due to the French author for the able,
anxious, and oftentimes generous justice which he has rendered to
English literature. It is most gratifying to a thoughtful
Englishman--that precisely from that period when the mighty drama of the
French Revolution, like the Deluge, or like the early growth of
Christianity, or like the Reformation, had been in operation long enough
to form a new and more thoughtful generation in France, has the English
literature been first studied in France, and first appreciated. Since
1810, when the generation moulded by the Revolution was beginning to
come forward on the stage of national action, a continued series of able
writers amongst the French--ardent, noble, profound--have laid aside
their nationality in the most generous spirit for the express purpose of
investigating the great English models of intellectual power, locally so
near to their own native models, and virtually in such polar remoteness.
Chateaubriand's intense enthusiasm for Milton, almost monomaniac in the
opinion of some people, is notorious. This, however, was less
astonishing: the pure marble grandeur of Milton, and his classical
severity, naturally recommended themselves to the French taste, which
can always understand the beauty of proportion and regular or teleologic
tendencies. It was with regard to the anomalous, and to that sort of
vaster harmonies which from moving upon a wider scale are apt at first
sight to pass for discords, that a new taste needed to be created in
France. Here Chateaubriand showed himself a Frenchman of the old leaven.
Milton would always have been estimated in France. He needed only to be
better known. Shakspeare was the _natural_ stone of offence: and with
regard to _him_ Chateaubriand has shown himself eminently blind. His
reference to Shakspeare's _female_ gallery, so divine as that Pantheon
really is, by way of most forcibly expressing his supposed inferiority
to Racine (who strictly speaking has no female pictures at all, but
merely _umrisse_ or outlines in pencil) is the very perfection of human
blindness. But many years ago the writers in _Le Globe_, either by
direct papers on the drama or indirectly by way of references to the
acting of Kean, etc., showed that even as to Shakspeare a new heart was
arising in France. M. Raymond de Vericour, though necessarily called off
to a more special consideration of the Miltonic poetry by the very
promise of his title (_Milton, et la Poesie Epique_: