National Review

GREAT men, of the very first order of greatness," the heights and pinnacles of human mind,"-are of no country. They are cosmopolitan, not national. They belong not to the Teutonic, or the Anglo-Saxon, or the Italian, or the Gallic race, but to the Human race. They are stamped with the features, rich with the endowments, mighty with the power, instinct with the life, not of this or that phase or section of humanity, but of humanity itself, in its most unlimited development and its loftiest possibilities. There is no apparent reason why they might not have been born in any one of the nations into which the civilised modern world is divided as well as in another. The universal elements of their character and their intelligence override and obliterate the special ones. We do not think of Shakespeare and Bacon, of Spinoza and Descartes, of Newton and Galileo, of Columbus or Michael Angelo, of Kant or Goethe, as Frenchmen or Englishmen, Germans or Italians, but as MEN, whose capacities and whose achievements are at once the patrimony and the illustration of all peoples and all lands alike.

But there are great men of a secondary stature and a more bounded range, men darkly wise and imperfectly and irregularly great, yet whose greatness cannot be disputed, since, in spite of many moral short-comings and much intellectual frailty, they have filled a large space in the world's eye, have done good service and earned high fame, have notably influenced the actions and the

No. XXIII. JANUARY 1861.

thoughts of their contemporaries, and produced works "which after-times will not willingly let die," and yet who are so prominently marked with the impress of their age and country, that no one can for a moment fail to recognise their origin. Every page of their writings, every incident of their career, every power they evince, every weakness they betray, proclaims aloud the Briton or the Frank. And we speak here not only of men of talent, but of men of unquestionable genius too. "Talent," as Sir James Mackintosh well defined it, is "habitual power of execution:" it is of many descriptions; it may be generated to some extent; it may be cultivated to almost any extent; and will naturally have a local stamp and colouring. "Genius" implies a special gift, an innate and peculiar endowment; Providence, with a mysterious and uncontrollable sovereignty, drops the seed into any soil; it might be expected, therefore, to be purely personal, rather than redolent of time and place. Yet, except in the case of those paramount and abnormal Intelligences of whom we have spoken above, men of genius, for the most part, are essentially national and secular,-visibly stamped with the image and superscription of the era in which they lived, and the land which gave them birth.

Of this secondary order of great men-unquestionably a man of genius, unquestionably also and par excellence a Frenchman, and a Frenchman of the nineteenth century-CHATEAUBRIAND was one of the most eminent and the most special. His career, his character, and his writings, are well worth the pains of studying. His career extended over the whole of the most momentous and exciting epoch of modern history, and was involved in some of its most stirring scenes. He was born in 1768, and died in 1848. He was old enough to feel an interest in the establishment of American Independence; and he lived to see the United States swell in number from thirteen to thirty-three, and their statesmen dwindle in capacity from Washington to Polk. He was presented in his eighteenth year to Louis XVI. in the days of his grandeur at Versailles, and he might have been presented in his eightieth year to Louis Napoleon, at the Elysée, as he marched back from exile on his way to the imperial throne. He was a fugitive to England in his youth, and ambassador to England in his old age. He served Napoleon, and he served Charles X. He lived through the three great moral, political, and social convulsions of modern times-the revolution of 1789, the revolution of 1830, the revolution of 1848. He was born under feudalism; he died under socialism. He opened his eyes on France when she was an ancient and hereditary monarchy: he beheld her "every thing in turn and nothing long;" he lived to see the Second Republic, and almost to see the Second Empire,

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National Review, Том 12