s can hardly be mistaken. As in his
younger contemporary, compatriot, and, beyond all doubt, disciple,
Lamennais, the results are often crude, unequal, disappointing;
insufficiently smelted ore, insufficiently ripened and cellared wine.
But the quantity and quality of pure metal--the inspiriting virtue of
the vintage--in them is extraordinary: and once more it must be
remembered that, for the novel, all this was absolutely new. In this
respect, if in no other, though perhaps he was so in others also,
Chateaubriand is a Columbus of prose fiction. Neither in French nor in
English, very imperfectly in German, and, so far as I know, not in any
other language to even the smallest degree, had "prose-poetry" been
attempted in this department. "Ossian" perhaps must have some of the
credit: the Bible still more. But wherever the capital was found it was
Chateaubriand who put it into the business of novel-writing and turned
out the first specimens of that business with the new materials and
plant procured by the funds.

[Sidenote: Chateaubriand's Janus-position in this.]

Some difficulties, which hamper any attempt to illustrate and support
this high praise, cannot require much explanation to make them obvious.
It has not been the custom of this book to give large untranslated
extracts: and it is at least the opinion of its author that in matters
of style, translation, even if it be of a much higher quality than he
conceives himself able to offer, is, if not quite worthless, very
inadequate. Moreover, it is (or should be) well known that the qualities
of the old French _style noble_--which, as has been said, Chateaubriand
deliberately adopted, as his starting-point if nothing more--are, even
in their own language, and still more when reproduced in any other, full
of dangers for foreign appreciation. The no doubt largely ignorant and
in any case mistaken contempt for French poetry and poetic prose which
so long prevailed among us, and from which even such a critic and such a
lover (to some extent) of French as Matthew Arnold was not free, was
mainly concerned with this very point. To take a single instance, the
part of De Quincey's "Essay on Rhetoric" which deals with French is made
positively worthless by the effects of this almost racial prejudice.
Literal translation of the more _flamboyant_ kind of French writing has
been, even with some of our greatest, an effective, if a somewhat
facile, means of procuring a laugh. Furtherm