By : François-René de Chateaubriand (1768 - 1848)
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A mong the illustrious names which adorn the annals of France, that of François Auguste de Chateaubriand, the author of “Atala,” “Les Martyrs,” “The Last of the Abencerages,” and many other brilliant and renowned works, occupies a proud pre-eminence. But his fame rests not merely upon his literary achievements. His services as a statesman and the record and example of his private life-even his sufferings and misfortunes-have served to enhance his reputation and endear his memory, both among his own countrymen, and among just, noble and patriotic minds in other lands. He was great both by his character and abilities; and, while his celebrity is undiminished by the lapse of time, his works are still read and will long continue to be read and admired, even through all changes in the manners and sentiments of mankind. Fashions and modes in literature and art, as in society, come and go; new institutions arise, demanding new methods and modifying cherished customs; and men’s thoughts enlarge and widen with improved conditions, as with the inevitable progress of the age. But the master mind ever asserts its power. He who has once truly stirred the human heart in its purest depths speaks not alone to his own generation, but appeals to all other hearts and belongs to all his race. His good gifts are the birthright of the world. The rank of Chateaubriand has been fixed by the united judgment of his associates and his successors; and since time has allayed the fierce passions which raged in France during his lifetime, his character is more and more deeply respected and admired. His sincerity of purpose and enlightened understanding, his grandeur and nobility of thought, his energy of action and loftiness of aim, preserve for him ever his exalted position, made brilliant by the fires of genius and perpetuated by the force of truth.
Chateaubriand was born at St. Malo in September, 1768, and died in Paris, after an active and most eventful career, on the fourth of July, 1848. The earlier portion of his life was passed in the quiet of his home at Combourg. At the termination of his collegiate training at Dole and Rennes, he entered the army, in which he soon gained promotion. At about the age of nineteen he was presented at court, became acquainted with the fashionable world, and was received and welcomed into the choicest literary circles of Paris, where he gained the friendship of La Harpe, Fontanes, Malesherbes, and others among the distinguished savants of that period. It was a troubled and stormy epoch in France. The social and political forces which culminated in the great Revolution were beginning to be seriously felt, and faction, turbulence and anarchy were already rife in Paris when Chateaubriand left his native shores for America, moved by a desire to discover the northwest passage, but also with an attendant purpose, long cherished, of observing the mode of life and studying the characteristics of the aborigines, for the purpose of embodying in his writings the impressions thus gained of man in a primitive condition.
From this period to the time of his death his life was a singular series of vicissitudes—at one time the brilliant and revered statesman, at another the voluntary abdicator of all his rights and honors; and even, at one bitter passage of his existence, living in an unwarmed London garret and obtaining a precarious livelihood by giving lessons in his native tongue and translating for the booksellers.
The utter upheaval of affairs in France brought the greatest distress upon himself, his family and his immediate friends, and, with the sensitive heart of genius, the blows which had fallen so keenly doubtless engendered the melancholy cast with which his writings are sometimes tinged. His first work, an idyllic poem, showed little of the genius so finely developed in after years; but his finest literary productions—“The Martyrs,” “The Last of the Abencerages” and “The Genius of Christianity,” to which “Atala” and “René” properly belong—remain a splendid monument to his powers and exhibit his earnest desire to be numbered among the benefactors and enlighteners of mankind.
The present work, “Atala,” is the gathered fruit of his previous studies amid the wilds of America. It abounds in sparkling description, romantic incident and sentiments tender and heroic. It is pervaded by purity of tone and elevation of thought, qualities the more commendable and marked because produced in an age proverbially lax and frivolous.
The illustrations of M. Doré have given an additional value to this tale, so simple, so unsophisticated, yet blooming with all the wild luxuriance of nature. The artist has added his gifts to those of the poet; and those acquainted only with his ready and original powers as the delineator of farce and drollery, or of the exceptionally tragic and horrible, will find new cause for admiration in these quiet renderings of the primeval beauties of the American wild—its plains and forests, its still lagoons and roaring cataracts, its mountain slopes and deep defiles—all its aspects of rudest workmanship—and will welcome these efforts of his genius in the lovely realm of descriptive art, wedded as they are to the exquisite simplicity of this Indian romance. As in his other works, here may be noted the same surpassing fertility of resource, the same alertness of intellect and readiness and swiftness of touch; but there may also be found new proofs of his complete sympathy with all that is picturesque in forest beauty and his high intuitive perception of every possible phase of nature in her wildest caprice and most tender bloom.
We append the following extracts from different prefaces to the author’s writings, as constituting what is explanatory of the story that follows:
[From the Preface to the First Edition.]
“I was still very young when I conceived the idea of composing an epic on ‘The Man of Nature,’ to depict the manners of savages, by uniting them with some well-known event. After the discovery of America, I saw no subject more interesting, especially to Frenchmen, than the massacre of the Natchez colony in Louisiana, in 1727. All the Indian tribes conspiring, after two centuries of oppression, for the restoration of liberty to the New World, appeared to me to offer a subject almost as attractive as the conquest of Mexico. I put some fragments of the work to paper; but I soon found that I was weak in local coloring, and that, if I wished to produce a picture of real resemblance, it became necessary for me, in imitation of Homer’s example, to visit the tribes I was desirous of describing.
“In 1789 I made M. de Malesherbes acquainted with my idea of going to America; but, wishing at the same time to give a useful object to my voyage, I formed the project of discovering the overland passage so long sought after, and concerning which even Captain Cook himself had left some doubts. I started, visited the American solitudes, and returned with plans for a second voyage, which was to last nine years. I proposed to traverse the entire continent of North America, afterwards to explore the coasts to the north of California, and to return by Hudson’s Bay, rounding the pole. M. de Malesherbes undertook to submit my plans to the Government, and it was then that he listened to the first fragments of the little work I now offer to the public. The Revolution put a stop to all my projects. Covered with the blood of my only brother, of my sister-in-law, and of the illustrious old man, their father; having seen my mother and another talented sister die in consequence of the treatment they had undergone in prison, I wandered forth to foreign lands, where the only friend I had preserved stabbed himself in my arms.
“Of all my manuscripts upon America, I have only saved some fragments, ‘Atala’ in particular, which was itself but an episode of ‘The Natchez.’ ‘Atala’ was written in the desert, beneath the huts of the savages. I do not know whether the public will like the story, which quits all beaten tracks, and represents a nature and manners altogether foreign to Europe. There is no adventure in ‘Atala.’ It is a sort of poem, half descriptive, half dramatic. It consists entirely in the portraiture of two lovers walking and talking together in the solitudes, and in the picture of the trials of love in the midst of the calm of the desert. I have endeavored to give to this work the most antique forms. It is divided into Prologue, Recital and Epilogue. The principal parts of the story have each a denomination, such as ‘The Hunters,’ ‘The Laborers,’ etc.; and it was thus that, in the early ages of Greece, the rhapsodists sang, under different titles, fragments of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey.’”
“The moralities I have been desirous of inculcating in ‘Atala’ are easily discoverable, and as they are summed up in the Epilogue, I need not speak of them here. I will merely say a word or two concerning Chactas, the lover of Atala.
“He is a savage more than half civilized, since he knows not only the living, but also the dead languages of Europe. He can therefore express himself in a mixed style, suitable to the line upon which he stands, between society and nature. This circumstance has given me some advantages, by permitting Chactas to speak as a savage in the description of manners, and as a European in the dramatic portions of the narrative. Without that the work must have been abandoned. If I had always made use of the Indian style, ‘Atala’ would have been Hebrew for the reader.
“As to the missionary, he is a simple priest, who speaks without blushing of the Cross, of the blood of his Divine Master, of the corrupted flesh, etc.; in one word, he is really a priest. I am aware that it is difficult to depict such a character without awakening ideas of ridicule in the minds of certain readers. Where I do not draw a tear, I may raise a smile; that must depend upon individual sentiment.”
“I must say a last word as to ‘Atala.’ The subject is not entirely of my invention. It is certain that there was a savage at the galleys and at the court of Louis XIV.; it is certain that a French missionary accomplished the facts I have related; it is certain that I saw savages in the American forests carrying away the bones of their forefathers, and a young mother exposing the body of her child upon the branches of a tree. Some other circumstances narrated are also veritable, but as they are not of general interest, it is needless for me to speak of them.”
[From the Preface to “Alain” and “René” published in 1805. ]
“I have been stopped in the corrections neither by the consideration of the cost of the book, nor by that of the length of the work. A few years have sufficed to make me acquainted with the weak or defective portions of that episode. Obedient upon this point to the critics, even so far as to reproach myself with an excess of docility, I have proved to those who attacked me that I never remain voluntarily in error, and that, at all times and upon all subjects, I am ready to give way to lights superior to my own. ‘Atala’ has been reprinted eleven times—five times separately and six times in the ‘Genius of Christianity.’ If those eleven editions were compared, scarcely two would be found to be altogether alike.
“The twelfth, which I now publish, has been revised with the greatest care. I have consulted the friends prompt to censure me; I have weighed each phrase, examined every word. The style, freed from certain epithets which embarrassed it, proceeds perhaps more naturally and with greater simplicity. I have introduced more order and logic into certain ideas, and I have effaced even the slightest inaccuracies of language. M. de la Harpe observed to me, on the subject of ‘Atala,’ ‘If you will shut yourself up with me only for a few hours, that time will suffice for wiping out the spots that cause your critics to cry out so loudly.’ I have passed four years in the revision of this episode; but it is now as I intend it to remain. It is at present the only ‘Atala’ I shall ever in future acknowledge.”
“The new nature and the new manners I have described have also drawn upon me another ill-considered reproach. I have been taken for the inventor of certain extraordinary details, whereas I merely repeated circumstances well known to all travellers. Some notes added to the present edition of ‘Atala’ would easily have justified this assertion; but if I had introduced them at every point where each reader might have looked for them, they would soon have exceeded the length of the work itself. I therefore gave up the idea of annotations.”
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