Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

Châteaubriand and M. de Villéle.

23

from first to last, just as, to be accepted by the retrograde party, to whom he, from an inconceivable aberration, chose to attach himself, was necessarily forced to trample upon what he was reproached with as the "Liberalism" of his early days. During Louis XVIII.'s reign, M. de Châteaubriand's whole time was employed in trying to outwit M. de Villèle, having vainly tried to seduce him into being his subordinate. At the Congress of Verona we find Châteaubriand, with a curious oblivion of his own dignity, writing to M. de Villèle that he shall be successful were he known to be entirely "M. de Villèle's man" (si on sait que je suis votre homme); and a short time after, there is no malicious trick he does not attempt to play his more prosaic but very cunning colleague. The end of this is, the abrupt dismissal of Châteaubriand from his short-lived ministry, and the installation, ad interim, of M. de Villèle in his place! This was in 1824. A more unwarrantably harsh proceeding (in its form), or a more ill-advised one, as the sequel showed, could scarcely be imagined, and the open quarrel with M. de Villèle may be said to have caused the first party struggles to the long endurance and growing bitterness of which the government of the Bourbons ended by succumbing, after fifteen years of insufficiently organised re

sistance.

It is singular enough that, on the occasion of the attack upon M. Decazes in 1820, the best friend Châteaubriand ever hadM. de Fontanes-was irresistibly led into saying of him what twenty years before had been said by one of his worst enemies. "Cet intrigant est un méchant homme," said Cardinal Fesch of his troublesome secretary. "Take care of yourselves!" exclaimed Fontanes, when he saw that the ministry meant to resist,-" Gare a vous autres: Châteaubriand est un terrible homme, c'est un homme de génie implacable."

This was but too true; and the implacability of self-love being superadded, from the moment when M. de Châteaubriand contracted the unnatural alliance which bound him to the retrograde party in France, he had no peace until the hopes of the Liberals were defeated. Had Louis XVIII. lived ten years longer, M. de Châteaubriand would have been thrown effectually into the back-ground; for the King knew that in the genuine and sincere practice of constitutional government lay the only chance of salvation for the dynasty and for France, and he accordingly did practise it sincerely; but Louis XVIII. once dead, and the un-constitutional party represented on the throne by Charles X., the capricious author of La Monarchie selon la Charte had every means afforded him of aiding in the task of precipitating the country to inevitable ruin. But, like all men who have often changed their convictions, Châteaubriand was

distrusted by those to whom he gave his utmost support; and whilst Louis XVIII. suspected in him an agent of that retrograde faction, in which he wisely recognised the greatest danger to the state, Charles X. was suspicious of him for his recent attachment to liberal ideas. This distrust of the King's made the fortune of Châteaubriand till his death, and, in the eyes of modern Royalists, the author of René was the representative of that pure constitutional form of government, which, as in Great Britain, gives the utmost amount of freedom to the subject, with the utmost amount of respect to the Crown. This was a mistake. Châteaubriand had joined with the ultras, to impede the progress of the only really constitutional government France ever had-that of which, under Louis XVIII., M. Decazes was, as minister, the faithful exponent, and he merely assumed a liberal air under the ministry of M. de Polignac and the reign of Charles X., because he thought that it would produce a greater effect. "You think that if M. de Laval were Foreign Minister, I should be better able to work with him," writes M. de Châteaubriand, from his Embassy in Rome, in 1829,-"You are wrong; I do not feel inclined to work with anybody!"-a naive but true confession, as M. Villemain observes." Je suis disposé à ne m'entendre avec personne!" The man's whole selfish and eminently wayward character is shown in these words.

Our readers may perhaps think time might be better employed than in studying the life of a politician who, like Châteaubriand, was of such small political usefulness to his own country. But Châteaubriand was not a political man only. He was, as we said in the beginning of this Essay, a man whose literary influence lies at the source of nearly all the modern literature of France: he helps to afford the philosopher and historical student a clearer insight into the intimate workings of the mind of Napoleon Bonaparte; he is the abettor of many of the errors that drove the Restoration to the catastrophe of 1830; and he is the type of a whole class of Frenchmen, of that peculiarly mischievous race, in whom the caprice for action disturbing the tendency to thought, leaves neither character complete, and mars the perfect existence of either a genuine thinker, or a plain manly doer of deeds.

Were it not even for all these reasons, we would still strongly recommend our readers to read attentively M. Villemain's Life of Châteaubriand. They will find in it the evidence of what a great mind feels and finds expression for, even under such an iron rule of compression as that which now weighs down France, and they will, in matters of History, Poetry, Politics, and Art, profit by the not less generous, because matured judgments, of one of the greatest æstheticians of any age.

[ocr errors]
[blocks in formation]

ART. II.-Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. By the Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE, D.C.L., M.P. 3 Vols. Oxford University Press.

THERE is a reality about Homer which time can never mellow down into something visionary and shadowy; there is a freshness in his verse, which the tedium of millions of schoolboys can never rub off. The Iliad and Odyssey are always on the horizon of literature, and at every turn meet our gaze. Virgil has had his age of renown, as Diomed's battle-rage has its book in the Iliad; so has Horace had his. Homer has seldom, in modern times, been the book of a generation, only because he is the book of all. In this sense, Mr Hallam is right, when he assigns pre-eminent popularity to him above all poets, ancient and modern. His great influence-whether direct, through readers, or indirect, through readers of those who have formed themselves by them-has always been an element in literary history. From those distant eminences of the Iliad and Odyssey the inhabitants often come down, and mingle in the business of our life. We listen to their tales of enchantment in the mediæval chivalry of Tasso and Ariosto; we turn round, and catch in the tone of the narrative or the adventure, the glow of a type borrowed from an Agamemnon or an Achilles. In our own accents, they talk to us from the pages of our own poets, and even lurk behind the vigour of Shakespeare, or the measured declamation of Dryden.

But this literary ubiquity, which is so clear a test of the surpassing merit of Homer, is injurious, perhaps, to the fame of his critics and commentators. A volume which should extol a Claudian or an Ausonius, might, as to any results effected by its arguments, be useless; but, if these were sufficiently ingenious, it would remain long on the surface of literature, simply from the fact of its subject-matter being such as not to allow it to blend with more solid works. An eccentric effort of power has always a chance of becoming, at least, the Wandering Jew of literature. A critique on Homer, unless it aim at destroying its idol by impugning his personality, has little hope of such a position. It must, sooner or later, fall into the body of the current of its theme, like any famous dictionary, and help to swell the stream; it will not be allowed to dwindle away as a separate and independent rivulet. This is the common fate of books introductory to other books; but they are not therefore the least useful or influential agents in human progress. Dr Johnson's Dictionary has long succumbed to Webster and Richardson; but it would be as foolish to consider the

years expended on that great work thrown away, as to lament our expenditure on the loaf we eat, or the coat we wore last year. Few books have given a more palpable impulse to the political literature, and even the political instincts, of their own day, than the "Letters of Junius;" yet who now reads those fiery declamations? It would be a curious spectacle, could we have a tabular classification of works, drawn up according to their relative influence on their immediate successors, and so upon the long line of literature following. We should observe the great names radiating, as it were, equally through all ages, not more conspicuous during their own than in one a dozen generations off. Shakespeare would be there not more prominent than Jonson, or Milton than Cowley. The great representatives of their era,-the men who seem the centres of the time, and the bright points in the darkness of their several periods, natives therein, and not mere chance guests,—would be those who have long since died out of the small list of the classics who are read. Their rank is known to us as a matter of history, not of our own consciousness, and through the eulogiums scattered throughout the liberal pages of their far loftier contemporaries, where they lie like flies embalmed in amber.

Many will probably be disposed to complain that Mr Gladstone has taken up his position along with the latter class, and spent his rare ingenuity and subtlety on what may, perhaps, earn the praise of skill and versatility, but must soon be forgotten. It will have seemed to them a prodigal waste of powers and enthusiasm which might have set parties in a flame, to hunt after the fame of a pioneer before the steps of the Father of verse, who carries no voters in his train, and cannot even muster up an Election cry. They will not allow that whatever makes an age, even in its schoolboy studies, more earnest; whatever gives it topics of interest and thought, and tends to prevent it from growing into a stagnant pool, a nuisance to itself and neighbouring times, is so far worthy of praise. Last century might have been far worse even than it was, had it been without the stimulating zeal and vigour of those great PreRaphaelites in the field of critical art-the Bentleys and Parrs. But Mr Gladstone does not need any such qualified apology for these volumes. His subject is neither merely a sublime poem, nor merely an æsthetically blank repository of valuable antiquarian and historical facts; it is the most truthful and ancient of poets singing of the most heroic and eventful of themes.

A false sort of prestige has at times attached to early times, as though the accident that they are primitive confers upon them a sure title to veneration. But those ages nearer the beginning have no undoubted prerogative of genius, or right to

Homer not Indebted to Associations.

27

respect. They have not necessarily the innocence of childhood; and, in the absence of that, they cannot but have the stolidity and rudeness of brute nature. There is no medium; and instances from savage life, perhaps, far more commonly reveal the latter as the normal state of things. Nevertheless, nothing is so common as to find men falling into an indiscriminate reverence for all that is old, as though that were in itself something glorious. On this account, it is fortunate that the fact of the neglect of sordid Hesiod appears side by side with the universal sway of Homer, furnishing so obvious an answer to those insulting panegyrics of the latter, based simply upon his antiquity, and the simplicity of his age. It shows that antiquity, by itself, is no reason for our admiration. It is only when conjoined with brilliant qualities, ordinarily found to be the tardy growth of late ripening art, that the guilelessness of a primitive period becomes a virtue. We do not look with any surprise at stones older far than Adam, while a bracelet worn by Alfred, or the supposed sceptre of Charlemagne thrills us through. To an essentially great poet, such as Homer, priority in time, his advantage over the tribe of bards by a thousand or so of years, has not been the reason, but a kind of outward badge of pre-eminence which Time has bestowed. Associations we all have with his name, but he does not owe his place to this clustering about his name of reminiscences of boyish labour, and the freshness of a first appreciation of beauty. Could we see Horace, as Plato, in his terrible "Vision of Souls," saw the spirits of the tyrants and lustful lords of the past, we should behold him incrusted with schoolboy pleasures and pains. Virgil himself has some obligations of the same sort. But Homer, with Shakespeare and all the few greatest, soars above all possibility of contact with, or debt to such sources. As the wings of his genius expand, they shake off these adventitious associations, as lightly and as gracefully as the lark shakes off the dew at dawn. They wander and float round about his feet, like the clouds about Jove on Ida, but the mass of his poetic faculty is seen through them, and above them. It is not on account of his place in education that he is venerated, but for his loyalty to truth, and therefore to the essence and root of all that is grandest in imagination and poetry.

Of no other poem can we say, as we may of these, that whether realities sat for the portraits or no, we can, and even must imagine each hero as a really existing being. Their pictures are too natural and palpable for a romance; the features of every-day life are kept too carefully trimmed, and are too entirely penetrated with passion for an essay or a chronicle. Without ceasing to be poetical, he never forgets that he is narrating part of his nation's history. In fact, it is in his peculiar

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »