Like the German, the Danish, and, at a later period, the French Romanticists, Chateaubriand loves the mysterious. He begins his vindication of belief in authority by appealing to men's sense of mystery in life generally: "There is nothing beautiful or sweet or great in life that is not mysterious. The most wonderful feelings are those which at once move and perplex us. Bashfulness, chaste love, pure friendship, are full of mystery.... Is not innocence, which in its essence is nothing but holy ignorance, the most ineffable mystery? Women, the more admirable half of the human race, cannot live without mysteries." The transition from this to the dogmas of a so-called revealed religion strikes us as sudden.
De Maistre makes a somewhat similar use of mystery. When he has shown that such and such a social institution is inexplicable, he believes that he has proved it to be divine. There is, in his opinion, no reasonable explanation for hereditary royalty and hereditary nobility--which is proof sufficient that they exist by the grace of God. What is there to be said in defence of war? Hardly anything, thinks De Maistre; consequently war too is a mystery. A little reflection shows us the necessity of such argument. Authority demands mystery as its counterpart. Note what Michaud says in the dedication of his poem, "An Exile's Spring" (_Le printemps d'un proscrit_), 1803: "Society ought to have its mysterious side as well as religion; I have always thought that we should at times believe in the laws of our country as we believe in the commandments of God. In private as well as in public life there are things which a man does better if he does them without reflecting upon his reason for acting."
The style of Chateaubriand's work is dazzlingly brilliant. But for this it would not have created the sensation it did. It contains descriptions of nature, emotional outbursts, and some few sparsely scattered thoughts of real value. But all that is of genuine value from the literary and poetical point of view is to be found in the tales _Atala_ and _René_, which, according to Chateaubriand's original plan, were to have formed chapters of the work--where they would have cut a curious figure among such chapters as those on missionaries and sisters of mercy. They were, preliminarily, sent out as feelers long before the main work, and they do not concern us now; we have studied them in their historical significance in their proper place.[1]