Back to the Garden: Chateaubriand, Senancour and Constant (review)

352 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Koppel finds Mr Knightley the embodiment of a Christian ideal, and decides that "for all practical purposes, [he] is perfect ... [his] wise conduct and good deeds ... [are] a result of habitual principles rather than exceptional efforts which require special comment" (pp. 30, 29). Evidently these "practical purposes" keep judgments about Mr Knightley within the drawing room at Hartfield and on the turf of Box Hill and Donwell Abbey, the area that the text of the novel confines him to. And the tactful disregard of unmentioned "exceptional efforts" exempts Koppel from commenting on the rural distress so movingly described by Crabbe and Cobbett, or the rick-burning and agricultural unrest that filled the convict ships. These sorrows were not the concern of a maiden lady, novelist though she was, any more than were the alarms of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; Austen's theatre of social conduct was almost entirely the drawing room, but her moral judgment is not less than universal; "the Terror of secularized spirituality" Lionel Trilling called it. A critic who also confines his judgments to conduct within the drawing room would need to demonstrate, not by doctrine but by the force of his understanding, a justification for closing his eyes to moral perplexities too painful to be mentioned in polite society but inescapably present to every informed sensibility. As Austen neglects these issues, so Koppel's "religious dimensions" are limited. Leaving all doctrine, all morality, all sympathy aside, what then can be called the sense of a religious dimension? The irreducible element is a feeling of transcendence: reading Jane Austen provides one variety of religious experience, like listening to Mozart or imagining oneself swinging in one of those idyllic gardens of Watteau, with the guitar player forever leaning on the fountain. The secret of her transcendence has always been ascribed to her irony; somehow because of the multiple ironic vision we are implicated in her observation and dramatic projection, as if we had written her novels ourselves, just as we would have written the music of Mozart or painted the scenes of Watteau if we only had the talent. Is it not it a little bit of heaven to listen to a string quartet or to read Emma! Perhaps this is all we know of a religious dimension, and all we need to know. Harry Knowles Girling York University Michael J. Call. Back to the Garden: Chateaubriand, Senancour and Constant. Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri (Stanford French and Italian Studies, #52), 1988. vii + 136pp. It is not unusual to see Chateaubriand, Senancour, and Constant compared in a study of Romanticism, as René, Adolphe, and Obermann are archetypes of the REVIEWS 353 Romantic malady which characterized a part of the early nineteenth century in France. Sainte-Beuve was the first of many, since the mid-nineteenth century, to study the "mal du siècle." Most of these critics focused on a description of what they referred to as the Romantic disease while, for the most part, ignoring its causes. They approached the sources of what was "mal" in the First Empire by concentrating on the historical and sociological contexts in which it was born. Michael Call completes these studies by seeking a fuller understanding of the question of causation, attempting to identify the origins of the anguish felt by so many young men during the Empire. In so doing, he studies these three novels not as precursors of the later Romantic movement but as important components of the Empire and attributes to them their rightful place in literary history. Call begins by an analysis of the three texts. He discovers that the authors under examination have three biblical metaphors in common: the Cain figure, the forbidden Eve, and the lost order of the Garden of Eden. He goes on to demonstrate that Chateaubriand, Constant, and Senancour were drawn to these metaphors because they perceived comparisons between their own lives in postrevolutionary France and the Cain myth. Call applies concepts from modern social psychology to show how the "mal du siècle" is tied to problems experienced by these authors who were denied the structured order and tranquillity of pre-revolutionary France, in reidentifying...