Let us now be permitted to substitute our opinion to that of our predecessors.

According to us, it is more especially as a figure that Chateaubriand sheds lustre over his age. The greatness of his life appears before that of his talent; his name comes before his books. He is himself a human epic. He is visible from a great distance, and respect reaches him before admiration.

Hence, for a long time to come, perhaps, he will still be M. de Chateaubriand, before he is plain Chateaubriand. For a long time to come, perhaps, majesty will reign before force. Majesty that is his great and superb crime. Epic and dramatic genius, he wearies admiration.

He has innovated only by halves. His literature is the literature of the eighteenth century, attempered among the savages. The Incas had previously opened the way, and we recollect too well, perhaps, that Chactas has been at Versailles, and seen Racine's tragedies performed.

It is not with a little matter that Chateaubriand composes his landscapes. Poussin has given him lessons. He must have columns broken in half, moonlight, cinerary urns, and over and above all this, the "Genius of recollections seated pensive by his side."

This search after the grand leads him at times into excesses, against which one cannot be too cautiously on one's guard. I shall cite only as a single and signal example, this sunset: "The luminary, inflaming the vapours of the city, seemed to oscillate slowly in a golden fluid, like the pendulum of the clock of ages!" The extravagant poets of the sixteenth century could not have surpassed this.

"The action," he writes in the preface to the Martyrs, "is of little consequence to me; it is but a pretext for description." Why, alas! did Heaven throw La Harpe in his way, as well as M. de Fontanes, the French Siminole !

He is not of the same opinion as Voltaire, who said that good works were those which make readers weep most. "Genuine tears," says Chateaubriand, are those that fine poetry causes to be shed: there must be as much admiration

H

This unfortunate system

as grief mingled with them." appears even in Réné, at the moment when the brother of Amelie, who is thunderstruck by the avowal of a criminal passion, still finds presence of mind enough to round immediately the following period: "Chaste bride of Christ, receive my last embraces, through the chill of death and the depths of eternity, which already separate thee from thy brother!"

Majesty!-Chateaubriand sacrificed everything to it: accordingly, his genius, special and constant in its pomp, is not one of those that address themselves to all, such as Shakspeare, for example, the man of palaces and of taverns, of kings and of drunkards, great with the great, familiar with the little, forceful with each-Shakspeare, a god speaking the language of men; Chateaubriand, a man speaking the language of the gods. Chateaubriand called Hamlet that tragedy of lunatics. What would Shakspeare have called Moïse, that tragedy of Chateaubriand's?

As a poet, it must be confessed, Chateaubriand is null, or nearly so. With the exception of some fifty verses, I believe that he never made much account of his Pindaric baggage. How could it be otherwise, when we find him supporting himself on a poetic system so false as that which he develops in the following lines: "Poetry has its limits in the limits of the idiom in which it is written and sung: one may make verses different from Racine's, never better."

In my opinion, Chateaubriand exists more particularly in his prefaces, that is to say, almost out of his books, in his private letters, and, as we have already observed, in his political style;* in short, wherever he had not time to polish his phrases, where he forgets Aristotle, where he writes off-hand, or is himself in spite of himself.

For the time to come, he will exist chiefly in his Memoirs. Towards the close of life, an important transformation took place in his talent. I say important and curious. It was at

* In this line he has some startling bursts. In his attacks against the Terrorists, he calls them "builders with bones," and a little further on, "Manufacturers of corpses, grind death as you please, ye will never extract from it one germ of liberty!"

VOL. I.

D

sixty that the season of his youth arrived. On the brink of the grave this austere thinker, who, to a certainty, has never smiled, is suddenly seized with laughter, the loud laughter of Callot, Montaigne, Le Sage, and sometimes also of Voltaire. His Muse, issuing from some unknown Fountain of Youth, just now a goddess in purple robe, re-appears to us as a young damsel crowned with corn-flowers. She was Juno; she is now plain Lydia, or Camilla, or any other nymph that comes first.

The past work of Chateaubriand, a grand and harmonious whole, appears to me like a marble palace in the midst of a forest. All about it is enchantment and magnificence. Mysterious voices resound within, intoxicating perfumes fill the air without. Every window opens upon a scene of rich foliage, upon an extensive park, adorned with statues, upon a hill which bends beneath the vines. "Tis a very beautiful palace, only it is inclosed and imprisoned with iron railing; sentinels defend the approach to it all round at the distance of above half a league; and in order to get to it, you must have at least seven or eight quarters of nobility.

The posthumous work of Chateaubriand's, that is to say, his Memoirs, presents, indeed, if you must have it, the aspect of a palace, but not of marble; it is of plain stone. The cold splendour of Grecian architecture has given place to the original expansion of the fantasies of Gothic art. A tract of the forest has been felled, and on that side the eye penetrates into the swarming labyrinth of the streets of the city. The rebellious gates stand open, the guards have received different orders; and citizens, peasants, populace, women, those who are gentlemen and those who are but men, the man of science and the scholar, everybody, in short, enter freely. Lazarus himself is seated on the uppermost step of the porch.

The Martyrs may be compared to the gardens of the Tuileries, open to gentlemen of the bedchamber only; the Memoirs to the same garden, open to all without distinction. Are the gardens of the Tuileries less beautiful since the wearers of blouses have been admitted into them?

As it is impossible for me to foresee the moment of my death,—and as, at my age, the days accorded to man are but days of grace, or rather days of suffering,-I wish to enter upon some explanations.

On the 4th of next September, I shall have attained my seventy-eighth year. It is full time that I should prepare to leave a world which is leaving me, and from which I shall depart without regret.

The Memoirs, which this introduction will precede, are arranged in divisions corresponding with the natural divisions in the career of my life.

That sad necessity, which has always pressed heavily upon me, has forced me to sell my Memoirs. No one can form an idea of what I have suffered in being thus compelled, as it were, to mortgage my grave; but this last sacrifice was demanded by promises I had made, and it was due to the integrity of my character. A feeling, perhaps, partaking of weakness, caused me to regard these Memoirs as confidants, from which I was reluctant to part. My intention was to have bequeathed them to Madame de Chateaubriand. I wished it to be left to her choice either to publish, or to suppress them; their suppression would now be most in accordance with my own wishes.

Deeply do I regret that, before my departure from the world, I have not been able to meet with some one sufficiently rich and trustworthy to purchase the shares of the Society; and

not like that society, compelled to submit the work to the press as soon as my death-knell shall ring. Of the shareholders, some are my personal friends; others are kind individuals, who have endeavoured to be serviceable to me. The shares may possibly have been sold; or they may have been transferred to third parties of whom I have no knowledge, and with whom family interests must be paramount to every other consideration. It follows, therefore, that my life, in proportion as it may be prolonged, must operate as a disappointment, perhaps as an actual injury to those persons. In short, if these Memoirs were now my own property, I would either forbid their being printed, or I would retard their publication for the space of fifty years.

These Memoirs have been written at different dates, and in different countries, and I have consequently deemed it necessary to insert, at certain points, a few preliminary observations (avant propos) for the purpose of explaining the scenes by which I was surrounded, and the feelings which occupied me at the moment when the thread of my narrative was resumed. The varied circumstances of my life are, as it were, blended with each other :-in my moments of prosperity, I have spoken of the days of my misery; and in my days of tribulation, I have retraced my intervals of happiness. The scenes of my youth intermingling with those of my old age ;— the gravity of my years of experience, casting a shade over my years of levity;-the rays of my sun, from its dawning to its setting, crossing each other and mingling together, produce a sort of confusion, or I may perhaps say, a sort of undefinable unity. My cradle partakes of my tomb, and my tomb of my cradle;-my suffering becomes pleasure, and my pleasure pain ; and, after having read over my Memoirs, it appeared to me impossible to determine whether they were written in life's prime, or in hoary age.

I know not whether this jumble, the disorder of which I cannot now rectify, will please or displease. It is the result of the varying vicissitudes of my fate. The tempest has sometimes left me with no other writing-table than the plank saved from my shipwreck.