21 September 1857 – 27 September 1857

In the course of much thought yesterday about “Atala” and “René,” Châteaubriand became clear to me. I saw in him a great artist but not a great man, immense talent but a still vaster pride—a nature at once devoured with ambition and unable to find anything to love or admire in the world except itself—indefatigable in labor and capable of everything except of true devotion, self-sacrifice and faith. Jealous of all success, he was always on the opposition side, that he might be the better able to disavow all services received, and to hold aloof from any other glory but his own. Legitimist under the empire, a parliamentarian tinder the legitimist régime, republican under the constitutional monarchy, defending Christianity when France was philosophical, and taking a distaste for religion as soon as it became once more a serious power, the secret of these endless contradictions in him was simply the desire to reign alone like the sun—a devouring thirst for applause, an incurable and insatiable vanity, which, with the true, fierce instinct of tyranny, would endure no brother near the throne. A man of magnificent imagination but of poor character, of indisputable power, but cursed with a cold egotism and an incurable barrenness of feeling, which made it impossible for him to tolerate about him anybody but slaves or adorers. A tormented soul and miserable life, when all is said, under its aureole of glory and its crown of laurels! Essentially jealous and choleric, Châteaubriand from the beginning was inspired by mistrust, by the passion for contradicting, for crushing and conquering. This motive may always be traced in him. Rousseau seems to me his point of departure, the man who suggested to him by contrast and opposition all his replies and attacks, Rousseau is revolutionary: Châteaubriand therefore writes his “Essay on Revolutions.” Rousseau is republican and Protestant; Châteaubriand will be royalist and Catholic. Rousseau is bourgeois; Chateaubriand will glorify nothing but noble birth, honor, chivalry and deeds of arms. Rousseau conquered nature for French letters, above all the nature of the mountains and of the Swiss and Savoy, and lakes. He pleaded for her against civilization. Châteaubriand will take possession of a new and colossal nature, of the ocean, of America; but he will make his savages speak the language of Louis XIV., he will bow Atala before a Catholic missionary, and sanctify passions born on the banks of the Mississippi by the solemnities of Catholic ceremonial. Rousseau was the apologist of reverie; Châteaubriand will build the monument of it in order to break it in René. Rousseau preaches Deism with all his eloquence in the “Vicaire Savoyard;” Châteaubriand surrounds the Roman creed with all the garlands of his poetry in the “Génie du Christianisme.” Rousseau appeals to natural law and pleads for the future of nations; Châteaubriand will only sing the glories of the past, the ashes of history and the noble ruins of empires. Always a rôle to be filled, cleverness to be displayed, a parti-pris to be upheld and fame to be won—his theme, one of imagination, his faith one to order, but sincerity, loyalty, candor, seldom or never! Always a real indifference simulating a passion for truth; always an imperious thirst for glory instead of devotion to the good; always the ambitious artist, never the citizen, the believer, the man. Châteaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pygmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of everything by mere force of genius. He is the type of an untoward race, and the father of a disagreeable lineage. But to return to the two episodes. “René” seems to me very superior to “Atala.’” Both the stories show a talent of the first rank, but of the two the beauty of “Atala” is of the more transitory kind. The attempt to render in the style of Versailles the loves of a Natchez and a Seminole, and to describe the manners of the adorers of the Manitous in the tone of Catholic sentiment, was an attempt too violent to succeed. But the work is a tour de force of style, and it was only by the polished classicism of the form, that the romantic matter of the sentiments and the descriptions could have been imported into the colorless literature of the empire. “Atala” is already old-fashioned and theatrical in all the parts which are not descriptive or European—that is to say, throughout all the sentimental savagery. “René” is infinitely more durable. Its theme, which is the malady of a whole generation—distaste for life brought about by idle reverie and the ravages of a vague and unmeasured ambition—is true to reality. Without knowing or wishing it, Châteaubriand has been sincere, for René is himself. This little sketch is in every respect a masterpiece. It is not, like “Atala,” spoilt artistically by intentions alien to the subject, by being made the means of expression of a particular tendency. Instead of taking a passion for René, indeed, future generations will scorn and wonder at him; instead of a hero they will see in him a pathological case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will endure. A work of art will bear all kinds of interpretations; each in turn finds a basis in it, while the work itself, because it represents an idea, and therefore partakes of the richness and complexity which belong to ideas, suffices for all and survives all. A portrait proves whatever one asks of it. Even in its forms of style, in the disdainful generality of the terms in which the story is told, in the terseness of the sentences, in the sequence of the images and of the pictures, traced with classic purity and marvelous vigor, “René” maintains its monumental character. Carved, as it were, in material of the present century, with the tools of classical art, “René” is the immortal cameo of Châteaubriand. We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart in its cunning quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it may deafen the clamor within.