after the French Revolution, reveals directly or indirectly the
transmutation that the eighteenth century had worked in religious
thought. Either it reacts against or it develops the rationalistic
movement. In France the literary reaction is one of the first factors
in the orthodox revival. Its leader and type was Chateaubriand,
in whose typical work, the Génie du Christianisme (1802), lies the
proof that, whatever might be the "shallowness" of Voltairism, it
was profundity beside the philosophy of the majority who repelled
it. On one who now reads it with the slightest scientific preparation,
the book makes an impression in parts of something like fatuity. The
handling of the scientific question at the threshold of the inquiry
is that of a man incapable of a scientific idea. All the accumulating
evidence of geology and palæontology is disposed of by the grotesque
theorem that God made the world out of nothing with all the marks
of antiquity upon it--the oaks at the start bearing "last year's
nests"--on the ground that, "if the world were not at once young and
old, the great, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature,
for these sentiments by their essence attach to antique things." [1830]
In the same fashion the fable of the serpent is with perfect gravity
homologated as a literal truth, on the strength of an anecdote about
the charming of a rattlesnake with music. [1831] It is humiliating,
but instructive, to realize that only a century ago a "Christian
reaction," in a civilized country, was inspired by such an order
of ideas; and that in the nation of Laplace, with his theory in
view, it was the fashion thus to prattle in the taste of the Dark
Ages. [1832] The book is merely the eloquent expression of a nervous
recoil from everything savouring of cool reason and clear thought,
a recoil partly initiated by the sheer stress of excitement of the
near past; partly fostered by the vague belief that freethinking in
religion had caused the Revolution; partly enhanced by the tendency
of every warlike period to develop emotional rather than reflective
life. What was really masterly in Chateaubriand was the style; and
sentimental pietism had now the prestige of fine writing, so long
the specialty of the other side. Yet a generation of monarchism
served to wear out the ill-based credit of the literary reaction;
and belles lettres began to be rationalistic as soon as politics
began again to be radical. Thus the prestige of the neo-Christian
school was already spent before the revolution of 1848; [1833] and
the inordinate vanity of Chateaubriand, who died in that year, had
undone his special influence still earlier. He had created merely a
literary mode and sentiment.