istianity as a barbarous system
whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress. But it was much more
than polemic. Chateaubriand arrayed arguments in support of orthodox
dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration, and the rest; but the
appeal of the book did not lie in its logic, it lay in the appreciation
of Christianity from a new point of view. He approached it in the spirit
of an artist, as an aesthete, not as a philosopher, and so far as he
proved anything he proved that Christianity is valuable because it
is beautiful, not because it is true. He aimed at showing that it can
"enchanter l'ame aussi divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homere."
He might call to his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on
Dante, Milton, Racine that his case was really based. The book is an
apologia, from the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school. "Dieu ne
defend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui."

It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should
reject the doctrine of perfectibility. "When man attains the highest
point of civilisation," wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau,
"he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude; by
civilising his manners, he forges himself chains. His heart profits at
the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his heart." And,
apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the question of
Progress had little interest for the Romantic school. Victor Hugo, in
the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he went more deeply
than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between ancient and modern art,
revived the old likeness of mankind to an individual man, and declared
that classical antiquity was the time of its virility and that we are
now spectators of its imposing old age.

From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the
Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern
society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had
wished to blot out the Middle Ages. The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre,
and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the
English constitution was hardly less offensive to their minds than the
Revolution which De Maistre denounced as "satanic." Advocates as they
were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed, however, to the
advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval institutions on the
notice of the world but also by