A History of French Literature Part 15

The Count de Caylus (1692-1765), travelling in Italy and the East with the enthusiasm of an archaeologist, presented in his writings an ideal of beauty and grace which was new to sculptors and painters of the time. The discovery of Pompeii followed, after an interval, the discovery of Herculaneum. The Abbe BARTHeLEMY (1716-95) embodied the erudite delights of a lifetime in his _Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grece_ (1788), which seemed a revelation of the genius of h.e.l.lenism as it existed four centuries prior to the Christian era. It was an ideal Greece--the Greece of Winckelmann and Goethe--unalterably gracious, radiantly calm, which was discovered by the eighteenth century; but it served the imaginative needs of the age. We trace its influence in the harmonious forms of Bernardin's and Chateaubriand's imagining, and in the marbles of Canova. A poet, the offspring of a Greek mother and a French father--Andre Chenier--a latter-day Greek or demi-Greek himself, and yet truly a man of his own century, interpreted this new ideal in literary art.

Born at Constantinople in 1762, ANDRe CHeNIER was educated in France, travelled in Switzerland and Italy, resided as secretary to the French Amba.s.sador for three weary years in England--land of mists, land of dull aristocrats--returned to France in 1790, ardent in the cause of const.i.tutional freedom, and defended his opinions and his friends as a journalist. The violences of the Revolution drove him into opposition to the Jacobin party. In March 1794 he was arrested; on the 25th July, two days before the overthrow of Robespierre, Andre Chenier's head fell on the scaffold.

Only two poems, the _Jeu de Paume_ and the _Hymne aux Suisses_, were published by Chenier; after his death appeared in journals the _Jeune Captive_ and the _Jeune Tarentine_; his collected poems, already known in ma.n.u.script to lovers of literature, many of them fragmentary, were issued in 1819. The romantic school had come into existence without his aid; but under Sainte-Beuve's influence it chose to regard him as a predecessor, and during the years about 1830 he was studied and imitated as a master.

He belongs, however, essentially to the eighteenth century, to its graceful sensuality, its revival of antiquity, its faith in human reason, its comprehensive science of nature and of society. In certain of his poems suggested by public occasions he is little more than a disciple of Lebrun. His _elegies_ are rather Franco-Roman than Greek; these, together with beauties of their own, have the characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the mundane voluptuousness of their age. His philosophical poem _Hermes_, of which we have designs and fragments, would have been the _De Rerum Natura_ of an admiring student of Buffon.

In his _eglogues_ and his epic fragments he is a Greek or a demi-Greek, who has learnt directly from Homer, from the pastoral and idyllic poets of antiquity, and from the Anthology. The Greece of Chenier's imagination is the ideal Greece of his time, more finely outlined, more delicately coloured, more exquisitely felt by him than was possible with his contemporaries in an age of prose. "It is the landscape-painter's Greece," writes M. f.a.guet, "the Greece of fair river-banks, of gracious hill-slopes, of comely groups around a well-head or a stream, of harmonious theories beside the voiceful sea, of dancing choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blue heavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the light breathing of the Cyclades."

In the _ambes_, inspired by the emotions of the Revolution during his months of imprisonment, Chenier united modern pa.s.sion with the beauty of cla.s.sic form; satire in these loses its critical temper, and becomes truly lyrical. In his versification he attained new and alluring harmonies; he escaped from the rhythmical uniformity of eighteenth-century verse, gliding sinuously from line to line and from strophe to strophe. He did over again for French poetry the work of the Pleiade, but he did this as one who was a careful student and a critic of Malherbe.

BOOK THE FIFTH 1789-1850

CHAPTER I THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE--MADAME DE STAeL--CHATEAUBRIAND

I

The literature of the Revolution and the Empire is that of a period of transition. Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand announce the future; the writers of an inferior rank represent with declining power the past, and give some faint presentiment of things to come. The great political concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract ideas united with the pa.s.sions of the hour produced poetry which was of the nature of a declamatory pamphlet. Innumerable pieces were presented on the stage, but their literary value is insignificant.

Marie-Joseph Chenier (1764-1811), brother of the great poet who perished on the scaffold, attempted to inaugurate a school of national tragedy in his _Charles IX._; neither he nor the public knew history or possessed the historical sentiment--his tragedy was a revolutionary "school of kings." Arnault, Legouve, Nepomucene Lemercier were applauded for their cla.s.sic dignity, or their depth of characterisation, or their pomp of language. The true tragedy of the time was enacted in the streets and in the clubs. Comedy was welcome in days of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harleville drew mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in _Le Vieux Celibataire_ (1792); Fabre d'Eglantine moralised Moliere to the taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante debased by egoism and accommodations with the world; Louis Laya, during the trial of the King, satirised the pretenders to patriotism in _L'Ami des Lois_, yet escaped the vengeance of the Jacobins.

Historical comedy, a novelty in art, was seen in Lemercier's _Pinto_ (1799), where great events are reduced to petty dimensions, and the destiny of nations is satirically viewed as a vulgar game of trick-track. In his _Christophe Colomb_ of 1809 he dared to despise the unities of time and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless, among the spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial regime.

Baour-Lormian, the translator of _Ossian_ (1801), converted the story of Joseph in Egypt into a frigid tragedy; Hector and Tippoo Sahib, Mahomet II., and Ninus II. (with scenes of Spanish history transported to a.s.syria) diversified the stage. The greatest success was that of Raynouard's _Les Templiers_ (1805); the learned author wisely applied his talents in later years to romance philology. Among the writers of comedy--Andrieux, etienne, Duval, and others--Picard has the merit of reproducing the life of the day, satirising social cla.s.ses and conditions with vivacity and careless mirth. In melodrama, Pixerecourt contributed unconsciously to prepare the way for the romantic stage. Desaugiers, with his gift for gay plebeian song, was the master of the vaudeville.

Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice during the Revolution. The lesser Chenier's _Chanson du Depart_ has in it a stirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Republic sent forth to war with the acclaim of mother and wife and maiden, old men and little children.

Lebrun-_Pindare_, in his ode _Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur_, does not quite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of cla.s.sical imagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse and music, _La Ma.r.s.eillaise_ (1792), was an inspiration which equally lent itself to the enthusiasm of victory and the gallantries of despair. The pseudo-epics and the descriptive poetry of the Empire are laboured and lifeless. But Creuze de Lesser, in his _Chevaliers de la Table-Ronde_ (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian, in his _Poesies Ossianiques_, widened the horizons of literature. The _Panhypocrisiade_ of Lemercier, published in 1819, but written several years earlier--an "infernal comedy of the sixteenth century"--is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, and genius; it bears to Hugo's _Legende des Siecles_ the relation which the megatherium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous a.n.a.logues.

If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's poetry, we may find it in the harmonious melancholy of Chenedolle, in the grace of Fontanes' stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications.

The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition, for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details.

If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out what was commonplace in ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature in the eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and had become a social and political weapon; under the imperial rule this militant function was withdrawn; what remained for literature but frigid ambitions or petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once again recovered?

The Revolution closed the _salons_ and weakened the influence of cultivated society upon literature. Journalism and the pamphlet filled the place left vacant by the _salons_. The _Decade Philosophique_ was the organ of the ideologists, who applied the conceptions of Condillac and his followers to literary and philosophical criticism. In 1789 the _Journal des Debats_ was founded.

Much ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was expended in the columns of the public press. Among the contributors were Andre Chenier, Mallet du Pin, Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine, Camille Desmoulins hoped to render France happy, prosperous, and republican. Heady, vain, pleasure-loving, gay, bitter, sensitive, with outbreaks of generosity and moments of elevation, he did something to redeem his crimes and follies by pleas for justice and mercy in his journal, _Le Vieux Cordelier_, and died, with Danton as his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and despair.

The orators of the Revolution glorified doctrinaire abstractions, overflowed with sentimental humanity, and decorated their harangues with heroic examples of Roman virtue. The most abstract, colourless, and academic was Rousseau's disciple, who took the "Supreme Being"

under his protection, Robespierre. The fervid spirit of the Girondins found its highest expression in Vergniaud, who, with infirm character, few ideas, and a hesitating policy, yet possessed a power of vibrating speech. Danton, the Mirabeau of the populace, was richer in ideas, and with sudden accesses of imagination thundered in words which tended to action; but in general the Mountain cared more for deeds than words. The young Saint-Just thrilled the Convention with icy apothegms which sounded each, short and sharp, like the fall of the knife. Barnave, impetuous in his temper, was clear and measured in discourse, and once in opposition to Mirabeau, defending the royal prerogative, rose beyond himself to the height of a great occasion.

But it was MIRABEAU, and Mirabeau alone, who possessed the genius of a great statesman united with the gifts of an incomparable orator.

Born in 1749, of the old Riquetti family, impulsive, proud, romantic, yet clear of intellect and firmly grasping facts, a thinker and a student, calmly indifferent to religion, irregular in his conduct, the pa.s.sionate foe of his father, the pa.s.sionate lover of his Sophie and of her child, he had conceived, and in a measure comprehended, the Revolution long before the explosion came. Already he was a copious author on political subjects. He knew that France needed individual liberty and individual responsibility; he divined the dangers of a democratic despotism. He hoped by the decentralisation of power to balance Paris by the provinces, and quicken the political life of the whole country; he desired to balance the const.i.tution by playing off the King against the a.s.sembly, and the a.s.sembly against the King, and to control the action of each by the force of public opinion. From Montesquieu he had learnt the gains of separating the legislative, the executive, and the judicial functions. His hatred of aristocracy, enhanced by the hardship of imprisonment at Vincennes, led him to ignore an influence which might have a.s.sisted in the equilibration of power. As an orator his ample and powerful rhetoric rested upon a basis of logic; slow and embarra.s.sed as he began to speak, he warmed as he proceeded, negligent of formal correctness, disdainful of the conventional cla.s.sical decorations, magnificent in gesture, weaving together ideas, imagery, and pa.s.sion. His speech, said Madame de Stael, was "like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilful artist, and fashioning men to his will." At the sitting of the a.s.sembly on April 2, 1791, the President announced, amid murmurs, "Ah! il est mort," which antic.i.p.ated his words, that Gabriel-Honore Riquetti was dead.

"The 18th Brumaire," writes M. Lanson, "silenced the orators. For fifteen years a solitary voice was heard, imperious but eloquent....

Napoleon was the last of the great Revolutionary orators." As he advanced in power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric, and condensed his summons to action into direct, effective words, now simple and going straight at some motive of self-interest, now grandiose to seduce the imagination to his side. Speech with Napoleon was a means of government, and he knew the temper of the men whom he addressed. His own taste in literature was touched with sentimentality; _Ossian_ and _Werther_ were among his favourite books; but what may be styled the official literature of the Empire was of the decaying cla.s.sical or neo-cla.s.sical tradition.

Yet while the democratic imperialism was the direct offspring of the Revolution with its social contract and its rights of man, it was necessary to combat eighteenth-century ideas and defend the throne and the altar. Great scientific names--Laplace, Bichat, Cuvier, Lamarck--testify to the fact that a movement which made the eighteenth century ill.u.s.trious had not spent its force. Scholarship was laying the bases for future constructions; Ginguene published in 1811 the first volumes of his _Histoire Litteraire de l'Italie_; Fauriel and Raynouard acc.u.mulated the materials for their historical, literary, and philological studies. Philosophy was turning away from sensationalism, which seemed to have said its final word, towards spiritualist conceptions. Maine de Biran (1766-1824) found in the primitive fact of consciousness--the _nisus_ of the will--and in the self-recognition of the _ego_ as a cause, an escape from materialism.

Royer-Collard (1763-1845), afterwards more distinguished in politics than he was in speculation, read for his cla.s.s at the Sorbonne from the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and turned it by his commentary as a siege-train against the positions of Condillac.

The germs of new literary growths were in the soil; but the spring came slowly, and after the storms of Revolution were spent, a chill was in the air. Measureless hopes, and what had come of them? infinite desire, and so poor an attainment! A disciple of Rousseau, who shared in his sentiment without his optimistic faith, and who, like Rousseau, felt the beauty of external nature without Rousseau's sense of its joy, etienne Pivert de SeNANCOURT published in 1799 his _Reveries_, a book of disillusion, melancholy atheism, and stoical resistance to sadness, a resistance which he was unable to sustain. It was followed in 1804 by _Obermann_, a romance in epistolary form, in which the writer, disguised in the character of his hero, expresses a fixed and sterile grief, knowing not what he needs, nor what he loves, nor what he wills, lamenting without a cause and desiring without an object. The glories of Swiss landscape, which quicken his imagination, do not suffice to fill the void that is in his soul; yet perhaps in old age--if ever it come--he may resign himself to the infinite illusion of life. It is an indication of the current of the time that fifteen years later, when the _Libres Meditations_ appeared, Senancourt had found his way through a vague theopathy to autumnal brightness, late-born hope, and tranquil reconcilement with existence.

The work of the professional critics of the time--Geoffroy, De Feletz, Dussault, Hoffman--counts now for less than the words of one who was only an amateur of letters, and a moralist who never moralised in public. JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824), the friend of Fontanes and of Chateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity for ideas, and possessing the finest sense of the beauty of literature, lacked the strength and self-confidence needful in a literary career. He read everything; he published nothing; but the _Pensees_, which were collected from his ma.n.u.scripts by Chateaubriand, and his letters reveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious dilettante charmed by literary grace, a writer tormented by the pa.s.sion to put a volume in a page, a page in a phrase, a phrase in a word. Plato in philosophy, Virgil in poetry, satisfy his feeling for beauty and refinement of style. From Voltaire and Rousseau he turns away, offended by their lack of moral feeling, of sanity, of wisdom, of delicacy. A man of the eighteenth century, Joubert had lifted himself into thin clear heights of middle air, where he saw much of the past and something of the future; but the middle air is better suited for speculation than for action.

II

The movement towards the romantic theory and practice of art was fostered in the early years of the nineteenth century by two eminent writers--one a woman with a virile intellect, the other a man with more than a woman's imaginative sensibility--by GERMAINE DE STAeL and by Chateaubriand. The one exhibits the eighteenth century pa.s.sing into the nineteenth, receiving new developments, yet without a breach of continuity; the other represents a reaction against the ideas of the age of the philosophers. Both opened new horizons--one, by the divinations of her ardent intelligence; the other, by his creative genius. Madame de Stael interpreted new ideas and defined a new theory of art. Chateaubriand was himself an extraordinary literary artist.

The style of the one is that of an admirable improvisator, a brilliant and incessant converser; that of the other is at its best a miracle of studied invention, a harmony of colour and of sound. The genius of the one was quickened in brilliant social gatherings; a Parisian _salon_ was her true seat of empire. The genius of the other was nursed in solitude by the tempestuous sea or on the wild and melancholy moors.

Germaine Necker, born in 1766, daughter of the celebrated Swiss banker and future minister of France, a child of precocious intelligence and eager sympathies, reared amid the brilliant society of her mother's _salon_, a girl whose demands on life were large--demands of the intellect, demands of the heart--enamoured of the writings of Rousseau, married at twenty to the Swedish Amba.s.sador, the Baron de Stael-Holstein, herself a light and an inspirer of the const.i.tutional party of reform in the early days of the Revolution, in her literary work opened fresh avenues for nineteenth-century thought. She did not recoil from the eighteenth century, but rather carried forward its better spirit. The Revolution, as a social upheaval, she failed to understand; her ideal was liberty, not equality; and Necker's daughter was a.s.sured that all would be well were liberty established in const.i.tutional forms of government. A republican among aristocrats, she was an aristocrat among republicans. During the years of Revolutionary trouble, the years of her flights from Paris, her returns, excursions, and retreats, she was sustained by her zeal for justice, her pity for the oppressed, and her unquenchable faith in human progress.

A crude panegyric of Rousseau, certain political pamphlets, an _Essai sur les Fictions_, a treatise on the Influence of the Pa.s.sions upon the Happiness of Individuals and Nations (1796), were followed in 1800 by her elaborate study, _De la Litterature consideree dans ses Rapports avec les Inst.i.tutions Sociales_. Its central idea is that of human progress: freedom, incarnated in republican inst.i.tutions, will a.s.sure the natural development of the spirit of man; a great literature will be the offspring of progress and of freedom; and each nation will lend its lights to other nations to illuminate the general advance. Madame de Stael hoped to cast the spell of her intellect over the young conqueror Bonaparte; Bonaparte regarded a political meteor in feminine form with cold and haughty aversion. In 1802 the husband, whom she had never loved, was dead. Her pa.s.sion for Benjamin Constant had pa.s.sed through various crises in its troubled career--a series of attractions ending in repulsions, and repulsions leading to attractions, such as may be discovered in Constant's remarkable novel _Adolphe_. They could neither decide to unite their lives, nor to part for ever. Adolphe, in Constant's novel, after a youth of pleasure-seeking, is disenchanted with life; his love of Ellenore is that of one whose pa.s.sions are exhausted, who loves for vanity or a new indulgence of egoism; but Ellenore, whose youth is past, will abandon all for him, and she imposes on him the tyranny of her devotion. Each is the other's torturer, each is the other's consolation. In the mastery of his cruel psychology Constant antic.i.p.ates Balzac.

Madame de Stael lightened the stress of inward storm by writing _Delphine_, the story of a woman of genius, whose heroic follies bring her into warfare with the world. The lover of Delphine, violent and feeble, sentimental and egoistic, is an accomplice of the world in doing her wrong, and Delphine has no refuge but death in the wilds of America.[1]

[Footnote 1: In the first edition, Delphine dies by her own hand.]

In 1803 Madame de Stael received orders to trouble Paris with her torrent of ideas and of speech no longer. The ill.u.s.trious victim of Napoleon's persecution hastened to display her ideas at Weimar, where Goethe protected his equanimity, as well as might be, from the storm of her approach, and Schiller endured her literary enthusiasm with a sense of prostration. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, tutor to her sons, became the interpreter of Germany to her eager and apprehensive mind. Having annexed Germany to her empire, she advanced to the conquest of Italy, and had her Roman triumph. England, which she had visited in her Revolutionary flights, and Italy conspired in the creation of her novel _Corinne_ (1807). It is again the history of a woman of genius, beautiful, generous, enthusiastic, whom the world understands imperfectly, and whom her English lover, after his fit of Italian romance, discards with the characteristic British phlegm.

The paintings of Italian nature are rhetorical exercises; the writer's sympathy with art and history is of more value; the interpretation of a woman's heart is alive with personal feeling.

Madame de Stael's novels are old now, which means that they once were young, and for her own generation they had the freshness and charm of youth.

Her father's death had turned her thoughts towards religion. A Protestant and a liberal, her spiritualist faith now found support in the moral strength of Christianity. She was not, like Chateaubriand, an epicurean and a Catholic; she did not care to decorate religion with flowers, or make it fragrant with incense; it spoke to her not through the senses, but directly to the conscience, the affections, and the will. In the chapters of her book on Germany which treat of "the religion of enthusiasm," her devout lat.i.tudinarianism finds expression.

The book _De l'Allemagne_, published in London in 1813, after the confiscation and destruction of the Paris edition by the imperial police, prepared the way by criticism for the romantic movement. It treats of manners, letters, art, philosophy, religion, interpreting with astonishing insight, however it may have erred in important details, the mind of Germany to the mind of France. It was a Germany of poets, dreamers, and metaphysicians, loyal and sincere, but incapable of patriotic pa.s.sion, disqualified for action and for freedom, which she in 1804 had discovered. The life of society produces literature in France; the genius of inward meditation and sentiment produces literature in Germany. The literature and art of the South are cla.s.sical, those of the North are romantic; and since the life of our own race and the spirit of our own religion are infused into romantic art, it has in it possibilities of indefinite growth.

Madame de Stael advanced criticism by her sense that art and literature are relative to ages, races, governments, environments.

She dreamed of an European or cosmopolitan literature, in which each nation, while retaining its special characteristics, should be in fruitful communication with its fellows.

In 1811 Madame de Stael, when forty-five, became the wife of Albert de Rocca, a young Swiss officer, more than twenty years her junior.

Their courage was rewarded by six years of happiness. Austria, Poland, Russia, Sweden, England were visited. Upon the fall of Napoleon Madame de Stael was once more in Paris, and there in 1817 she died. The _Dix Annees d'Exil_, posthumously published, records a portion of her agitated life, and exhales her indignation against her imperial persecutor. The unfinished _Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise_, designed originally as an apology for Necker, defends the Revolution while admitting its crimes and errors; its true object, as the writer conceived--political liberty--had been in the end attained; her ideal of liberty was indeed far from that of a revolutionary democracy; England, liberal, const.i.tutional, with a system at once popular and aristocratic, was the country in which she saw her political aspirations most nearly realised.

III

FRANcOIS-RENe DE CHATEAUBRIAND was born in 1768, at St.-Malo, of an ancient Breton family. Except for the companionship of an elder sister, of fragile health and romantic temper, his childhood was solitary.

The presence of the old count his father inspired terror. The boy's society was with the waves and winds, or at the old chateau of Combourg, with lonely woods and wilds. Horace, Tibullus, _Telemaque_, the sermons of Ma.s.sillon, nourished his imagination or stimulated his religious sentiment; but solitude and nature were his chief inspirers.

At seventeen he already seemed worn with the fatigue of unsatisfied dreaming, before he had begun to know life. A commission in the army was procured for him. He saw, interested yet alien in heart, something of literary life in Paris; then in Revolution days (1791) he quitted France, and, with the dream of discovering the North-West Pa.s.sage, set sail to America. If he did not make any geographical discovery, Chateaubriand found his own genius in the western world. The news of the execution of Louis XVI. decided him to return; a Breton and a royalist should show himself among the ranks of the emigrants. To gratify the wish of his family, he married before crossing the frontier. Madame de Chateaubriand had the dignity to veil her sorrow caused by an imperfect union, and at a later time she won such a portion of her husband's regard as he could devote to another than himself.

The episode of war having soon closed--not without a wound and a serious illness--he found a refuge in London, enduring dire poverty, but possessing the consolation of friendship with Joubert and Fontanes, and there he published in 1797 his first work, the _Essai sur les Revolutions_. The doctrine of human progress had been part of the religion of the eighteenth century; Chateaubriand in 1797 had faith neither in social, nor political, nor religious progress. Why be deceived by the hopes of revolution, since humanity can only circle for ever through an exhausting round of illusions? The death of his mother and words of a dying sister awakened him from his melancholy mood; he resolved to write a second book, which should correct the errors of the first, and exhibit a source of hope and joy in religion.

To the eighteenth century Christianity had appeared as a gross and barbarous superst.i.tion; he would show that it was a religion of beauty, the divine mother of poetry and of art, a spring of poetic thought and feeling alike through its dogma and its ritual; he would convert literature from its decaying cult of cla.s.sicism, and restore to honour the despised Middle Ages.

The _Genie du Christianisme_, begun during its author's residence in London, was not completed until four years later. In 1801, detaching a fragment from his poetic apology for religion, he published his _Atala, ou les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert_.

It is a romance, or rather a prose poem, in which the magic of style, the enchantment of descriptive power, the large feeling for nature, the sensibility to human pa.s.sion, conceal many infirmities of design and of feeling. Chateaubriand suddenly entered into his fame.

On April 18, 1802, the Concordat was celebrated with high solemnities; the Archbishop of Paris received the First Consul within the portals of Notre-Dame. It was the fitting moment for the publication of the _Genie du Christianisme_. Its value as an argumentative defence of Christianity may not be great; but it was the restoration of religion to art, it contained or implied a new system of aesthetics, it was a glorification of devout sentiment, it was a pompous manifesto of romanticism, it recovered a lost ideal of beauty. From Ronsard to Chenier the aim of art had been to imitate the ancients, while imitating or interpreting life. Let us be national, let us be modern, let us therefore be Christians, declared Chateaubriand, and let us seek for our tradition in the great Christian ages. It was a revolution in art for which he pleaded, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the revolution was in active progress.