Memoirs of Chateaubriand Volume II — Part I Book IX

Alloquar?

audiero nunquam tua facta loquentem?

Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior, Aspiciam posthac?

At certe semper amabo[248].

I have just taken leave of a friend, I am about to take leave of a mother: one has constantly to repeat the verses which Catullus addressed to his brother.

In our vale of tears, as in Hell, there is a strange, eternal wailing, which forms the accompaniment or the prevailing note of human lamentations; it is heard unceasingly, and it would continue when all other created sorrows had come to be silent.

A letter from Julie, which I received soon after that from Fontanes, confirmed my sad remark on my gradual isolation: Fontanes urged me to "work, to become illustrious;" my sister begged me to "give up writing:" one put glory before me, the other oblivion.

This train of thought is described in the story of Madame de Farcy; she had grown to hate literature, because she regarded it as one of the temptations of her life.

"SAINT-SERVAN, 1 _July_ 1798. "Dear, we have just lost the best of mothers: I grieve to inform you of this fatal blow.

When you cease to be the object of our solicitude, we shall have ceased to live.

If you knew how many tears your errors had caused our venerable mother to shed; how deplorable they appear to all who think and profess not only piety, but reason: if you knew this, perhaps it would help to open your eyes, to induce you to give up writing; and if Heaven, moved by our prayers, permitted us to meet again, you would find in the midst of us all the happiness one is allowed on earth; you would give us that happiness, for there is none for us so long as you are not with us and we have cause to be anxious as to your fate."

Ah, why did I not follow my sister's advice?

Why did I continue to write?

Had my age remained without my writings, would anything have been changed in the events and spirit of that age?

And so I had lost my mother; and so I had distressed the last hour of her life!

While she was drawing her last breath far from her last son, and praying for him, what was I doing in London?

Perhaps I was strolling in the cool morning air at the moment when the sweat of death covered my mother's forehead without having my hand to wipe it away!

[Sidenote: The _Génie du Christianisme.

_] The filial affection which I preserved for Madame de Chateaubriand was deep.

My childhood and youth were intimately linked with the memory of my mother.

The idea that I had poisoned the old days of the woman who bore me in her womb filled me with despair: I flung copies of the _Essai_ into the fire with horror, as the instrument of my crime;

had it been possible for me to destroy the whole work, I should have done so without hesitation.

I did not recover from my distress until the thought occurred to me of expiating my first work by means of a religious work: this was the origin of the _Génie du Christianisme.

_ * "My mother," I said, in the first preface to that work, "after being flung, at the age of seventy-two years, into dungeons where she saw part of her children die, expired at last on a pallet to which her misfortunes had reduced her.

The recollection of my errors cast a great bitterness over her last days; when dying, she charged one of my sisters to call me back to the religion in which I was brought up.

My sister acquainted me with my mother's last wish.

When the letter reached me across the sea, my sister herself was no more; she too had died from the effects of her imprisonment.

Those two voices from the tomb, that death which acted as death's interpreter impressed me.

I

became a Christian.

I did not yield, I admit, to great supernatural enlightenment: my conviction came from the heart; I wept and I believed."

* I exaggerated my fault: the _Essai_ was not an impious book, but a book of doubt, of sorrow.

Through the darkness of that book glides a ray of the Christian light that shone upon my cradle.

It needed no great effort to return from the scepticism of the _Essai_ to the certainty of the _Génie du Christianisme.

_ * When, after receiving the sad news of Madame de Chateaubriand's death, I resolved suddenly to change my course, the title of _Génie du Christianisme_, which I found on the spot, inspired me: I set to work;

I toiled with the ardour of a son building a mausoleum to his mother.

My materials were since long collected and rough-hewn by my previous studies.

I knew the works of the Fathers better than they are known in our times; I had even studied them in order to oppugn them, and having entered upon that road with bad intentions, instead of leaving it as a victor, I left it vanquished.

As to history properly so-called, I had occupied myself with it specially in composing the _Essai sur les Révolutions.

_ The Camden originals which I had lately examined had made me familiar with the manners and institutions of the Middle Ages.

Lastly, my terrible manuscript of the _Natchez_, in 2393 pages folio, contained all that I needed for the _Génie du Christianisme_ in the way of descriptions of nature; I was able to draw largely upon that source, as I had done for the _Essai_.

I wrote the first part of the _Génie du Christianisme.

_ Messrs. Dulau[249], who had become the booksellers of the French emigrant clergy, undertook the publication.

The first sheets of the first volume were printed.

The work thus begun in London in 1799 was completed only in Paris in 1802: see the different prefaces to the _Génie du Christianisme.

_ I was devoured by a sort of fever during the whole time of writing: no one will ever know what it means to carry at the same time in one's brain, in one's blood, and in one's soul, _Atala_ and _René_, and to combine with the painful child-birth of those fiery twins the labour of conception attending the other parts of the _Génie du Christianisme.

_ The memory of Charlotte penetrated and warmed all that, and to give me the finishing stroke, the first longing for fame inflamed my exalted imagination.

This longing came to me from filial affection: I wanted a great renown, so that it might rise till it reached my mother's dwelling-place, and that the angels might carry her my solemn expiation.

As one study leads to another, I could not occupy myself with my French scholia without taking note of the literature and men of the country in which I lived: I was drawn into these fresh researches.

My days and nights were spent in reading, in writing, in taking lessons in Hebrew from a learned priest, the Abbé Capelan, in consulting libraries and men of attainments, in roaming about the fields with my everlasting reveries, in paying and receiving visits.

If such things exist as retroactive and symptomatic effects of future events, I might have foreseen the bustle and uproar created by the book which was to make my name from the seething of my mind and the throbbing of my inner muse.

Reading aloud to others my first rough drafts helped to enlighten me.

Reading aloud is an excellent form of instruction, when one does not take the necessary compliments for gospel.

Provided an author be in earnest, he will soon feel, through the impression which he instinctively receives from the others, which are the weak places in his work, and especially whether that work is too long or too short, whether he keeps, does not reach, or exceeds the right dimensions.

[Sidenote: A letter from Panat.

] I have discovered a letter from the Chevalier de Panat on the readings from a work at that time so unknown.

The letter is charming: the dirty chevalier's positive and scoffing spirit did not seem susceptible of thus rubbing itself with poetry.

I have no hesitation in giving this letter, a document of my history, although it is stained from end to end with my praises, as though the sly author had taken pleasure in emptying his ink-pot over his epistle: "_Monday.

_ "Heavens, what an interesting reading I owed to your extreme kindness this morning!

Our religion had numbered among its defenders great geniuses, illustrious Fathers of the Church: those athletes had wielded with vigour all the arms of reasoning; incredulity was vanquished; but that was not enough: it was still necessary to show all the charms of that admirable religion; it was necessary to show how suited it is to the human heart and what magnificent pictures it offers to the imagination.

It is no longer a theologian in the school, it is the great painter and the man sensitive to impressions who open up a new horizon for themselves.

Your work was wanted, and you were called upon to write it.

Nature has eminently endowed you with the great qualities which this work requires: you belong to another age....

"Ah, if the truths of sentiment rank first in the order of nature, none will have proved better than yourself those of our religion; you will have confounded the unbelievers at the gate of the Temple and introduced delicate minds and sensible hearts into the sanctuaries.

You bring back to me those ancient philosophers who gave their lessons with their heads crowned with flowers, their hands filled with sweet perfumes.

This is a very feeble image of your suave, pure and classic mind.

"I congratulate myself daily on the happy circumstance which made me acquainted with you; I can never forget that it was Fontanes who did me that kindness; I shall love him for it the more, and my heart will never separate two names whom the same glory is bound to unite, if Providence re-opens to us the doors of our native land.

"CHEV.

DE PANAT."

The Abbé Delille also heard some fragments of the _Génie du Christianisme_ read.

He seemed surprised, and did me the honour, soon after, to put into verse the prose which had pleased him.

He naturalized my wild American flowers in his various French gardens, and put my somewhat hot wine to cool in the frigid water from his clear spring.

The unfinished edition of the _Génie du Christianisme_, commenced in London, was a little different, in the order of the contents, from the edition published in France.

The consular censure, which soon became imperial, showed itself very touchy on the subject of kings: their persons, their honour and their virtue were dear to it beforehand.

Already Fouché's police saw the white pigeon, the symbol of Bonaparte's candour and revolutionary innocence, descend from Heaven with the sacred phial.

The true believers who had taken part in the Republican processions of Lyons compelled me to cut out a chapter entitled the _Rois athées_, and to distribute paragraphs from it here and there in the body of the work.

* Before continuing these literary investigations I must interrupt them for a moment to take leave of my uncle de Bedée; alas, that means taking leave of the first joy of my life: _freno non remorante dies_[250]!

See the old sepulchres in the old crypts: themselves overcome by age, decrepit and without memory, having lost their epitaphs, they have forgotten the very names of those whose ashes they contain.

I had written to my uncle on the subject of my mother's death: he replied with a long letter containing some touching words of regret;

but three-quarters of his double folio sheet were devoted to my genealogy.

He begged me above all, when I should return to France, to look up the title-deeds of the "Bedée quartering," entrusted to my brother.

And so, to this venerable Emigrant, exile, ruin, the destruction of his kin, the sacrifice of Louis XVI.

alike failed to make the fact of the Revolution clear to him; nothing had happened, nothing come to pass; he had gone no farther than the States of Brittany and the Assembly of the Nobles.

This fixity of ideas in man is very striking in the midst and as it were in presence of the alteration of his body, the flight of his years, the loss of his relations and friends.

[Sidenote: Death of my uncle de Bedée. ] On his return from the Emigration, my uncle de Bedée went to live at Dinan, where he died, six leagues from Monchoix, without having seen it again.

My cousin Caroline[251], the oldest of my three cousins, still lives.

She has remained an old maid in spite of the formal requests for her hand made in her former youth.

She writes me letters, badly spelt, in which she addresses me in the second person singular, calls me "chevalier," and talks to me of our good time: _in illo tempore.

_ She was endowed with a pair of fine dark eyes and a comely figure; she danced like the Camargo[252], and she seems to recollect that I bore a fierce passion for her in secret.

I reply in the same tone, laying aside, in imitation of her, my years, my honours and my reputation: "Yes, dear Caroline, your chevalier," etc. It must be some six or seven lustres since we met: Heaven be praised for it, for God alone knows, if we came to embracing, what kind of figure we should cut in each other's eyes!

Sweet, patriarchal, innocent, creditable family friendship, your age is past!

We no longer cling to the soil by a multitude of blossoms, sprouts and roots; we are born and die singly nowadays.

The living are in haste to fling the deceased to Eternity, and to be rid of his corpse.

Of his friends, some go and await the coffin at the church, grumbling the while at being put out and disturbed in their habits;

others carry their devotion so far as to follow the funeral to the cemetery: the grave once filled up, all recollection is obliterated.

You will never return, O days of religion and affection, in which the son died in the same house, in the same arm-chair, by the same fireside where died his father and his grandfather before him, surrounded, as they had been, by weeping children and grandchildren, upon whom fell the last paternal blessing!

Farewell, my beloved uncle!

Farewell, family of my mother, which are disappearing like the other portion of my family!

Farewell, my cousin of days long past, who love me still as you loved me when we listened together to our kind aunt de Boistelleul's ballad of the Sparrow-hawk, or when you assisted at my release from my nurse's vow at the Abbey of Nazareth!

If you survive me, accept the share of gratitude and affection which I here bequeath to you.

Attach no belief to the false smile outlined on my lips in speaking of you: my eyes, I assure you, are full of tears.

* My studies correlative to the _Génie du Christianisme_ had gradually, as I have said, led me to make a more thorough examination of English literature.

When I took refuge in England in 1793, it became necessary for me to redress most of the judgments which I had drawn from the criticisms.

As regards the historians, Hume[253] was reputed a Tory and reactionary writer: he was accused, as was Gibbon, of over-loading the English language with gallicisms; people preferred his continuer, Smollett[254].

Gibbon[255], a philosopher during his lifetime, became a Christian on his death-bed, and in that capacity was duly convicted of being a sorry individual.

Robertson[256] was still spoken of, because he was dry.

[Sidenote: English literature.

] Where the poets were concerned, the "elegant extracts" served as a place of banishment for a few pieces by Dryden[257]; people refused to forgive Pope[258] for his verse, although they visited his house at Twickenham and cut chips from the weeping-willow planted by him and withered like his fame.

Blair[259] was looked upon as a tedious critic with a French style; he was placed far below Johnson[260].

As to the old _Spectator_[261], it was relegated to the lumber-room.

English political works have little interest for us.

The economic treatises are less stinted in their scope: their calculations on the wealth of nations, the employment of capital, the balance of trade, are applicable in part to the different European societies.

Burke[262] emerged from the national political individuality: by declaring himself opposed to the French Revolution, he dragged his country into the long road of hostilities which ended in the plains of Waterloo.

However, great figures remained.

One met with Milton and Shakespeare on every hand.

Did Montmorency[263], Byron[264], Sully[265], by turns French Ambassadors to the Courts of Elizabeth[266] and James I. [267], ever hear speak of a merry-andrew who acted in his own and other writers' farces?

Did they ever pronounce the name, so outlandish in French, of Shakespeare?

Did they suspect that there was here a glory before which their honours, pomps and ranks would become as nothing?

Well, the comedian who undertook the part of the Ghost in _Hamlet_ was the great spectre, the shade of the Middle Ages which rose over the world like the evening star, at the moment when the Middle Ages were at last descending among the dead: giant centuries which Dante[268] opened and Shakespeare closed.

In the Memorials of Whitelock[269], the contemporary of the singer of Paradise Lost, we read of "one Mr. Milton, a blind man, parliamentary secretary for Latin despatches."

Molière[270], the "stage-player," performed his Pourceaugnac in the same way that Shakespeare, the "buffoon," clowned his Falstaff.

Those veiled travellers, who come from time to time to sit at our board, are treated by us as ordinary guests; we remain unaware of their nature until the day of their disappearance.

On leaving the earth, they become transfigured, and say to us, as the angel from heaven said to Tobias: "I am one of the seven who stand before the Lord[271]."

But, though misunderstood by men on their passage, those divinities do not fail to recognise one another.

Milton asks: What needs my Shakespeare, for his honour'd bones, The labour of an age in piled stones[272]?

Michael Angelo[273], envying Dante's lot and genius, exclaims: Pur fuss'io tal...

Per l'aspro esilio suo con sua virtute Darci del mondo più felice stato.

Tasso celebrates Camoëns, as yet almost unknown, and acts as his "Fame."

Is there anything more admirable than the society of illustrious people revealing themselves, one to the other, by means of signs, greeting one another and communing with each other in a language understood by themselves alone?

[Sidenote: Shakespeare.

] Was Shakespeare lame, like Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott[274], and the Prayers, the daughters of Jupiter?

If he was so in fact, the "Boy" of Stratford, far from being ashamed of his infirmity, as was Childe Harold, is not afraid to remind one of his mistresses of it: So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite[275].

Shakespeare must have had many loves, if we were to count one for each sonnet.

The creator of Desdemona and Juliet grew old without ceasing to be in love.

Was the unknown woman to whom he addresses his charming verses proud and happy to be the object of Shakespeare's Sonnets?

It may be doubted: glory is to an old man what diamonds are to an old woman; they adorn, but cannot make her beautiful.

Says the English tragic poet to his mistress: No longer mourn for me when I am dead .

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Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe.

O, if, I say, you look upon this verse When I perhaps compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, But let your love even with my life decay[276].

Shakespeare loved, but believed no more in love than he believed in other things: a woman to him was a bird, a zephyr, a flower, a thing that charms and passes.

Through his indifference to, or ignorance of, his fame, through his condition, which set him without the pale of society and of a position to which he could not hope to attain, he seemed to have taken life as a light, unoccupied hour, a swift and gentle leisure.

Shakespeare, in his youth, met old monks driven from their cloister, who had seen Henry VIII.

, his reforms, his destructions of monasteries, his "fools," his wives, his mistresses, his headsmen.

When the poet departed from life, Charles I. was sixteen years of age.

Thus, with one hand, Shakespeare was able to touch the whitened heads once threatened by the sword of the second of the Tudors and, with the other, the brown head of the second of the Stuarts, destined to be laid low by the axe of the Parliamentarians.

Leaning upon those tragic brows, the great tragedian sank into the tomb; he filled the interval of the days in which he lived with his ghosts, his blind kings, his ambitious men punished, his unfortunate women, so as to join together, through analogous fictions, the realities of the past and of the future.

Shakespeare is of the number of the five or six writers who have sufficed for the needs and nutriment of thought: those parent geniuses seem to have brought forth and suckled all the others.

Homer impregnated antiquity: Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace, Virgil are his sons.

Dante engendered Modern Italy, from Petrarch to Tasso.

Rabelais created French literature: Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière descend from him.

England is all Shakespeare, and in these later days he has lent his language to Byron, his dialogue to Walter Scott.

Men often disown these supreme masters; they rebel against them; they reckon up their faults: they accuse them of tediousness, of length, of extravagance, of bad taste, what time they plunder them and deck themselves in their spoils; but they struggle in vain against their yoke.

Everything wears their colours; they have left their traces everywhere; they invent words and names which go to swell the general vocabulary of the nations; their expressions become proverbs, their fictitious characters change into real characters, with heirs and a lineage.

They open out horizons whence burst forth sheaves of light;

they sow ideas, the germs of a thousand others; they supply all the arts with imaginations, subjects, styles: their works are the mines or the bowels of the human mind.

These geniuses occupy the first rank; their vastness, their variety, their fruitfulness, their originality cause them to be accepted from the very first as laws, models, moulds, types of the various forms of intellect, even as there are four or five races of men issuing from one single stock, of which the others are only branches.

Let us take care how we insult the disorders into which these mighty beings sometimes fall: let us not imitate Ham, the accursed; let us not laugh if we see the sole and solitary mariner of the deep lying naked and asleep, in the shadow of the Ark resting upon the mountains of Armenia.

Let us respect that diluvial navigator, who recommenced the Creation after the flood-gates of Heaven were shut up: let us, as pious children, blessed by our father, modestly cover him with our cloak.

Shakespeare, in his lifetime, never thought of living after his life: what signifies to him to-day my hymn of admiration?

Admitting every supposition, reasoning from the truths or falsehoods with which the human mind is penetrated or imbued, what cares Shakespeare for a renown of which the sound cannot rise to where he is?

A Christian?

In the midst of eternal bliss, does he think of the nothingness of the world?

A deist?

Freed from the shades of matter, lost in the splendours of God, does he cast down a look upon the grain of sand over which he passed?

An atheist?

He sleeps the sleep without breathing or awakening which we call death.

Nothing therefore is vainer than glory beyond the tomb, unless it have kept friendship alive, unless it have been useful to virtue, helpful to misfortune, unless it be granted to us to rejoice in Heaven in a consoling, generous, liberating idea left behind by us upon earth.

* [Sidenote: Samuel Richardson.

] Novels, at the end of the last century, had been included in the general proscription.

Richardson[277] slept forgotten: his fellow-countrymen discovered in his style traces of the inferior society in which he had spent his life.

Fielding[278] maintained his success; Sterne[279], the purveyor of eccentricity, was out of date.

The _Vicar of Wakefield_ was still read[280].

If Richardson has no style, a question of which we foreigners are unable to judge, he will not live, because one lives only by style.

It is vain to rebel against this truth: the best-composed work, adorned with life-like portraits, filled with a thousand other perfections, is still-born if the style be wanting.

Style, and there are a thousand kinds, is not learnt; it is the gift of Heaven, it is talent.

But, if Richardson has only been forsaken because of certain homely turns of expression, insufferable to an elegant society, he may revive: the revolution which is being worked, in lowering the aristocracy and raising the middle classes, will render less apparent, or cause entirely to disappear, the traces of homespun habits and of an inferior language.

From _Clarissa_ and _Tom Jones_ sprang the two principal branches of the family of modern English novels: the novels of family pictures and domestic dramas, and the novels of adventure and pictures of general society.

After Richardson, the manners of the West End invaded the domain of fiction: the novels became filled with country-houses, lords and ladies, scenes at the waters, adventures at the races, the ball, the opera, Ranelagh, with a never-ending chit-chat and tittle-tattle.

The scene was rapidly changed to Italy; the lovers crossed the Alps amid terrible dangers and sorrows of the soul calculated to move lions: "the lion shed tears!"

A jargon of good company was adopted.

Of the thousands of novels which have flooded England since the last fifty years, two have kept their places: _Caleb Williams_[281] and the _Monk.

_ I did not see Godwin during my stay in London; but I twice met Lewis[282].

He was a young member of the House of Commons, very pleasant, with the air and manners of a Frenchman.

The works of Ann Radcliffe[283] are of a class apart Those of Mrs. Barbauld[284], Miss Edgeworth[285], Miss Burney[286], etc. , have a chance of living.

* "There should," says Montaigne, "be some correction appointed by the laws against foolish and unprofitable writers, as there is against vagabonds and loiterers; so should both my selfe and a hundred others of our people be banished....

Scribbling seemeth to be a symptome or passion of an irregular and licentious age[287]."

* [Sidenote: Sir Walter Scott.

] But these different schools of sedentary novelists, of novelists travelling by diligence or calash, of novelists of lakes and mountains, ruins and ghosts, of novelists of cities and drawing-rooms, have come to be lost in the new school of Walter Scott, even as poetry has precipitated itself in the steps of Lord Byron.

The illustrious painter of Scotland started his career in literature during my exile in London with his translation of Goethe's _Berlichingen.

_[288] He continued to make himself known by poetry, and ultimately the bent of his genius led him towards the novel.

He seems to me to have created a false manner: the romancer set himself to write historical romances, and the historian romantic histories.

If, in reading Walter Scott, I am sometimes obliged to skip interminable conversations, the fault is doubtless mine; but one of Walter Scott's great merits, in my eyes, is that he can be placed in the hands of everybody.

It requires greater efforts of talent to interest while keeping within the limits of decency than to please when exceeding all bounds; it is less easy to rule the heart than to disturb it.

Burke kept the politics of England in the past.

Walter Scott drove back the English to the Middle Ages; all that they wrote, manufactured, built, became Gothic: books, furniture, houses, churches, country-seats.

But the barons of Magna Charta are to-day the fashionables of Bond Street, a frivolous race camping in the ancient manor-houses while awaiting the arrival of the new generations which are preparing to drive them out.

* At the same time that the novel was passing into the "romantic" stage, poetry was undergoing a similar transformation.

Cowper[289] abandoned the French in order to revive the national school; Burns[290] commenced the same revolution in Scotland.

After them came the restorers of the ballads.

Several of those poets of 1792 to 1800 belonged to what was called the "Lake school," a name which survived, because the romantic poets lived on the shores of the Cumberland and Westmoreland lakes, which they sometimes sang.

Thomas Moore[291], Campbell[292], Rogers[293], Crabbe[294], Wordsworth[295], Southey[296], Hunt[297], Knowles[298], Lord Holland[299], Canning[300], Croker[301] are still living to do honour to English literature; but one must be of English birth to appreciate the full merit of an intimate class of composition which appeals specially to men born on the soil.

None is a competent judge, in living literature, of other than works written in his own tongue.

It is in vain that you believe yourself thoroughly acquainted with a foreign idiom: you lack the nurse's milk, together with the first words which she teaches you at her breast and in your swaddling-clothes; certain accents belong to the mother country alone.

The English and Germans have the strangest notions concerning our men of letters: they worship what we despise, and despise what we worship; they do not understand Racine nor La Fontaine, nor even Molière completely.

It is ludicrous to know who are considered our great writers in London, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Munich, Leipzig, Göttingen, Cologne, to know what is read there with avidity and what not at all.

When an author's merit lies especially in his diction, no foreigner will ever understand that merit.

The more intimate, individual, rational a talent is, the more do its mysteries escape the mind which is not, so to speak, that talent's fellow-countryman.

We admire the Greeks and Romans on trust; our admiration comes to us by tradition, and the Greeks and Romans are not there to laugh at our barbarian judgments.

Which of us has an idea of the harmony of the prose of Demosthenes and Cicero, of the cadence of the verses of Alcæus and Horace, as they were caught by a Greek or Latin ear?

Men maintain that real beauties are of all times, all countries: yes, beauties of feeling and of thought; not beauties of style.

Style is not cosmopolitan like thought: it has a native land, a sky, a sun of its own.

Burns, Mason[302], Cowper died during my emigration, before 1800 and in 1800: they ended the century; I commenced it.

Darwin[303] and Beattie[304] died two years after my return from exile.

[Sidenote: James Beattie.

] Beattie had announced the new era of the lyre.

The _Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius_ is the picture of the first effects of the muse upon a young bard who is as yet unaware of the inspiration with which he is tossed.

Now the future poet goes and sits by the sea-shore during a tempest; again he leaves the village sports to listen in some lonely spot to the distant sound of the pipes.

Beattie has run through the entire series of reveries and melancholy ideas of which a hundred other poets have believed themselves the discoverers.

Beattie proposed to continue his poem; he did, in fact, write the second canto: Edwin one evening hears a grave voice ascend from the bottom of the valley; it is the voice of a solitary who, after tasting the illusions of the world, has buried himself in that retreat, there to collect his soul and to sing the marvels of the Creator.

This hermit instructs the young minstrel and reveals to him the secret of his genius.

Beattie was destined to shed tears; the death of his son broke his paternal heart: like Ossian, after the loss of his son Oscar, he hung his harp on the branches of an oak.

Perhaps Beattie's son was the young minstrel whom a father had sung and whose footsteps he no longer saw on the mountain.

* Lord Byron's verses contain striking imitations of the Minstrel.

At the time of my exile in England, Lord Byron was living at Harrow School, in a village ten miles from London.

He was a child, I was young and as unknown as he; he had been brought up on the heaths of Scotland, by the sea-side, as I in the marshes of Brittany, by the sea-side; he first loved the Bible and Ossian, as I loved them; he sang the memories of his childhood in Newstead Abbey, as I sang mine in Combourg Castle: When I roved a young Highlander o'er the dark heath.

And climb'd thy steep summit, O Morven of snow!

To gaze on the torrent that thunder'd beneath, Or the mist of the tempest that gather'd below[305].

In my wanderings in the neighbourhood of London, when I was so unhappy, I passed through the village of Harrow a score of times, without suspecting the genius it contained.

I have sat in the churchyard at the foot of the elm beneath which, in 1807, Lord Byron wrote these verses, at the time when I was returning from Palestine: Spot of my youth!

whose hoary branches sigh, Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky;

Where now alone I muse, who oft have trod, With those I loved, thy soft and verdant sod.

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When fate shall chill, at length, this fever'd breast, And calm its cares and passions into rest, .

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here my heart might lie;

Here might I sleep where all my hopes arose, .

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Mix'd with the earth o'er which my footsteps moved;

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Deplored by those in early days allied, And unremembered by the world beside[306].

And I shall say: Hail, ancient elm, at whose foot the child Byron indulged in the fancies of his age, while I was dreaming of _René_ beneath thy shade, the same shade beneath which later, in his turn, the poet came to dream of _Childe Harold!

_ Byron asked of the churchyard, which witnessed the first sports of his life, an unknown grave: a useless prayer, which fame will not grant.

Nevertheless, Byron is no longer what he has been; I had come across him in all directions living at Venice: at the end of a few years, in the same town where I had met with his name on every hand, I found him everywhere eclipsed and unknown.

The echoes of the Lido no longer repeat his name and, if you ask after him of the Venetians, they no longer know of whom you speak.

Lord Byron is entirely dead for them; they no longer hear the neighing of his horse: it is the same thing in London, where his memory is fading.

That is what we become.

If I have passed by Harrow without knowing that the child Byron was drawing breath there, Englishmen have passed by Combourg without suspecting that a little vagabond, brought up in those woods, would leave any trace.

Arthur Young[307], the traveller, when passing through Combourg, wrote: "To Combourg [from Pontorson] the country has a savage aspect; husbandry has not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons, which appears incredible amidst inclosures; the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none-yet here is a chateau, and inhabited; who is this Mons.

de Chateaubriand, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty?

Below this hideous heap of wretchedness is a fine lake, surrounded by well-wooded inclosures[308]."

That M. de Chateaubriand was my father; the residence which seemed so hideous to the ill-humoured agriculturist is none the less a fine and stately home, sombre and grave though it may be.

As for me, a feeble ivy-shoot commencing to climb at the foot of those fierce towers, would Mr. Young have noticed me, he who was interested only in inspecting our harvests?

[Sidenote: Lord Byron.

] Give me leave to add to the above pages, written in England in 1822, the following written in 1824 and 1840: they will complete the portion relating to Lord Byron; this portion will be more particularly perfected when the reader has perused what I shall have to say of the great poet on passing to Venice.

There may perhaps be some interest in the future in remarking the coincidence of the two leaders of the new French and English schools having a common fund of nearly parallel ideas and destinies, if not of morals: one a peer of England, the other a peer of France; both Eastern travellers, not infrequently near each other, yet never seeing one another: only, the life of the English poet has been connected with events less great than mine.

Lord Byron visited the ruins of Greece after me: in _Childe Harold_ he seems to embellish with his own pigments the descriptions in the _Itinéraire.

_ At the commencement of my pilgrimage I gave the Sire de Joinville's farewell to his castle: Byron bids a similar farewell to his Gothic home.

In the _Martyrs_, Eudore sets out from Messenia to go to Rome: "Our voyage was long," he says; "...

we saw all those promontories marked by temples or tombstones....

My young companions had heard speak of nought save the metamorphoses of Jupiter, and they understood nothing of the remains they saw before them; I myself had already sat, with the prophet, on the ruins of devastated cities, and Babylon taught me to know Corinth[309]."

The English poet is like the French prose-writer, following the letter of Sulpicius to Cicero[310]: a coincidence so perfect is a singularly proud one for me, because I anticipated the immortal singer on the shore where we gathered the same memories and celebrated the same ruins.

I have again the honour of being connected with Lord Byron in our descriptions of Rome: the _Martyrs_ and my _Lettre sur la campagne romaine_ possess, for me, the inestimable advantage of having divined the aspirations of a fine genius.

The early translators, commentators and admirers of Lord Byron were careful not to point out that some pages of my works might have lingered for a moment in the memory of the painter of _Childe Harold_;

they would have thought that they were depreciating his genius.

Now that the enthusiasm has grown a little calmer this honour is not so consistently refused to me.