As a matter of fact, by far the larger part of this latter famous book, the _revanche_ for Voltairianism, the manifesto of the whole earlier, and not a little of the later nineteenth century, the main pillar of its author’s fame,[193] is literary criticism pure and simple. It is so odd a place to look for this that it sometimes escapes. Accounts of Chateaubriand have been written (I am, I fear, guilty of one myself) in which it has had no adequate recognition. But when we have once sighted our panther,[194] she cannot escape us; and we may try here to do justice to the real sweetness of her breath.[195] [Sidenote: _The_ Génie du Christianisme.] So odd a place: and that, too, in more ways than one. At first sight—and perhaps too hasty or not thoroughly informed readers permanently—the _Génie_[196] may appear an inextricable tangle, or a frank flinging together of fragments without even the connection of being tangled. It would be improved (and perhaps such a thing has been done) by a table like that which Burton wisely prefixed to the _Anatomy_. One has to realise the utter _terrassement_ in France of Christian doctrine and practice—the all but total triumph of that purely secular education and atmosphere for which a hundred years later some of our Nonconformists pant—to appreciate the real art and the practical necessity of the fashion in which Chateaubriand “lets everything go in” against Philosophism. It seems temerity, but was probably wisdom, to begin, as he begins, with the altitudes of faith and dogma. And he glides off from them, cunningly but most naturally, to those ceremonies, sacramental and other, for which the Republic had substituted unmeaning and unaffecting civil functions. Then he once more attacks the _philosophes_ on their own ground—on the subject of morals and that “virtue” which they had so tediously dinned into the public ear, but of which they had made so little private exhibition,—and grapples courageously, though perhaps not rashly, considering the extreme sciolism of most of his adversaries, with cosmology and teleology, with physic and metaphysic, with Hell and Heaven themselves. In all, his rhetoric serves him admirably, if nothing else does; but we have as yet little or nothing to do with literature or with criticism. It is quite different when we come to the “Second Part,” _Poétique du Christianisme_, and here Chateaubriand begins to present his credentials as a critic. Nor, with some digressions, does he again drop the character throughout the book. [Sidenote: _Its saturation with literary criticism._]