Page:The Criticism of Chateaubriand.pdf/5

Rh to note the tender feelings of the man running in a soft under-current beneath the violence of the fanatic preacher: speaking of his children he says, "What must have been Abraham's feelings, when he consented to sacrifice and slaughter his only son? Assuredly he never said a word on the subject to Sarah." Again, while deploring the death of his infant daughter:—"Elizabeth, my little girl, is dead. Strange to say, her loss has left me a sick heart, a woman’s heart—so intense is my sorrow. I never could have imagined that a father could feel so much tenderness for his child. Her features, her words, her gestures, during life and on her death-bed, are deeply engraven in my heart. Oh, my obedient and dutiful daughter! the very death of Christ (and what in comparison are all other deaths!) cannot, as it should, drive her from my memory." Chateaubriand appears to us to attach too much importance to Henry VIII. He influenced nothing but the present, of whose circumstances he was at once the toy and the tyrant. He left nothing but a warning as to how power was again entrusted to one hand. He was the last feudal king—and was the type of a system that expired with himself. Brave, magnificent, and courteous, he was cruel, profuse, and uncertain. In the meantime England was in a state of progression; then were first sown the seeds of those great principles which led to the revolution. Henry carried the vices of feudalism to excess, and it is the excess that leads to the remedy. The reign of force was yielding to the reign of opinion, and to this day the struggle is carried on by an engine thus characterized by Luther—"The press is the last and the supreme gift—the summum et postremum donum, by means of which the Almighty promotes the things of the Gospel. It is the last blaze that bursts forth before the extinction of the world. Thanks be to God, we at last behold its splendour." .—The great fault of Chateaubriand’s remarks on Shakspeare is, that they address themselves to a by-gone school of criticism; Dr. Johnson’s is very far from being the national opinion; and the alterations and adaptations made in Charles the Second’s time are held anything but orthodox in the present day. But we shall not enter into the question of preference between the rival queens of the French and the English stage: the foreign critic does not and cannot understand us. But what does our author mean by saying that "all Shakspeare's young female characters are formed on one model?" He might as well say that the rose and the violet resemble each other because they are both sweet. Take, for example, two placed in similar situations—namely, disguised in male attire; and yet what can be more essentially different than the characters of Rosalind and Viola. The last, whose heart Tender thought clothes like a dove, With the wings of care," dreaming, devoted, silent, but dying of her silence. The first, on the contrary, is "a gay creature of the element;" a coquette, who delights in teasing the lover, whose danger yet sends the blood from her cheek—witty, sarcastic, with her deeper feelings shrouded as it were in sunshine. What have she and Viola in common? Sept.—VOL. XLVIII. NO. CLXXXIX.