et us therefore be Christians, declared Chateaubriand, and let us
seek for our tradition in the great Christian ages. It was a revolution
in art for which he pleaded, and throughout the first half of the
nineteenth century the revolution was in active progress.

The episode of _Rene_, which was included in the _Genie_, and
afterwards published separately, has been described as a
Christianised _Werther_; its passion is less frank, and even more
remote from sanity of feeling, than that of Goethe's novel, but the
sadness of the hero is more magnificently posed. A sprightly English
lady described Chateaubriand as "wearing his heart in a sling"; he
did so during his whole life; and through Rene we divine the inventor
of Rene carrying his wounded heart, as in the heroine we can discern
some features of his sister Lucile. In all his writings his feelings
centre in himself: he is a pure egoist through his sensibility; but
around his own figure his imagination, marvellous in its expansive
power, can deploy boundless perspectives.

Both _Atala_ and _Rene_, though brought into connection with the
_Genie du Christianisme_, are in fact more closely related to the
prose epic _Les Natchez_, written early, but held in reserve until
the publication of his collected works in 1826-31. _Les Natchez_,
inspired by Chateaubriand's American travels, idealises the life of
the Red Indian tribes. The later books, where he escapes from the
pseudo-epic manner, have in them the finest spirit of his early years,
his splendour and delicacy of description, his wealth of imaginative
reverie. Famous as the author of the _Genie_, Chateaubriand was
appointed secretary to the embassy at Rome. The murder of the Duc
d'Enghien alienated him from Napoleon. Putting aside the _Martyrs_,
on which he had been engaged, he sought for fresh imagery and local
colour to enrich his work, in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a record
of which was published in his (1811) _Itineraire de Paris a
Jerusalem_.

The _Martyrs_ appeared in 1809. It was designed as a great example
of that art, inspired by Christianity, on behalf of which he had
contended in the _Genie_; the religion of Christ, he would prove,
can create passions and types of character better suited for noble
imaginative treatment than those of paganism; its supernatural
marvels are more than a compensation for the loss of pagan mythology.
The time chosen for his epopee in prose is the reign of the persecutor
Diocletia