uence--put
it up, so to speak, on a platform, in a fine attitude, under a tinted
illumination. He lacked the subtle intimacy of Faith. In his
descriptions of Nature, too, the same characteristics appear. Compared
with Rousseau's, they are far bolder, far richer, composed on a more
elaborate and imposing scale; but they are less convincing; while
Rousseau's landscapes are often profoundly moving, Chateaubriand's are
hardly ever more than splendidly picturesque. There is a similar
relation between the egoisms of the two men. Chateaubriand was never
tired of writing about himself; and in his long _Memoires
d'Outre-Tombe_--the most permanently interesting of his works--he gave a
full rein to his favourite passion. His conception of himself was
Byronic. He swells forth, in all his pages, a noble, melancholy, proud,
sentimental creature whom every man must secretly envy and every woman
passionately adore. He had all the vanity of Rousseau, but none of his
honesty. Rousseau, at any rate, never imposed upon himself; and
Chateaubriand always did. Thus the vision that we have of him is of
something wonderful but empty, something striking but unreal. It is the
rhetorician that we see, and not the man.

Chateaubriand's influence was very great. Beside his high-flowing,
romantic, imaginative writings, the tradition of the eighteenth century
seemed to shrivel up into something thin, cold and insignificant. A new
and dazzling world swam into the ken of his readers--a world in which
the individual reigned in glory amid the glowing panorama of Nature and
among the wondrous visions of a remote and holy past. His works became
at once highly popular, though it was not until a generation later that
their full effect was felt. Meanwhile, the impetus which he had started
was continued in the poems of LAMARTINE. Here there is the same love of
Nature, the same religious outlook, the same insistence on the
individual point of view; but the tints are less brilliant, the emphasis
is more restrained; the rhetorical impulse still dominates, but it is
the rhetoric of elegiac tenderness rather than of picturesque pomp. A
wonderful limpidity of versification which, while it is always perfectly
easy, is never weak, and a charming quietude of sentiment which, however
near it may seem to come to the commonplace, always just escapes
it--these qualities give Lamartine a distinguished place in the
literature of France. They may be seen in their perfection in