Chateaubriand, the inaugurator of the religious reaction of the nineteenth century, himself possessed no faith, no enthusiasm, no real devotion to an idea. The ideas of the eighteenth century were beginning to suffer an eclipse, to look like fallacies; the great ideas of the nineteenth had not as yet taken scientific shape, and, placed and constituted as he was, Chateaubriand was incapable of anticipating them. Hence he became the leader of the reaction, the champion of Catholicism and the Bourbons. With the genius's instinctive inclination to seize on the great principle of the new age, but without the genius's infallible prevision of its real nature and faith in its final victory, he took hold of the ideas which a temporary revulsion in men's mood and sympathies had brought to light, and championed them with obstinacy, with magnificent but often hollow eloquence, with great talent but without warmth, without that conviction which permeates the whole individual and makes of him the enthusiastic, indefatigable organ of the idea. Whilst Voltaire, with all his restlessness and all his faults, sustained his life's battle freshly, unweariedly, and invincibly to the last, because he never for a moment wavered in his faith in his ideals, Chateaubriand was consumed by ennui, incredulity, and cynicism. In one direction only, namely as a poet, and more especially a colourist, did he break new ground; and hence it was only his youthful poetical efforts that satisfied and inwardly rewarded him. But of all his creations, René, the picture of the intellectual type to which he himself belonged, was the most successful. A genius of René's type may employ religious phraseology, but he never truly merges himself in a higher being; his melancholy in its inmost essence is only the egoist's unsatisfied craving for enjoyment. As a genius René knows that the Deity is with and within him, and he can scarcely distinguish between himself and the Deity. He feels that his thought and his words are inspired, and where is the boundary between that which is of him and that which is not of him? He demands everything--the homage of the public, the love of women, all the laurels and roses of life--and it never occurs to him that he is in duty bound to make any return. He accepts love without loving again. Is not his a privileged nature? is not he a prophet hastening through life like a fugitive, a fleeting fire which illuminates, consumes, and vanishes?