that the great spiritual streams which flow from other countries into France at the beginning of the nineteenth century have their source, and to Rousseau is it due that the literature produced by Frenchmen living in remote provinces or foreign countries, in spite of its antagonism to the spirit which produced and upheld the imperial despotism, remained in touch with the eighteenth century, and was based upon originally French theories.

I

CHATEAUBRIAND

The year 1800 was the first to produce a book bearing the imprint of the new era, a work small in size, but great in significance and mighty in the impression it made. Atala took the French public by storm in a way which no book had done since the days of Paul and Virginia. It was a romance of the plains and mysterious forests of North America, with a strong, strange aroma of the untilled soil from which it sprang; it glowed with rich foreign colouring, and with the fiercer glow of consuming passion. The history of a repressed, and therefore overpowering and fatal love, was depicted upon a background of wild Indian life, the effect of the whole being heightened by a varnish of Roman Catholic piety.

This story of the love and death of a Christian Indian girl was so admired that its principal characters were soon to be seen adorning the walls of French inns in the form of coloured prints, while their waxen images were sold on the quays of Paris, as those of Christ and the Virgin usually are in Catholic countries. At one of the suburban theatres the heroine figured in savage attire with cock's feathers in her hair, and a farce was given at the Théâtre des Variétés in which a school girl and boy, who had eloped, talked of nothing but alligators, storks, and virgin forests in the style of Atala. A parody published under the title of "Ah! là! là!" substituted for the long, gorgeous description of Mississippi scenery an equally lengthy and detailed description of a potato patch—so strange did it seem at that day that an author should devote several pages to the description of natural scenery. But though parodies, jests, and caricatures rained upon the author, he was not to be pitied, such things being symptoms of fame. With one bound he had risen from complete obscurity to the rank of a celebrity. His name was upon all lips, the name of François René de Chateaubriand.

The youngest of ten children, he was born of an ancient and noble house in St. Malo, Brittany. His father was a stern, dry, unsociable and silent man, whose one passion was his pride of race; while his mother, a little, plain, restless, discontented woman, was God-fearing to the highest degree, a church-goer and a patroness of priests. The son inherited a mixture of both natures.

Sternly brought up in a home where, as he himself expressed it, the father was the terror and the mother the scourge of the household, he was reserved and shy, an obstinate, excitable, melancholy child, early familiar with the unrest of the sea and the music of its storms, never reconciled to the discomfort and coldness of his home. His sister Lucile, the nearest him in age, was his one friend and confidante. Like him, she was of a morbid and passionate temperament, year by year more prone, like Rousseau, to suspect every one of conspiracy against her, and to regard herself as persecuted. In her childhood it was to her brother, in later life to religion, that she turned for protection in these troubles and dangers. At first plain and shy, like her brother, she afterwards became very beautiful; with her pale face and dark hair she was like a lovely angel of death. She passed the greater part of her life in convents; was passionate in her sisterly love, and passionately Catholic; she had considerable poetic talent, and in shyness and romantic excitability she seems to have been the feminine counterpart of her brother. Another sister, Julie, having passed her youth as a gay woman of the world, ended her life in the most saintly self-renunciation. The tendency towards Catholicism seems to have run in the blood of the whole family.

The great constraint of young Chateaubriand's upbringing induced in him a wild longing to be free and his own master, while the perpetual surveillance under which he suffered created an overwhelming, misanthropic desire for solitude. When he ran alone down the stairs of the old manor-house, or went out with his gun, he felt all the passions boiling and seething within him in wild ecstasy at being able to dream and long unrestrainedly. Ill at ease in the society of others, he plunged when alone into dreams of happiness and ambition, the dreams of a poet. In this half-sensuous, half-spiritual dreaming and longing, he created the image of a supernaturally charming woman, a youthful queen, bedecked with flowers and jewels, whom he loved and by whom he was beloved in the balmy, moonlit nights of Naples or Sicily. To awake from these dreams and realise the insignificant little Breton that he was, awkward, unknown, poor and possibly without talent, was torture to him. The contrast between what he was and what he longed to be overwhelmed him.

He was at first intended for the navy, but his unconquerable aversion to discipline proved an insurmountable obstacle, and his thoughts turned to the Church, from which, however, a conviction of his unfitness for a life of renunciation made him draw back. In the depth of his despondency he attempted to commit suicide. An irrevocable family decision put an end to his vacillation; he was given a commission as sub-lieutenant in the army, and found the life to his liking. As a cadet of a noble family he was presented to Louis XVI., at whose court he witnessed the last glimmer of the old splendour and ceremony of royalty. Two years later the Revolution broke out, and in 1790 rank, titles, and feudal rights were abolished. Chateaubriand gave up his commission, and, as no occupation offered itself under the new order, or disorder, he conceived the fantastic plan of travelling to America to discover the North-West Passage. Without any of the requisite information, without interest or money, he was inevitably soon obliged to abandon this project. But if he did not find the North-West Passage, he did discover a new race, fresh conditions, and new scenery. In his early youth, after reading Rousseau, he had conceived the idea of writing the Epic of Primitive Man, a description of the ways of the savages of whom he knew nothing. Now he was upon their own soil, in their world, and though they were not as untouched by civilisation as he had imagined, it was not difficult to reconstruct their original condition. The first impression he received of them was undeniably a strange one. On the way from Albany to Niagara, when his guide led him for the first time into the virgin forest, he was seized by one of those transports of delight in his independence which he had felt in his early youth when he went hunting in Brittany. He wandered from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to himself: "Here are no roads, no towns, no monarchies, no republics, no men." Imagining himself to be alone in the forest, he suddenly came upon a score of half-naked, painted savages with ravens' feathers in their hair and rings in their noses, who—marvellous to relate!—were dancing quadrilles to the sounds of a violin played by a little powdered and frizzed Frenchman, once kitchen-boy to a French general, now retained as dancing-master by these savages for a consideration of beaver-skins and bear-hams. What a humiliating introduction to primitive life for a pupil of Rousseau! Subsequent impressions were, fortunately, simpler and more beautiful than this. Chateaubriand purchased clothes and weapons from the Indians, and lived their life for some weeks at least. He was presented to the Sachem, or chief, of the Onondagas (as Byron at a later period was presented to Ali Pasha); he rode through the country, coming here and there upon little European houses, with their