FRANCOIS RÉNÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND is a literary celebrity about whom it is difficult to form an opinion. At one moment we think him effeminate and affected; at another, we fancy that no one has yet given him his due position. He is an imposing character, and yet incomplete. He is poetic, and yet not "of imagination all compact," as all lunatics, lovers, and poets ought to be. He is not a manly hero, in any Shakspearian sense; he is full of weaknesses, and in the delicate elegance of those weaknesses lies his strength. He is a writer-passionately enough too-on erotic subjects, but retains perfect dignity all the while; and is as far removed from the ordinary French novelists who write of love with paraffine, or distilled nitroglycerine, or liquid fire instead of ink, as the "wild nun," of whom Mr. Swinburne treats, is different from a ballet-dancer. "As the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge of it bruises her bosom," so was Chateaubriand's love. His nature was essentially that of a recluse, and he hugged his passion to his heart till it scorched him like a brand. Then in solitude he dreamed over it till he fell into utter depths of despair. Finally he contemplated this despair of his from every possible point of view, and described it all with perfection of language. Besides being the delineator of love-sentiments, Chateaubriand writes a huge tome on the Christian religion; and in addition to being a preacher of Christianity, he has long been to France the prophet of morbidness and the apostle of ennui. This strange mortal also, with a methodical array of proof which makes us almost believe in him, and a feminine jealousy which prevents us from believing in him altogether, claims, as a poetic influence, to have been the forerunner-nay, even the father of Byron. When we add to these already sufficiently curious qualifications, the fact that during his chequered existence he fought the fiend, poverty, in London, doing translations from the French for very scanty pay; that he was also a peer of France; that an English girl proposed marriage to him, and that he escaped with precipitation; that in Paris he is stated to have been the only man whom

the great Napoleon feared; that he flung money away like a prodigal millionaire one day, and was a pauper the next-it will be plain that we are looking upon a character sufficiently extroardinary to be interesting.

Chateaubriand was born in Brittany, that region of bigotry and old fashions. St. Malo has the honor of being his birthplace, and he first saw the light on the 4th September, 1768. Frenchmen always remember most accurately the localities where their celebrities are born, and so give an air of romance, or a touch of interest, to most of their towns. Twenty days before Chateaubriand's birth, Napoleon had stepped in to the world. We can't fancy the latter appearing as a puling infant, but imagine the tramp of a military heel as he came into the midst of men. But even man-taming men are insignificant at one period of their lives, and dignified men undignified. Chateaubriand, for instance, had all the majestic bearing of the old aristocratic régime; but he began life with some importune haste and unexpectedness in a kitchen, his mother being on her way upstairs from a walk. There was a tempest of the autumnal equinox on that day. The sound of the storm prevented the infant's cries from being heard, on which account, if it had been able to think at all at the time, it would probably have found the world as inexplicable a puzzle then as in life afterward proved to the man. The child was brought up in a gloomy castle, on the borders of the sea; and the melancholy murmurs of the Channel were about his early years. They seemed to be woven into his life, and the restless waves form no inadequate type of his mental condition

unquiet, unsatisfied, "full of tears that he could not shed," as he ever was. He took these breakers, himself, as an emblem of his life; and when mature in years, he was wont to say that there had not been a day when he failed to revisit in dream the austere rock whereon he was born, the tempest whose roar was about his earliest sleep. Other causes that acted upon his childhood tended to make him what he was. A frail child, elegant by instinct, and fastidious by constitution, he was put out

to nurse in St. Malo, and for some years enjoyed little society, infantine or otherwise, save that of the small gamins of the place, the associates of the children of the nurse. His father was morose, cold, and proud, a man who inspired fear and no love; his mother is described as lively, but she was of the French kind of liveliness, and found equal pleasure in frivolous society and the devotions of the Church. When they met for dinner in his father's house, no one was allowed to speak a word. Then the master of the house went out hunting, and Chateaubriand's mother retired to her oratory. The children had their books, or could play near the house till supper time. Then, after supper, the mother and children stood immovable and mute, watching the father make a promenade, backwards and forwards, always grave and taciturn, until ten o'clock, in the great hall. Directly the clock struck, he stopped his melancholy march, received icily his family's good-night, and retired; when all the rest must do the same.

This rigid gaoler of the domestic prison died when Chateaubriand was about eighteen, and at the Military Academy at Cambrai. After this event the youth went to Paris. On one occasion, in 1789, his sword was unsheathed against the mob; but alarmed by the popular excesses, he quitted the service on the occasion of the revolt.

Chateaubriand remained in Paris all that strange time before the revolution, but he belonged to no party. The aristocracy, feeling the approach of their end, rushed headlong into luxurious vice. Chateaubriand was cold and grave, and though he dined with them, was not of them; and he did not belong to the people. Perhaps all he cared for at this time-he was only twenty-was the applause which the small fry of literature bestowed upon his puerile verses. Had he been a few years older he would have seen what was going on.

When the Revolution came, he escaped from Paris. The nobility went to Coblentz Chateaubriand departed for the United States.

The New World opened his eyes. "Only figure to yourself," says a French biographer, "the astonishment of a literary man of the 18th century, at sight of that strange gigantic Nature, full of life, gracefully terrible. Dropped among blue herons, rose-colored flamingoes,

red woodpeckers, Chateaubriand might well smile when he thought of that old French bird Philomèle, on which we live exclusively, ever since the mythologic era." From travel in such regions of the New World, Chateaubriand gained a certain approach to nature and to real life which the old school of pedantry and classicism could not have opened to him. But the new bright-colored garment never sat very well on the old-fangled dignity and tradition. Still his "happy savages," with their simple passions; and his attempt to write naturally, recommended him to those who might not otherwise have been drawn to him. Béranger, who disliked all borrowing from the ancients, and looked upon "consul" and "prefect" as worn-out, obsolete titles, that no one had wit enough to replace by new and suitable ones, was delighted to find a man who, when he wanted to speak of the sun, would speak of the sun and not of Phoebus; of the sea as the sea, and not as Neptune. Chateaubriand, nevertheless, never reached true simplicity. He has been styled a historic coin with the effigy of a by-gone age. In vain do modern manners, literary habits, all the precipitations of the new world, strive to cover the ancient type.

Chateaubriand soon returned from his American wanderings, reaching France early in 1792. Atala," which was not published until some years after, was the result of his sojourn abroad. The publication of this manuscript produced quite a furore. We must remember that at that time scarcely any graphic pen had been brought to bear upon life in the wilds of America. Cooper had not appeared as the pioneer of Western romance; so Chateaubriand had a new field to himself.

"Atala," apart from its Indian accessories, is composed of about equal parts of mystic Catholicism and passionate love. The love is never gratified: the Catholicism is. At least the priests seem to have it all their own way in the end; and Atala, who had loved so intensely, and had poisoned herself in terror of breaking the vow of virginity which her mother had imposed upon her, undergoes a most ecstatic celebration with the wafer and holy oil. The scenes of this book are most sentimentally sad; perhaps in this rational age they would not affect us with so deep a sense of solemnity and reality as they inspired in those who were more subject to the in

fluence of the spirit of the devotee. We feel a certain sense of narrowness in contemplating these scenes; we seem still to see in them the gloomy shore that was the birth-place of our Breton gentleman. We do not see the broad world, or any Shakspearian grandeur. The emotion is intense, but circumscribed. But we must remember that Chateaubriand despised Shakspeare, who took his characters from such low places as taverns, and made them talk sometimes only like men. Chateaubriand praises Voltaire for retracting his praise of Shakspeare, and speaks of him as repenting for having " opened the door to mediocrity, deified the drunken savage, and placed the monster on the altar." "Hamlet" Chateaubriand called "that tragedy of lunatics." In return, it has been pertinently asked, what would Shakspeare have called "Moïse," that tragedy of Chateaubriand's.

Chateaubriand is rather fond of disparaging great men; he considers himself, as we have said, the poetic father of Byron, and certainly brings forward some singular coincidences between their writings. Byron, on the other hand, whether conscious of this jealousy or not, evidently does not seek to exalt Chateaubriand. He rather speaks of him slightingly, as when, in "The Age of Bronze," referring to the incongruous Congress, he says,

"There Chateaubriand forms new books of Martyrs;

And subtle Greeks intrigue for stupid Tartars." In his notes to this poem, Byron, too, brings in an anecdote most disrespectful for a son to quote against his reputed literary papa: "Monsieur Chateaubriand, who has not forgotten the author in the minister, received a handsome compliment at Verona from a literary sovereign: Ah! Monsieur C- —, are you related to that Chateaubriand who-who-has written something?' (écrit quelque chose !) It is said that the author of 'Atala' repented him for a moment of his legitimacy."

With Milton, also, Chateaubriand compares himself: "Milton served Cromwell; I have combated Napoleon: he attacked kings; I have defended them: he hoped nothing from their pardon; I have not reckoned upon their gratitude. Now that in both our countries monarchy is declining towards its end, Milton and I have no more political questions to squabble about."

These comparisons are, at least, foolish, for Milton and Byron may chance to outlive Chateaubriand. The work of Chateaubriand's in which the largest reference is made to Byron is the "Sketches of English Literature," a book written by him somewhat late in life. In the memoirs of his younger days, he mentions him too. Chateaubriand was at one time, soon after his return from America, a resident in England. He was in poor circumstances, and was glad to make a scanty income by translations from the French, and any literary work that might turn up. At this time he speaks of himself as having been corporeally very close to Byron: "In his melancholy rambles he was seen passing through the village of Harrow at the time when the lively face and curly head of a boy-Lord Byron-frequently appeared at the window of a school." Whether the curly-headed boy was actually seen by the impecunious French exile, or not, does not matter much it may be interesting, however, to note what claim the Frenchman prefers against that naughty English boy. Chateaubriand first draws a parallel between Byron and himself: "I was destined to precede him in the career of letters, and to remain in it after him. He had been brought up on the heaths of Scotland, on the sea-shore, as I had been on the heaths of Brittany, on the sea-shore. He was at first fond of the Bible and Ossian, as I was fond of them. He sang, childhood, as I sang them in the Castle of in Newstead Abbey, the recollections of Courbourg." Personal as well as literary coincidences, it will be observed, are brought forward by our injured Chateaubriand. The next of these which he brings before our notice is, that Byron and himself-the former in 1807, the latter seven or eight years earlier-both sat under the self-same elm-tree in Harrow church-yard, to meditate or make verses. "Hail ancient elm of dreams," says Chateaubriand, "at the foot of which Byron, as a boy, indulged the caprices of his age, at the time when I was pondering on Rene' in the shade, in that same shade to which the poet subsequently repaired, in turn, to ponder on Childe Harold.'" Chateaubriand then proceeds with his comparison, as follows: "Some interest will perhaps be felt on remarking in future-if I am destined to have any future—the coincidence presented by the two leaders of the

new French and English schools, having one and the same fund of ideas, and destinies, if not manners, nearly similar; the one a peer of England, the other a peer of France; both travelers in the East, at no great distance of time from each other, but who never met. The only difference is, that the life of the English poet was not mixed up with such great events as mine." From a man possessed of such bad taste and morbid contemplation of self as to include himself in such a comparison as this, it is easy to understand that Byron, if he fell under his influence, might have acquired much of his own melancholy egotism. But Byron never descended to such puerilities as this coincidence-making of Chateaubriand's. The former may have had unhealthy cravings for present and future fame, personal affectations, and self-devouring introspection, but at least he did not display them in so childish a fashion as Chateaubriand. When he comes to treat of coincidences purely literary between himself and Byron the Frenchman becomes more precise. "Lord Byron," he says, "went to visit after me the ruins of Greece. In Childe Harold' he seems to embellish with his own colors the descriptions of my Travels.' At the commencement of my pilgrimage I introduced the farewell of Sire de Joinville to his castle: Byron, in like manner, bids adieu to his Gothic habitation." "In the 'Martyrs' Eudorus sets out from Messenia to proceed to Rome. Our voyage,' he says, was long. We saw all those promontories marked by temples or tombs. We crossed the Gulf of Megara. Before us was Ægina, on the right the Piræus, on the left Corinth. Those cities, of old so flourishing, exhibited only heaps of ruins. The very sailors appeared to be moved by this sight. The crowd collected upon the deck kept silence: each fixed his eye steadfastly on those ruins: each perhaps drew from them in secret a consolation in his misfortunes by reflecting how trifling are our own afflictions compared with those calamities which befall whole nations, and which had stretched before our eyes the corpses of those cities. My young companions had never heard of any metamorphoses other than those of Jupiter, and could not account for the ruins before their eyes. I, for my part, had already seated myself with the prophet on the ruins of desolate cities, and Baby

lon taught me what had happened to Corinth." So far Chateaubriand's description, as extracted from his book. "Now," says he, triumphantly, "turn to the fourth canto of Lord Byron's 'Childe Harold!"" We turn to stanza 44, and read as follows:

"Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him, The Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind,

The friend of Tully: as my bark did skim
The bright blue waters with a fanning wind,
Came Megara before me, and behind
Ægina lay, Piræus on the right,

And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined
Along the prow, and saw all these unite
In ruin, even as he had seen the desolate
sight."

Those who compare this stanza with the passage in prose above quoted will be able to judge whether Byron is to be deemed debtor to Chateaubriand, or not. We offer, as a suggestion, that Chateaubriand and Byron dipped into the same “Murray," supposing there existed sixty years ago such a guide-book to Greece. Chateaubriand, however, does not take this view of the matter, but enters upon a small rhapsody thereupon, wherein is most delicately insinuated the suspicious circumstance of two persons having made use of the same words on the same subject. He says, with some pedantry: "Here the English poet, as well as the French prosewriter, falls short of the letter of Sulpicius to Cicero ; but so complete a coincidence is singularly glorious for me, since I preceded the immortal bard on the shore where the same reflections occurred to both, and where we both have commemorated the same ruins." Byron has had sufficient detractors of late; but as Chateaubriand makes it evident that he himself is the inferior man, (for would Byron have condescended to such affected selfmeasurement ?) there is no harm in continuing the comparison, and listening to the pretended plagiarisms. Chateaubriand proceeds: "I have likewise the honor of agreeing with Lord Byron in the description of Rome. The Martyrs,' and my Letter on the Campagna' of Rome, claim for me the inestimable advantage of having anticipated the inspirations of a great genius. M. de Béranger, our immortal song-writer, has inserted in the last volume of his Chansons' a note, too flattering to me to be quoted entire. adverting to the impulse which, according to him, I have given to French poetry, he

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