CHATEAUBRIAND AND HIS CAREER.

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BY FAYETTE ROBINSON.

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François Auguste, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, was born in 1768, in the midst of that epoch which produced so many great men, Napoleon, Soult, Wellington and Walter Scott. Educated at the castle of Combourg near Saint-Malo, beyond all doubt as he wandered over the arid lands and desolate shores of Armorica, young Chateaubriand felt the development in his soul of that inclination and solitude which never abandoned him even in the turmoil of business and amid the gravest political affairs. Intended originally for the church, it was subsequently purposed to devote him to the army; he began at Dol and terminated at Rennes, an arduous course of study, which though it left his intense sensitiveness and that creative imagination which are the chief characteristics of his mind unaltered, enabled him to publish serious works on critical history, at an age when persons usually possess but vague notions of life and the principles which regulate the organization of society. In 1787, for the first time, young Chateaubriand went to Paris. He was at that time a second lieutenant in the regiment of Navarre, but so as to be enabled to ride in the king’s coaches, an honor to which from his old nobility, he was entitled, the rank of captain was necessary, he obtained by a fiction, not unusual at that time, the brevet of captain of cavalry; notwithstanding this however, he continued to do duty in the regiment of foot to which he belonged. The magnificence of the court of Versailles could not at all satisfy the vague desire, which, though he did not then understand its nature, tormented his soul. Adventure was a condition of his being; his life could not be objectless, and with delight he hailed the commencement of a career. One day as he looked over a map of the New World, he was struck with the possibility of discovering a passage to the northern Pole. From that hour sleep and repose were gone. Like Columbus, he went from door to door, to solicit means to realize the idea which animated him, and was compelled to submit to the ridicule of some, and the indifference of others. This idea, which then was esteemed insoluble, but a short time after was realized. It may be, had the government of Louis XVI, paid any attention to a question which had great significance in the points of view of commerce, politics and science, that passage, now known as McKenzie’s, would have borne the name Chateaubriand. Let this however, be as it may, the young second lieutenant, by ridicule and discouragement, resolved to accomplish his gigantic project without assistance, and in the spring of 1791, set out for America, with no other baggage than a letter of introduction to Washington. Yet imbued with the ideas of the old world, Chateaubriand had imagined the President of the United States, a king, surrounded by a brilliant court, with guards and chamberlains, crowding the portals of a palace of marble and gold. How great must his surprise have been, when he knocked at the door of a modest dwelling, which, in France, would have been esteemed scarcely fit for a private gentleman, and when a female opened the door, and without parade let him into the presence of one who had created a nation and declined a crown.

Washington received him with cordiality and kindness, but terrified beyond doubt at the dangers to which he was about to expose himself, attempted to dissuade the young adventurer from his enterprise. Chateaubriand, however, would not be persuaded, and soon after hired a guide and really began his journey, fancying that he had merely to go straight to the Pole, as he had gone from Saint Malo to Paris. He reached the limit of civilization, in what was then considered a short time, and with indescribable joy found himself amid the dark and mysterious forests of the new world, where it seemed to him, no human foot had ever been planted before. He thus describes his sensations, when his soul first became replete with astonishment and amazement at the magnificence of the scene.

“I wandered from tree to tree, now turning to the right and then to the left, saying to myself, here there are no beaten paths, no restricted dwelling places; presidents, kings and oligarchies, have no power here. By way of exhibiting my freedom from all control, I committed countless wild pranks, which made the steady Dutchman, who was my guide, fancy me a fool.”

The young lieutenant, however, looked anxiously for one of those Indian villages, in which the children of nature, the men of the soil, might certainly be found. His first essay, however, by no means impressed him favorably in relation to the true Native Americans. After a journey of several days, he saw in the depth of a forest, compared with which, all France was but a park, a wigwam from which strange sounds issued, and which in that place must have astonished him indeed. He listened with attention, and heard a well known “chant populaire” of France, with an accompaniment wrung from a violin, which certainly, Stradivarius never made. The wanderer entered the hut, and amid a bevy of Indians, who danced as if Saint Vitus had touched them, he saw an old man of diminutive stature, with his hair “à l’oisseau royal,” with a green coat, a coarse vest, cut however, à l’agonie de Louis XV., ruffles and wristbands of coarse cotton, busy in teaching a dozen Iroquois to dance the cotillion and minuet de la cour. The teacher’s name was Violet, and strange to say, he was the progenitor of that individual of the same name, made so famous by the late Captain Marryatt. Violet had been a servant of the Count Rochambeau, and had been induced to establish himself on one of the little lakes in New York, amid the Iroquois.—French nature and human nature are however, different entirely, and the valet de chambre had begun to civilize North American Indians, from the point du départ de la danse.

The young adventurer in a short time left his countryman and resumed his journey through the wilderness. He soon met with Indians far less civilised than the Corypheans of Violet. He was kindly received by various tribes which he visited, and participated in their councils and their wars. At this period of his career, he collected the variety of information, which was ultimately fused into Atala, René and the Natchez. It cannot but be regretted, that Chateaubriand never chanced to grasp the thread of that tradition, which connected the Natchez with the Aztecs, of whom beyond all doubt they were an abrasion. Had he done so, the light his meditative mind would have thrown on the traditions of that mysterious people, of whom now no remnant exists, and the memory of whom is forgotten, can scarcely be calculated. His poetical meditations did not, however, prevent him from keeping in view the original idea which had brought him to America, and he became more and more resolved to penetrate to the icy Pole. One day though, by a strange fancy, a fragment of a French paper, containing an account of the flight of Louis XVI, his arrest at Varennes, and the formation of the Army of Condé, beyond the Rhine, reached him. As he read this strange intelligence, the Breton gentleman, fancied that he heard the cry of honor calling him to defend that king for whom he had sworn to live and die. He then hastened, to cross the sea again, and within a few months, was a simple volunteer in the ranks of the royal and catholic army. It is well, here, to mention, that though Chateaubriand sought for the North Pole, he had from the lakes of New York, gone southward, and that the fragment of newspaper, which, in all probability, changed the tenor of his whole career, reached him in the depth of the lagoons of Florida. It is very certain that though his voyage to America, produced Atala and the Natches, he would not have occupied a high position among the great discoverers.

Having been wounded by the explosion of a shell, at Thionville, after undergoing the greatest vicissitudes, he contrived to reach England. The danger from which he had escaped on the Rhine, was, however, replaced only by penury, and the suffering of exile. In that country while expecting death, his physicians having told him, that he could live, under no possibility, more than two or three years, he wrote and published the “Essai historique, politique et moral, sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes considérées dans leurs rapports avec la révolution Française.” This is one of the strangest books ever published, the author succeeding in the most incomprehensible manner in drawing a parallel between Pisistratus and Robespierre, Marat and Harmodius, J. J. Rousseau and Heraclitus, Hanno and Fox, and Barca and Pitt, and finally discovering in Miltiades the type of Dumouriez.

Having on the 18th Brumaire returned to France, Chateaubriand became with Fontanes, his friend, a companion in exile, one of the proprietors of the Mercure, in which paper he published Atala, (so far back as this does the French feuilleton date.) The freshness of the ideas, the grandeur of sentiment, and exquisitely simple style of this book, were novel indeed, at a time when all things were innoculated with the pretence of the Directorate. The success of this prose-poem aptly prepared the public for the immense sensation subsequently created by le genie du Christianisme. It may safely be said that no work was ever better timed. The iron grasp of Napoleon had strangled all popular movements, order had succeeded anarchy, temples again were open for prayer, and ruined altars were rebuilt. All the world, weary of the fruitless worship of the personification of abstract and transcendental qualities and virtues, felt an innate longing for a less sterile and more poetical faith. Society hastened to resume that old creed, which had been the source of all the civilization which existed, not it may be true, because of conviction, but because the disgusting orgies at the feet of the statue of the so-called goddess of reason, had offended not only all sentiment but all decency. Never probably before were the fasts and feasts of Christianity so rigidly observed, and all France, by a rigid observance of Lent, sought to atone for and wipe out all remembrance of the reign of terror. With that wonderful sagacity which made Napoleon great in cabinet as he was on the battle-field, he did not neglect Chateaubriand’s book, and rewarded the author by the appointment of Secretary of Embassy to Rome, where the Cardinal Fesch was the French representative. Then, in the eternal city, amid the ruins of the coliseum, yet filled with the spirits of the ancient martyrs, the Christian poet formed a conception of the angelical Cymodocré and Eudoxe, and determined to visit the cradle of Christianity, the triumph and contests of which he resolved to celebrate, and to gather inspiration in the “city of desolation” by contemplating that one sepulchre which when time shall be no more will yield nothing to the great, grand judge.

Soon after his return from Rome, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who continued to maintain as high a position as ever in the favor of Napoleon, was appointed plenipotentiary to the Valois. Just then a rumor, circulated beyond doubt by the partisans of the exiled dynasty, acquired some influence on the popular mind, many hoping and others fearing that the emperor was prepared to follow the example of Monk, and sought to replace the Bourbons on the throne of Saint Louis and Henri IV. Chateaubriand, perhaps more than any one else, under the influence of the chivalric ideas which always characterised him, flattered himself that this dream would soon be realised. At once, however, all Paris was amazed by the news that the Duke d’Enghien, the last of the Condés, had been shot at midnight, in the ditch of the castle of Vincennes. Thus Napoleon replied to the imprudent suggestions of the royalists. The reason of this terrible tragedy is even now unknown, the only man who possibly could have explained it, the emperor, having borne the secret with him to the grave. The whole party then known as the emigration, was however terrified, and under the influence of a generous indignation, on the very day that he heard the news Chateaubriand resigned his appointment. Independence was then a crime, but far from being offended, Napoleon conceived a yet more exalted esteem for Chateaubriand. Prayers, promises, every possible inducement were used in vain to retain him in the imperial service. Chateaubriand hurried the preparations for his pilgrimage and crossed the Alps. On his previous visit he had not studied closely enough the Italian, and after a careful tour the vicomte sailed for Greece. In the wilds of America, the poet had shaken himself free of all old-world ideas as he would from a burden which oppressed him, that his soul in vigor, and unrestrained, might hear every accent of the poetry of a young nature. In Greece, however, his conduct was precisely the reverse. He was in the holy land of poetry and art, and he sought to conjure up by the powerful magic of memory, the mighty dead who for almost twenty centuries have slumbered in unknown graves. Thrice, according to ancient usage, he made the echos of Thermopylæ resound with the name of Leonidas, and in his pious wanderings across the ruins of Athens, he would ascend some fallen tribune, from which perhaps the voice of Demosthenes might have been heard moving the popular mind as the wind agitates the sea, and calling forth a new generation of warriors by the magic of the names of “those who died at Marathon.” If ever a man was instinct with the feeling of universal love, if ever any one idolized nature it was Chateaubriand, the piety of whom, however, was too intense to permit him ever to mistake the apparent for the great first cause. In the words of one of our own writers “he was filled with devotion to God and sympathized with all humanity.” Those now desolate regions he soon left, and the enthusiast went to seek in the dwelling-places of the once “people of God,” those spots over which Christ had passed during his pilgrimage from Bethlehem to the “place of the skull,” amid hordes of savage Bedweens and robber Arabs, he crossed the summits of Mount Liban and the waters of the sea of death. He prayed on the Mount of Olives, moistened his lip in the cool wave of the Jordan, and brought a portion of its waters, which, preserved with all the care of a pious superstition was subsequently used at the baptism of the Duke of Bordeaux. He finally knelt at the very tomb of Christ, the venerable guardians of which clasped on his heel the spur of Godfry de Bouillon, and made him a “Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.” The city of Alexandria and the capital of the Ptolemies were also visited by him, and ascending the Nile as far as Cairo, he sat at the foot of the pyramids, and gave himself up to meditation amid the Memphian ruins. He then re-embarked, and after undergoing imminent danger from shipwreck, landed at Tunis. Neglecting the living city, he visited that Carthage which twice became the rival of Rome, in war in the days of Hannibal, and in religion when St. Cyprian lived. From Africa Chateaubriand passed to Spain, that land of war and love, and as he wandered through the dilapidated halls of the Alhambra, and recalled Pelayo, Charlemagne and Boabdil, he formed the conception of the tender and chivalric legend of “The Last Abencerrages.”

On his return to Spain, in 1807, Chateaubriand, who had not yet ceased to feel an interest in Spain, published an analysis of Laborde’s book on that country. This book excited great curiosity, some of the pages containing allusions to which a malicious public gave a point. Napoleon was weak enough to take offense at a fancied parallel between himself and Nero; and after having stripped him of his ownership of the Mercure, went so far as to threaten to have him shot down in the Tuileries.

The independence of Chateaubriand is well known, and the despotism of Napoleon found an untiring enemy in him. All were, however, surprised to find in his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem, frequent eulogies of the imperial glory. The public was not aware of the fact, that a few days before its appearance, the publisher was notified that it would be suppressed unless praises of the emperor were inserted. Chateaubriand long protested against this edict, and yielded only to the prayers of the bookseller, who informed him that the suppression of the work would be his ruin. He had, however, something in reserve to gratify his self-respect, speaking only of the military glory, not of the statesman-like qualities of Napoleon.

Subsequently, in his peaceful hermitage of la vallée aux loups, Chateaubriand finished the great work, the plan of which he had conceived at Rome, and which he had meditated on during the whole of his pilgrimage in Greece, Judea, and Africa. The Martyrs at last appeared, and were all the pamphlets and books of every size which it called forth collected, a hall large as the Alexandrine Library would not suffice to contain them. It was a daring act, indeed, to personify, in a prose-poem, all the mysterious powers of Christianity. It was a poetical novel, the old gods of Greece and Rome playing a conspicuous part. In the introduction of the Pagan divinities, instead of Beelzebub and the powers of darkness, does this book greatly differ in general conception from the strange old book of the Puritan Bunyan. The genius of Christianity, however, demonstrates that there was inherent in Christianity, not less poetry than existed in the Heathen Olympus, and that the mysteries of Christianity opened as rich a field to the poet as did the Hesiodic theogony.

This was a great discovery in France, where at that time the Paradise Lost, and Klopstock’s great poem, were almost unknown. The attack and defense of this poem consequently created much excitement, and the reputation of Chateaubriand rapidly expanded. In 1811, a chair in the Academy having, by the death of Joseph Chenier, become vacant, public opinion designated Chateaubriand as the person most qualified to fill it. It is well known that custom requires the new member to eulogize his predecessor. Chateaubriand, however, in politics differed entirely from Chenier, and unwilling to submit to the usage, had prepared to attack him. The emperor having heard of his intention, forbade him to pronounce his address, seeing that this could not but be a dangerous precedent at a time when the judges of Louis XIV. occupied all the principal offices of state. From that time the emperor and Chateaubriand were irreconcilable.

During the hundred days Chateaubriand accompanied Louis XVIII. to Ghent, and after the restoration, was elevated to the dignity of a peer of France. At this crisis his opinions were ultra royalist. In his last work, de la Monarchie selon la Charte, he dared to define clearly the position of the king, according to the charter; he lost favor, Louis XVIII. being too shrewd to break with the liberal party. The order dismissing him is very significative, viz., “The Vicomte de Chateaubriand having in a printed book expressed doubt in relation to our personal will, made known in the decree of the 5th of September, the said Vicomte will, from to-day, cease to be one of our ministers of state.”

It is now scarcely worth while to follow Chateaubriand through all the phases of his political life. Dismissed and subsequently restored to royal favor, he was ambassador at both Berlin and London. He was also plenipotentiary at the Congress at Verona, again dismissed, and sent as minister to Rome. He again resigned on the coming into power of the ministry of Polignac, and even then foresaw the fall of the throne he had been so anxious to make secure. Having undergone proscription and exile, he had nothing more to undergo except imprisonment. He was yet doomed to taste of prison-fare, and it was reserved for the government of Louis Philippe to arraign the author of The Martyrs before the Court of Assizes.

Subsequent to the restoration, besides various political pamphlets, Chateaubriand published many works of a purely literary character. The first of these was The Natchez. The manuscript of this book, forgotten with many other similar things by the author, had been left at an inn in London, on the occasion of his return from emigration after the 18th Brumaire. Twenty years after it was strangely recovered in a cottage at an obscure village. The honesty of persons to whom he had confided it was the source of one of the happiest hours of the life of Chateaubriand, and secured to the world one of the chef-d’œuvres of romance. Next came Moses, the Essay on English Poetry, the translation of Milton, the Congress of Verona, and the Life of Ranée. The life of Chateaubriand, it will be seen, was eventful as the age in which he lived. Like Dante, Tasso, Cervantes, Camaeus, and Milton, persecution of every kind was heaped on him.

For many years he lived in an almost impenetrable retirement. Caring little for the convulsions of the world, or for courtly intrigues, he has consecrated his time to the publication of his Memoires d’Outre Tombe, the recent publication of which has suggested this notice.

This remarkable book he thus prefaces: “I have met almost all the men who, in my own days, have been conspicuous in my own or foreign countries—Washington and Napoleon, Louis XVIII. and Popes Alexander, Pius VII., and Gregory XVI., Fox, Pitt, Sheridan, Londonderry, Capo d’Istrias, Malesherbes, and Mirabeau, Nelson, Bolivar, Mehemet, the Pacha of Egypt, Suffren, Bougainville, Lapeyrouse, Moreau, and others. I was one of a triumverate which has no parallel in the history of the world; three poets of different views and interests having been almost at the same time ministers of foreign affairs—I, in France, Canning, in England, and Martinez de la Rosa, in Spain, I have lived through the uneventful years of my youth, the teeming era of the republic, the proud days of Buonaparte, and the reign of legitimacy. I have sailed over the seas of the Old and New World, and stood on the soils of four quarters of the globe. I have slept in the Indian wigwam, Arab tent, and Huron hut; amid the ruins of Athens, Jerusalem, Memphis, Carthage, and Grenada, with the Greek, Turk, and Moor, amid forests, and amid deserted cities. I have worn a bear-skin cap, and the Mameluke caftan; I have undergone hunger and thirst, and as an ambassador, covered with golden embroidery, and stars, and insignia of chivalry, have sat at the board of kings, princesses and ladies, and then have again become impoverished, and have languished in prison.”

For a long time the health of Chateaubriand had been the source of much uneasiness to his friends, but on his return from a trip to Dieppe, in 1847, the symptoms became absolutely alarming. He had resolved to visit Italy, but was attacked with pneumonia, in Paris, and died July 4, 1848, after an illness of five days. The body of the poet was taken to Saint Malo, his birth-place, and on a rocky promontory, where the waves of the Atlantic ceaselessly beat, one who was restless as they, found a final repose. Full of tender love for his childhood’s home, he himself selected his burial place, as the bird which perchance has girded the earth, returns to the nest whence it first winged its flight—to die.