ll the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is
preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense. With
the eighteenth century, however, a change came. The age was a critical
age--an age of prose and common sense; the rhetorical impulse faded
away, to find expression only in melodramatic tragedy and dull verse;
and the style of Voltaire, so brilliant and yet so colourless, so
limited and yet so infinitely sensible, symbolized the literary
character of the century. The Romantic Movement was an immense reaction
against the realism which had come to such perfection in the acid prose
of Voltaire. It was a reassertion of the rhetorical instinct in all its
strength and in all its forms. There was no attempt simply to redress
the balance; no wish to revive the studied perfection of the classical
age. The realistic spirit was almost completely abandoned. The pendulum
swung violently from one extreme to the other.

The new movement had been already faintly discernible in Diderot's
bright colouring and the oratorical structure of Rousseau's writing. But
it was not until after the Revolution, in the first years of the
nineteenth century, that the Romantic spirit completely declared
itself--in the prose of CHATEAUBRIAND. Chateaubriand was, at bottom, a
rhetorician pure and simple--a rhetorician in the widest sense of the
word. It was not merely that the resources of his style were enormous in
colour, movement, and imagery, in splendour of rhythm, in descriptive
force; but that his whole cast of mind was in itself rhetorical, and
that he saw, felt, and thought with the same emphasis, the same
amplitude, the same romantic sensibility with which he wrote. The three
subjects which formed the main themes of all his work and gave occasion
for his finest passages were Christianity, Nature, and himself. His
conception of Christianity was the very reverse of that of the
eighteenth century. In his _Genie du Christianisme_ and his _Martyrs_
the analytical and critical spirit of his predecessors has entirely
vanished; the religion which they saw simply as a collection of
theological dogmas, he envisioned as a living creed, arrayed in all the
hues of poetry and imagination, and redolent with the mystery of the
past. Yet it may be doubted whether Chateaubriand was essentially more
religious than Voltaire. What Voltaire dissected in the dry light of
reason, Chateaubriand invested with the cloak of his own eloq