:

"I implored you to fly; and yet I knew I should die if you were not with me. I longed for the shadow of the forest; and yet I feared to be with you in a desert place. Ah! if the cost had only been that of quitting parents, friends, country! if – terrible as it is to say it – there had been nothing at stake but the loss of my own soul.23 But, O my mother! thy shade was always there – thy shade reproaching me with the torments it would suffer. I heard thy complaints; I saw the flames of Hell ready to consume thee. My nights were dry places full of ghosts; my days were desolate; the dew of the evening dried up as it touched my burning skin. I opened my lips to the breeze; and the breeze, instead of cooling me, was itself set aglow by the fire of my breath. What torment, Chactas! to see you always near me, far from all other humankind in the deepest solitude, and yet to feel that between us there was an insuperable barrier! To pass my life at your feet, to serve you as a slave, to bring you food and lay your couch in some secret corner of the universe, would have been for me supremest happiness; and this happiness was within my touch, yet I could not enjoy it. Of what plans did I not dream? What vision did not arise from this sad heart? Sometimes, as I gazed on you, I went so far as to form desires as mad as they were guilty: sometimes I could have wished that there were no living creatures on earth but you and me; sometimes, feeling that there was a divinity mocking my wicked transports, I could have wished that divinity annihilated, if only, locked in your arms, I might have sunk from abyss to abyss with the ruins of God and of the world. Even now – shall I say it? – even now, when eternity waits to engulf me, when I am about to appear before the inexorable Judge – at the very moment when my mother may be rejoicing to see my virginity devour my life – even now, by a terrible contradiction, I carry with me the regret that I have not been yours!"

At this let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it looks back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great love-poetry since, while as something that is even greater than literature – life – it carries us up to the highest Heaven and down to the nethermost Hell.

René.

René 24 has greater fame and no doubt exercised far more influence; indeed in this respect Atala could not do much, for it is not the eternal, but the temporal, which "influences." But, in the same humble opinion, it is extremely inferior. The French Werther25 (for the attempt to rival Goethe on his own lines is hardly, if at all, veiled) is a younger son of a gentle family in France, whose father dies. He lives for a time with an elder brother, who seems to be "more kin than kind," and a sister Amélie, to whom he is fondly, but fraternally, attached. René has begun the trick of disappointment early, and, after a time, determines to travel, fancying when he leaves home that his sister is actually glad to get rid of him. Of course it is a case of coelum non animum. When he returns he is half-surprised but (for him) wholly glad to be at first warmly welcomed by Amélie; but after a little while she leaves him, takes the veil, and lets him know at the last moment that it is because her affection for him is more than sisterly, that this was the reason of her apparent joy when he left her, and that association with him is too much for her passion.26 She makes an exemplary nun in a sea-side convent, and dies early of disease caught while nursing others. He, his wretchedness and hatred of life reaching their acme, exiles himself to Louisiana, and gets himself adopted by the tribe of the Natchez, where Chactas is a (though not the) chief.

Difference between its importance and its merit.

Now, of course, if we are content to take a bill and write down Byron and Lamartine, Senancour and Jacopo Ortis (otherwise Ugo Foscolo), Musset, Matthew Arnold, and tutti quanti, as debtors to René, we give the tale or episode a historical value which cannot be denied; while its positive aesthetic quality, though it may vary very much in different estimates, cannot be regarded as merely worthless. Also, once more, there is real pathos, especially as far as Amélie is concerned, though the entire unexpectedness of the revelation of her fatal passion, and the absolute lack of any details as to its origin, rise, and circumstances, injure sympathy to some extent. But that sympathy, as far as the present writer is concerned, fails altogether with regard to René himself. If his melancholy were traceable to mutual passion of the forbidden kind, or if it had arisen from the stunning effect of the revelation thereof on his sister's side, there would be no difficulty. But, though these circumstances may to some extent accentuate, they have nothing to do with causing the weltschmerz or selbst-schmerz, or whatever it is to be called, of this not very heroic hero. Nor has Chateaubriand taken the trouble – which Goethe, with his more critical sense of art, did take – to make René go through the whole course of the Preacher, or great part of it, before discovering that all was vanity. He is merely, from the beginning, a young gentleman affected with mental jaundice, who cannot or will not discover or take psychological calomel enough to cure him. It does not seem in the least likely that if Amélie had been content to live with him as merely "in all good, all honour" a loving and comforting sister, he would have really been able to say, like Geraldine in Coleridge's original draft of Christabel, "I'm better now."

He is, in fact, what Werther is not – though his own followers to a large extent are – mainly if not merely a Sulky Young Man: and one cannot help imagining that if, in pretty early days, some one had been good enough to apply to him that Herb Pantagruelion, in form not exactly of a halter but of a rope's end, with which O'Brien cured Peter Simple's mal de mer, his mal du siècle would have been cured likewise.

Of course it is possible for any one to say, "You are a Philistine and a Vulgarian. You wish to regard life through a horse-collar," etc., etc. But these reproaches would leave my withers quite ungalled. I think Ecclesiastes one of the very greatest books in the world's literature, and Hamlet the greatest play, with the possible exception of the Agamemnon. It is the abysmal sadness quite as much as the furor arduus of Lucretius that makes me think him the mightiest of Latin poets. I would not give the mystical melancholy of certain poems of Donne's for half a hundred of the liveliest love-songs of the time, and could extend the list page-long and more if it would not savour of ostentation in more ways than one. But mere temperamental ἑωλοκρασια or κραιπαλη (next-day nausea), without even the exaltation of a previous orgy to ransom it, – mere spleen and sulks and naughty-childishness, – seem to me not great things at all. You may not be able to help your spleen, but you can "cook" it; you may have qualm and headache, but in work of some sort, warlike or peaceful, there is always small beer, or brandy and soda (with even, if necessary, capsicum or bromide), for the ailment. The Renés who can do nothing but sulk, except when they blunder themselves and make other people uncomfortable in attempting to do something, who "never do a [manly] thing and never say a [kind] one," are, I confess, not to my taste.27

Les Natchez.

Both these stories, as will have been seen, have a distinctly religious element; in fact, a distinctly religious purpose. The larger novel-romance of which they form episodes, as well as its later and greater successor, Les Martyrs, increase the element in both cases, the purpose in the latter; but one of the means by which this increase is effected has certainly lost – whether it may or may not ever recover – its attraction, except to a student of literary history who is well out of his novitiate. Such a person should see at once that Chateaubriand's elaborate adoption, from Tasso and Milton, of the system of interspersed scenes of Divine and diabolic conclaves and interferences with the story, is an important, if not a wholly happy, instance of that general Romantic reversion to earlier literary devices, and even atmospheres, of which the still rather enigmatic personage who rests enisled off Saint-Malo was so great an apostle. And it was probably effectual for its time. Classicists could not quarrel with it, for it had its precedents, indeed its origin, in Homer and Virgil; Romanticists (of that less exclusive class who admitted the Renaissance as well as the Dark and Middle Ages) could not but welcome it for its great modern defenders and examples. I cannot say that I enjoy it: but I can tolerate it, and there is no doubt at all, odd as it may seem to the merely twentieth-century reader, that it did something to revive the half-extinct religiosity which had been starved and poisoned in the later days of the ancien régime, forcibly suppressed under the Republic, and only officially licensed by the Napoleonic system. In Les Martyrs it has even a certain "grace of congruity,"28 but in regard to Les Natchez, with which we are for the moment concerned, almost enough (with an example or two to come presently) has been said about it.

The book, as a whole, suffers, unquestionably and considerably, from the results of two defects in its author. He was not born, as Scott was a little later, to get the historical novel at last into full life and activity; and it would not be unfair to question whether he was a born novelist at all, though he had not a few of the qualifications necessary to the kind, and exercised, coming as and when he did, an immense influence upon it. The subject is too obscure. Its only original vates, Charlevoix, though always a respectable name to persons of some acquaintance with literature and history, has never been much more, either in France or in England. The French, unluckily for themselves, never took much interest in their transatlantic possessions while they had them; and their dealings with the Indians then, and ours afterwards, and those of the Americans since, have never been exactly of the kind that give on both sides a subject such as may be found in all mediaeval and most Renaissance matters; in the Fronde; in the English Civil War; in the great struggles of France and England from 1688 to 1815; in the Jacobite risings; in La Vendée; and in other historical periods and provinces too many to mention. On the other hand, the abstract "noble savage" is a faded object of exhausted engouement, than which there are few things less exhilarating. The Indian ingénu (a very different one from Voltaire's) Outougamiz and his ingénue Mila are rather nice; but Celuta (the ill-fated girl who loves René and whom he marries, because in a sort of way he cannot help it) is an eminent example of that helpless kind of quiet misfortune the unprofitableness of which Mr. Arnold has confessed and registered in a famous passage. Chactas maintains a respectable amount of interest, and his visit to the court of Louis XIV. takes very fair rank among a well-known group of things of which it is not Philistine to speak as old-fashioned, because they never possessed much attraction, except as being new- or regular-fashioned. But the villain Ondouré has almost as little of the fire of Hell as of that of Heaven, and his paramour and accomplice Akansie carries very little "conviction" with her. In short, the merit of the book, besides the faint one of having been the original framework of Atala and René, is almost limited to its atmosphere, and the alterative qualities thereof – things now in a way ancient history – requiring even a considerable dose of the not-universally-possessed historic sense to discern and appreciate them.

Outside the "Histoire de Chactas" (which might, like Atala and René themselves, have been isolated with great advantage), and excepting likewise the passages concerning Outougamiz and Mila – which possess, in considerable measure and gracious fashion, what some call the "idyllic" quality – I have found it, on more than one attempt, difficult to take much interest in Les Natchez, not merely for the reasons already given, but chiefly owing to them. René's appearances (and he is generally in background or foreground) serve better than anything in any other book, perhaps, to explain and justify the old notion that accidia29 of his kind is not only a fault in the individual, but a positive ill omen and nuisance30 to others. Neither in the Indian characters (with the exceptions named) nor among the French and creole does one find relief: and when one passes from them to the "machinery" parts – where, for instance, a "perverse couple," Satan and La Renommée (not the ship that Trunnion took), embark on a journey in a car with winged horses – it must be an odd taste which finds things improved. In Greek verse, in Latin verse, or even in Milton's English one could stand Night, docile to the orders of Satan, condescending to deflect a hatchet which is whistling unpleasantly close to René's ear, not that he may be benefited, but preserved for more sufferings. In comparatively plain French prose – the qualification is intentional, as will be seen a little later – with a scene and time barely two hundred years off now and not a hundred then, though in a way unfamiliar – the thing won't do. "Time," at the orders of the Prince of Darkness, cutting down trees to make a stockade for the Natchez in the eighteenth century, alas! contributes again the touch of weak allegory, in neither case helping the effect; while, although the plot is by no means badly evolved, the want of interest in the characters renders it ineffective.

Les Martyrs.

The defects of Les Martyrs31 are fewer in number and less in degree, while its merits are far more than proportionally greater and more numerous. Needing less historical reinforcement, it enjoys much more. Les Natchez is almost the last, certainly the last important novel of savage life, as distinguished from "boys' books" about savages. Les Martyrs is the first of a line of remarkable if not always successful classical novels from Lockhart's Valerius to Gissing's Veranilda. It has nothing really in common with the kind of classical story which lasted from Télémaque to Belisarius and later. And what is more, it is perhaps better than any of its followers except Kingsley's Hypatia, which is admittedly of a mixed kind – a nineteenth-century novel, with events, scenes, and décor of the fifth century. If it has not the spectacular and popular appeal of The Last Days of Pompeii, it escapes, as that does not, the main drawback of almost all the others – the "classical-dictionary" element: and if, on the other, its author knew less about Christianity than Cardinals Wiseman and Newman, he knew more about lay "humans" than the authors of Fabiola and Callista.

It is probably unnecessary to point out at any great length that some of the drawbacks of Les Natchez disappear almost automatically in Les Martyrs. The supernatural machinery is, on the hypothesis and at the time of the book, strictly congruous and proper; while, as a matter of fact, it is in proportion rather less than more used. The time and events – those of the persecution under Diocletian – are familiar, interesting, and, in a French term for which we have no exact equivalent, dignes. There is no sulky spider of a René crawling about the piece; and though history is a little strained to provide incidents,32 "that's not much," and they are not in themselves improbable in any bad sense or degree. Moreover, the classical-dictionary element, which, as has been said, is so awkward to handle, is, at least after the beginning, not too much drawn upon.

The book, in its later modern editions, is preceded not merely by several Prefaces, but by an Examen in the old fashion, and fortified by those elaborate citation-notes33 from authorities ancient and modern which were a mania at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which sometimes divert and sometimes enrage more modern readers in work so different as Lalla Rookh and The Pursuits of Literature, while they provided at the time material for immortal jokes in such other work as the Anti-Jacobin poems. In the Prefaces Chateaubriand discusses the prose epic, and puts himself, quite unnecessarily, under the protection of Télémaque: in the Examen he deals systematically with the objections, religious, moral, and literary, which had been made against the earlier editions of the book. But these things are now little more than curiosities for the student, though they retain some general historical importance.

The story.

The book starts (after an "Invocation," proper to its scheme but perhaps not specially attractive "to us") with an account of the household of Demodocus, a Homerid of Chios, who in Diocletian's earlier and unpersecuting days, after living happily but for too short a time in Crete with his wife Epicharis, loses her, though she leaves him one little daughter, Cymodocée, born in the sacred woods of Mount Ida itself. Demodocus is only too glad to accept an invitation to become high priest of a new Temple of Homer in Messenia, on the slopes of another mountain, less, but not so much less, famous, Ithome. Cymodocée becomes very beautiful, and receives, but rejects, the addresses of Hierocles, proconsul of Achaia, and a favourite of Galerius. One day, worshipping in the forest at a solitary Altar of the Nymphs, she meets a young stranger whom (she is of course still a pagan) she mistakes for Endymion, but who talks Christianity to her, and reveals himself as Eudore, son of Lasthenes. As it turns out, her father knows this person, who has the renown of a distinguished soldier.

From this almost any one who has read a few thousand novels – almost any intelligent person who has read a few hundred – can lay out the probable plot. Love of Eudore and Cymodocée; conversion of the latter; jealousy and intrigues of Hierocles; adventures past and future of Eudore; transfer of scene to Rome; prevalence of Galerius over Diocletian; persecution, martyrdom, and supernatural triumph. But the "fillings up" are not banal; and the book is well worth reading from divers points of view. In the earliest part there is a little too much Homer,34 naturally enough perhaps. The ancient world changed slowly, and we know that at this particular time Greeks (if not also Romans) rather played at archaising manners. Still, it is probably not quite safe to take the memorable, if not very resultful, journey in which Telemachus was, rather undeservedly, so lucky as to see Helen and drink Nepenthe35 and to reproduce it with guide- and etiquette-book exactness, c. A. D. 300. Yet this is, as has been said, very natural; and it arouses many pleasant reminiscences.