Marx-Engels Correspondence 1873

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

November 30, 1873

For the rest, I read Saint-Beuve’s book on Chateaubriand, a writer whom I have always found repugnant. The man is celebrated in France, because in every respect he is the most classical incarnation of French vanité, a vanité clothed not in light, frivolous eighteenth-century garb, but draped in romanticism and prancing about in newly coined phrases. Such false profundity, Byzantine exaggeration, flirtation with emotion, motley schillerism, word painting, theatrical sublime, or to put it concisely, such a hodge-podge of lies has never before been achieved, neither in form, nor in content.