The North British review

No man has exercised over modern French literature so great an influence as Châteaubriand. After the catastrophe of '89-'93, by which every tradition was destroyed, every edifice overthrown, every connecting link snapped, whether in politics or religion, in morals, society, or literature,-after this period of confusion and barbarism, nothing remained to France but the love of movement, noise, and conquest, and a thoroughly perverted taste in the arts. Never, probably, was the taste of a nation so completely— in some respects, so irretrievably-vitiated; for there are points on which to this day no improvement is observable. From the hour when to the love of the impure and the distorted, was added the love of the glaring and the gaudy,-when the clatter and show of the Empire succeeded to the would-be Roman and Greek Republicanism of the Revolutionary days (both equally false), from that hour the appreciative powers of the public mind in France were diverted from their natural bent, the genius of the people and of the language was changed, and changed violently; and it is to be remarked, that, since that time, the works that, in literature, for instance, have been most famous, and have had the best right to be so, have not been in strict conformity with the tendencies of the French character, or with the genius of the French tongue, the perfect development whereof is visibly marked in the illustrious writers of the age of Louis XIV.

From 1789 to 1816 the "literature of France" would be a word almost devoid of sense, were it not for Châteaubriand. He alone prevents the chain from breaking asunder, which connects the

VOL. XXIX. NO. LVII.

literary epoch of Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, and the men of the 18th century, with the epoch made glorious from 1814 until now, by so many writers and thinkers of great power and elevation. We would, however, merely register here the undeniable extent of Châteaubriand's influence, not its quality. We are disposed to esteem the quality of that influence an exceedingly bad one. We are disposed to believe that all that was so eminently deteriorating in the power exercised by Jean Jacques Rousseau over the youth of his time,-all that was so essentially weakening and corrupt, so conducive to selfishness, vanity, and above all, to self-glorification,-as revived and brought into fresh activity by Châteaubriand. René, the very worst, and therefore the most indisputably influential of all Châteaubriand's productions, has far more affinity with the genius of Jean Jacques than with anything else in the whole world of literature,—far more even than with Werther, to which it has often been erroneously likened; while Valentine, Jacques, and the greater part of Madame Sand's immoral creations, derive more directly their origin from René than from any other source that can be assigned to them. It is scarcely possible to find a writer of fiction in France who does not owe a large portion of his talent and of his individuality to Châteaubriand. It is difficult, indeed, to conceive of the existence of a great number of the dreamers in prose and poetry of contemporary France, if you abstract for a moment, in your imagination, the fact of the pre-existence of René. Of this most immoral, but finely-written work, there is a trace in almost every writer of the class we have named. Hugo escaped it, perhaps, rather more than the others; but Lamartine owes a large portion of what he is, both in prose and verse, to Châteaubriand; Madame Sand owes to him fully as much as she does to Rousseau, and even among the more serious students of history and of science during the Restoration, you recognise the involuntary submission to an influence that is not, we again repeat, in accordance with the genius of the language or of the race.

Châteaubriand is an individuality worth studying in other respects than in merely literary ones. He is, from a curious concourse of circumstances, in perpetual antagonism to Napoleon Bonaparte; and, perhaps for the very reason that there was at bottom a strong attraction of each towards the other, when the repulsion established itself, it was an invincibly violent one. When these two, who had at first seemed destined to act together, were definitively and irrevocably severed, they seemed to acknowledge the force of some law common to both, and in virtue of which they both hated each other in the same way. "Does Châteaubriand fancy I don't understand the meaning of his allusions?" exclaims the Emperor, after the publication of an

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