he most famous and actually one of the
most effective of the episodes of the book--all "stand out from the
canvas," as the old phrase goes. Nor is the mastery lost when _recit_
becomes direct action, in the scenes of the persecution, and the final
purification of the hero and crowning of the heroine in the
amphitheatre. "The work burns"; and, while it is practically certain
that the writer knew the Scudery romances, the contrast of this
"burning" quality becomes so striking as almost to justify,
comparatively if not positively, the accusations of frigidity and
languor which have been somewhat excessively brought against the earlier
performances. There is not the passion of _Atala_--it would have been
out of place: and there is not the soul-dissection of _Rene_, for there
is nothing morbid enough to require the scalpel. But, on the other hand,
there is the bustle--if that be not too degrading a word--which is
wanting in both; the vividness of action and of change; colour, variety,
suspense, what may perhaps best be called in one word "pulse," giving,
as a necessary consequence, life.

[Sidenote: And its remarkable advance in style.]

And this great advance is partly, if not mainly, achieved by
another--the novelty of _style_. Chateaubriand had set out to give--has,
indeed, as far as his intention goes, maintained throughout--an effort
at _le style noble_, the already familiar rhetoric, of which, in French,
Corneille had been the Dryden and Racine the Pope, while it had, in his
own youth, sunk to the artifice of Delille in verse and the "emphasis"
of Thomas in prose. He has sometimes achieved the best, and not seldom
something that is by no means the worst, of this. But, consciously or
unconsciously, he has more often put in the old bottles of form new wine
of spirit, which has not only burst them, but by some very satisfactory
miracle of literature shed itself into new receptacles, this time not at
all leathery but glass of iridescent colour and graceful shape. It was
almost inevitable that such a process, at such a time, and with such a
language--for Chateaubriand did not go to the real "ancient mother" of
pre-_grand siecle_ French--should be now and then merely magniloquent,
that it should sometimes fall short of, or overleap, even magniloquence
and become bombast. But sometimes also, and not so seldom, it attains
magnificence as well; and the promise, at least the opportunity, of such
magnificence in capable follower