Page:The Criticism of Chateaubriand.pdf/3

Rh may, and we do differ from many of these conclusions, but we feel that they have been drawn by a clever man, and drawn, too, in a spirit of candour. If any man be entitled to form a judgment, that man is Chateaubriand. A poet himself, his whole life has been a poet's education, and he has studied our literature next to his own. But there is something in the French and the English character so essentially opposed, that it is impossible for them to understand each other. Now a nation’s character is in its literature. Some writer says, "The great difference of the two nations is, that the one lives out of doors and the other in; the one thinks of the people that are looking at him, and the other thinks of himself." This principle will account for the frequent self-reference in these pages, which, however, has more the appearance than the reality of vanity. An Englishman is timid of drawing attention to himself—he is afraid of being laughed at; a Frenchman, on the contrary, relies on your indulgence. Chateaubriand believes that genius is a moral problem, which it is matter of general attraction to solve; and he submits rather than advances his pretensions to the public, with a quiet conviction of their interest, which an English writer, however successful, would be too well aware of his and our national characteristics, to adventure. The style of the author of "Atala" has no parallel in our literature—it is what supplies in France the place of blank verse; it is redundant in epithet and simile, many of which appear to us grandiloquent: for example, Shakspeare is called "the young butcher of Strafford." Again, speaking of our writers among the lower classes, he says, "At the present day it is a blacksmith that shines—Vulcan was the son of Jupiter:" the illustration is rather magnificent. By-the-by, to what blacksmith does he allude?—we must confess our ignorance. There is a curious little instance of the mistakes inevitable to foreign critics: Chateaubriand quotes, as a charming specimen of our simple ballad poetry, a stanza of a song: "Where tarries my love,   Where tarries my love, Where tarries my true love from me?     Come hither my dove,     I will write to my love, And send him a letter by thee." He appears perfectly ignorant that the song is a burlesque. The lover receives the letter, but "The generous youth,   Full of valour and truth, Had not eaten a morsel that day;     So the pigeon he roasted,     His true love he toasted, And mounted and gallop'd away." A singular sample of the tender melancholy which marks our lyrics!

Chateaubriand’s life has been that of a poet; a life, however, an exception to the general rule. He has known his share of toil and of trouble—he has been poor, proscribed, and imprisoned; still he is among those who, "All their wand'rings past, Have safe return'd to die at home at last." There are few, very few, whose later years of a poetical career are spent