Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/514

498 grudge against Lamartine and Chateaubriand. The former he pounces upon, not indeed with the vulturous swoop, or rather perhaps the worrying tenacity, of Cuvilier Fleury (of the Débats), but with a resolute desire to turn him and his sentiment inside out, and show, by shaking it to the winds, what inflated falsity there is in the poet-politician's personal composition and literary compositions. This is not the time, or place, to enter at length into the justice of the strictures on the author of Raphael; we can only refer to the fact, that he is severely handled—his egotism roundly ridiculed—and his questionable morality more than questioned. Chateaubriand, again, is sadly "cut up," notwithstanding be liberal eulogies which besprinkle the detracting page; he is twitted with a whimsical imagination, an enormous and puerile vanity, an undue tendency to voluptuous themes, and especially—in spite of his great name as a pillar of orthodoxy—a deep-seated and desolating scepticism. He is represented as incessantly victimised by a twofold fatuitv—that of the man of fashion who would be always young, and that of the littérateur who cannot but be ostentatious. Passion, as a poet, is freely conceded him; but what kind of passion? that which involves the idea of death and destruction, a satanic fury, mingled all the while with a subdued emotion of the pleasurable, altogether composing a strange hybrid epicureanism, peculiar to Chateaubriand, and very unwholesome for society. The unfortunate Memoirs are sarcastically and searchingly interpreted, in a way infinitely displeasing to those enraptured admirers of the noble viscount, to whom their voice d'outre tombe came with so sepulchral a spell of fascination, and who found in their changeful records a recurring series of delights; and indeed the Memoirs have the merit of diversity in matter, if not in manner—as another noble poet has it,

Among the other literary men of this century who come under review in the Causeries, are Villemain, commended as uniting patient meditation with prompt facility of expression, and presenting a fine example of moral and literary growth; Victor Cousin, equally adroit at deciphering a musty manuscript, and at idealising its significance by the enthusiasm of artist and orator; Guizot, grave and emphatic; Thiers, sprightly and energetic; St. Marc Girardin, clear-sighted opponent of the Werter or René "green and yellow melancholy;" Montalembert, the impassioned apologist of Rome; Lacordaire, the trumpet-tongued militant churchman; Alfred de Musset and Théodore Lecleroq, both famous for their Proverbes Dramatiques; Béranger, Balzac, Jasmin (the barber-poet of the South), Bazin (historian and historical romancer), Armand Carrel, Mignet, Hégésippe Moreau and Pierre Dupont (two recent French poets—the former a kind of Chatterton in life and death, the latter a democratically disposed minstrel of too mobile temperament); such are specimens of the company to be found at the Monday réunions chez M. Sainte-Beuve.

Long may he preside there in the same pleasant spirit—making no more enemies than need be, and as many friends as he deserves. {{nop}