eeable
personality. Old experience may perhaps attain to this, and leave to
ghouls and large or small coffin-worms the business of investigating and
possibly fattening on the thing. But even the oldest experience dealing
with his novels (which were practically all early) may find itself
considerably _tabuste_, as Rabelais has it, that is to say, "bothered"
with faults which are mitigated in the _Genie du Christianisme_,
comparatively (not quite) unimportant in the _Voyages_, and almost
entirely whelmed in the _Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_. These faults are of
such a complicated and various kind that the whole armour of criticism
is necessary to deal with them, on the defensive in the sense of not
being too much influenced by them, and on the offensive in the sense of
being severe but not too severe on them.

[Sidenote: And the remarkable interconnection of his works in fiction.]

The mere reader of Chateaubriand's novels generally begins with _Atala_
and _Rene_, and not uncommonly stops there. In a certain sense this
reader is wise in his generation. But he will never understand his
author as a novelist if he does so; and his appreciation of the books or
booklets themselves will be very incomplete. They are both not
unfrequently spoken of as detached episodes of the _Genie du
Christianisme_; and so they are, in the illustrative sense. They are
actually, and in the purely constitutive way, episodes of another book,
_Les Natchez_, while this book itself is also a novel "after a sort."
The author's work in the kind is completed by the later _Les Martyrs_,
which has nothing to do, in persons or time, with the others, being
occupied with the end of the third century, while they deal (throwing
back a little in _Atala_) with the beginning of the eighteenth. But this
also is an illustrative companion or reinforcement of the _Genie_. With
that book the whole body of Chateaubriand's fiction[22] is thus directly
connected; and the entire collection, not a little supported by the
_Voyages_, constitutes a deliberate "literary offensive," intended to
counter-work the proceedings of the _philosophes_, though with aid drawn
from one of them--Rousseau,--and only secondarily designed to provide
pure novel-interest. If this is forgotten, the student will find himself
at sea without a rudder; and the mere reader will be in danger of
exaggerating very greatly, because he does not in the least understand,
the faults just referred to, and of fail