CHATEAUBRIAND

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 65, Issue 5493, 3 July 1942, Page 4

CHATEAUBRIAND

HIS CHECKERED RECORD LITTERATEUR AND LOVER (By C.R.8.) In any discussion of Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, it is a debatable point whether he practised literature as a pastime and made life the fine art. It has to be remembered that he flaunted through the vivid period of French history just antecedent to the Revolution, and thence on through the rise and downfall of Napoleon when living was a splendor and adventure and a mot or an epigram was a passport to society. When fully studied his record with its conspicuous comings and goings, its elevations and debasements and the surging passions and idiocies that made him so successful with the ladies, supports the conclusion that his fine writing was merely a postscript to his own heavily “bannered” story in the world of affairs. For this reason alone Chateaubriand is an extraordinary figure. Whatever he did with his pen—and his achievements run into several big volumes —it is fair to say that he drained life to the dregs. True enough, he was often, solitary and penniless, and his end was Fate’s frequent reward to an upstart soul. Nevertheless he had the imagination to wring all the color and climaxes of a four-act play out of the most preposterous defeats.

EARLY AUSTERITIES An egomaniac, this man was the sickly sixth child of another egomaniac. Rene Auguste, Comte de Combourg; a moody fellow who massed a fortune of 600,000 livres out of the then relatively genteel businesses of privateering and slave trading. He squandered 340,000 livres in acquiring the feudal fortress of Combourg in which to parade like a ponderous Hamlet for the rest of his days. In this atmosphere of feudal landlordism with its prim time-tables and cavernous gloom, the future poet of France grew up, turning his eyes in escape, it woulcj seem, to the sky, the birds and the trees. The austerities of his mother, a deeply religious woman, must have temporarily affected his somewhat vivacious outlook, for at one period he was definitely studying for the priesthood. Ultimately he entered the army, and in 1787, when he was only 19, he was presented at Court. At this stage he had just discovered Paris and was tasting the first of a long series of rapturous experiences which was to bring him all the pangs of ennui and disappointment, but never the comfort Of satiety and repose. The French Revolution came. At first ah impartial spectator of violences which eventually brought his own brother to the scaffold and were to mean the imprisonment of his mother, his young wife and his two

forlorn sisters, he quickly left in disgust for America, for the purpose so he announced, of finding the North-West passage. That ambition did not detain him or President Washington, to whom, by the way he was introduced; but his journey was responsible for the bursting into flower of his literary talent. He became enchanted with the scenic magnificance of the American cantinent, and threw all his impressions into the background of “Atala,” a strangely artless love story of two young Red Indians, in which the scene painting was superb, but in which the lofty expression of the lovers’ singularly European sentiments robbed them of all nationality and meaning.

Yet cleverly publicised by his friends, “Atala,” when issued in small book form, was said to have shaken the world. Many of his contemporaries raved about the performance, and it is historically true that ( wax models of his characters were sold on the boulevards of Paris. Viewed soberly to-day, however, “Atala” is just a piece of pretty writing. It is of the same sweetish literary rank as his “Les Aventures du Dernier Abencerage,” the record of the devout love of a Moor for a Spanish maiden, which, according to the well-informed Andrew Maurois, celebrated the author’s affection for the beauteous Natalie de Noaillees. LITERARY CONFECTIONERY Possibly confectionery had become intensely palatable to an elderly Revolution that was weary of blood; but it was Chateaubriand’s “Genie du Christianisme” which was to give him his true position in letters. Though he had been sceptic and pagan, he had been educated from childhood in the ritual of the Church of Rome. The strength of that faith he had frequently declared. This orthodoxy is the only reality about the heroine of “Les Aventures du Dernier Abencerage,” and it tinkles like distant church bells through the most passionate passages of “Atala.” In “Genie du Christianisme” the faith became a formless but magnificent parade of verbal exultations fetching the eye of the literary connoisseur even if here and 'there the fatuity of over-ardency is visible and the sophistry, born of shallow thinking, rears its silly head. Portions of the book had been started during his exile in London, and it was certain that he had originally intended to issue his message as a pamphlet. But the grandeur of his religion, still towering to the skies when the tumbrils were rumbling and the guillotine was in the midst of

gruesome feasts, fully seized his pen at the outset and sent it raving in salutation for page on page to a magic end. Give it its due, the book established his authority as a man of letters. It caught the fancy of the astute Napoleon, to whom the author had dedicated the work, and it brought him his warmest renown. Even Sainte Beuve, censorious of Chateaubriand in other directions, had to reach out for ripe superlatives in applause.

“Genie du Christianisme” is Chateaubriand’s best bit of writing. There are many brilliant flashes of his peculiar genius in his “Essai sur les Revolutions,” in the headlong record of his journey from Paris to Jerusalem, in “Les Martyrs” and in “Memories d’Outre-tombe,” but his tribute to the Christain Church will ever reign supreme. PUPPET OF VANITY If he had been content with his impressive literary achievement he would have a higher repute to-day. But he was the puppet of his vanity and under its direction he stroVe to be a heaven-sent statesriian and ambassador under the Bourbons and the first Napoleon. Admittedly, he had some idea of loyal service, but he bored and then annoyed his august patron by his fickleness and imbecility on many serious occasions. He was not without a certain poise and appeal enhanced by the lustre of his literary feats; but he was too unstable and reckless to give the monarchs and Ministers concerned the proper sense of security in delicate situations.

Then, again there was his astounding record as a lover which was ugly with treacheries over a long period of years. There is nothing inspiring about a lover who was capable of any meanness, even of the almost original exploit of borrowing from one devoted mistress to finance another. Despite the fact that he was physically unexciting, he raced from triumph to triumph among some of the most striking beauties of his time, even involving the lovely and unimpeachable Madame Recamier in years of tender worship at his feet. What was there about this man to attract the eye of a woman who herself was sought by practically every other man of consequence of the time? Yet she clung to Chateaubriand until she was blind and he was broken and alone. History holds few stranger instances of a rare woman’s adherence to a scoundrel.