Madame de Staël/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV.
HER WORKS.
Any notice of Madame de Staël would be imperfect without a review of her works. She did not begin, like so many famous authors, to write at an abnormally early age—it is true, she composed Portraits, which were read aloud in her mother's salon, but everybody did as much in those days, and her attempts were not sufficiently remarkable to stamp her at once as a literary genius. It has been said how much her father discouraged her writing. This may account in part for the tardy development of the taste, although more was doubtless due to the peerless conversations in which, before the Revolution, her young intellect found all that it could need of ideas. However this may be, she was twenty before she wrote Sophie, ou les Sentimens Secrets, that elegiac "comedy" which drew down on its authoress's youthful head the animadversions of her austere mother. Madame Necker was shocked at the subject, which represented a young girl of seventeen struggling against a secret passion for her guardian, a married man, who is in love with her. Sophie (who, by the bye, is English) behaves in the noblest manner as soon as she discovers that her feelings are reciprocated, and leaves the home of which she has unwittingly destroyed the peace. Her guardian and his wife are no less equal to the occasion, and Milord Henri Bedford, Sophie's slighted swain, is inspired by their example. Everybody expresses his or her sentiments in polished and prolix verse, and the curtain finally falls on four loftily eloquent and magnanimously miserable people. The style is not inflated, but the piece is very dull, and, while betraying little of the writer's future talent, reveals two of her defects, exaggeration of sentiment and a want of humour.
To the same date as Sophie belong Jane Grey, a tragedy in five acts, also in verse, of no real merit; another tragedy, Montmorency, and three tales—all romantic and tiresome.
Finally, in 1788, when she was nearly twenty-two, Madame de Staël published her Letters on Rousseau, and thus established her position as an aspirant to literary fame. The book, coming from a woman, made a great sensation. Indeed, this fact of her sex must never be lost sight of in judging the reception accorded to Madame de Staël's works. She attempted subjects of historical and philosophical interest which no woman in her country or age had approached before her.
As might be expected, she was an ardent admirer of Rousseau. Her sympathy with the philosophy of Helvetius was naturally slight. She required something declamatory, earnest, and didactic. In a glorification of natural sentiments to result in some future apotheosis of humanity lay the key to her creed. "Virtue" and still "virtue" and more "virtue" was her cry, as though "virtue" were a tangible and definitely constituted thing to be extracted en bloc out of the materials composing humanity. To such a mind it was inevitable that Emile and the Contrat Social should appeal more strongly than any number of witty epigrams at the expense of penitents and priests.
She sympathised with the philosophy of the eighteenth century in so far as it tended, by uprooting abuses, to promote the progress of culture and the emancipation of the oppressed, but she required some system that would reconstruct as well as destroy; and, being a fervid believer in theories, disliked nothing so much as the idea of leaving the human race to take care of itself. Rousseau, as embodying a protest against the spirit of frivolous negation, appeared to her in the light of a prophet of perfection; and she saw in the approaching meeting of the States General a first step towards the realisation of his views. These radiant ideals were destined to be suddenly and painfully obscured by the events of the Terror. Her only contribution to literature during that time was her celebrated and impassioned defence of the unhappy Queen. Public events so fascinated her attention that she had no leisure for any other thought. Two sentences in her Réflexions sur la Paix, published in 1794, reveal this preoccupation.
"During the reign of Robespierre," she says, "when each day brought a list of devoted victims, I could only desire death, and long for the end of the world and of the human race which was witness to, or accomplice in, such horrors. I should have made a reproach to myself even of thought, because it was separate from sorrow." In another passage she exclaims: "Oh appalling time, of which centuries will barely dim the trace; time which will never belong to the past!"
Nevertheless, Robespierre had hardly fallen before her ever vivid faith in humanity revived in full force. She looked for safety to the faction which divided extreme revolutionaries from extreme reactionaries, and refused to believe that it could only act as a buffer. Its moderation was partly caused by exhaustion; yet Madame de Staël, always optimistic, maintained that having no passions it must have convictions, and that the trumpet-call of liberty would summon it to the front. In this she was mistaken; but in the course of her observations on public events she uttered one remarkable prophecy. "France," she wrote, "may remain a republic; but to become a monarchy it must first submit to a military government."
In 1790 she published her work on The Influence of the Passions upon Human Happiness. This was originally to have been divided into two parts. The first portion was to be devoted to reflections on man's peculiar destiny; the second, to the constitutional fate of nations. We have to concern ourselves with the first alone, as the second, which would have required an immense and minute knowledge of ancient and modern governments, was never even begun.
In Madame de Staël's view the true obstacle to individual and political happiness lay in the force of passion. Neutralize this, and the problem of government would be solved. Happiness, as she conceived it, was to consist in having hope without fear, activity without anxiety, glory without calumny, love without inconstancy—in a word, ideal good with no admixture of evil. The happiness of nations would consist in the combination of republican liberty with monarchical calm, of emulation among talents unaccompanied by factious clamour, of military spirit in foreign affairs, and a law-abiding tendency in domestic matters. She concluded by saying that such an ideal is impossible of attainment, and the only achievable happiness is to be acquired by studying the true means of avoiding moral pain. To the discovery of this spiritual Nirvana her work was directed. The subject, as is evident, was a sterile one, since it dealt with abstractions that have no corresponding realities. To say that men and nations would be prosperous and contented without some particular institution or defect, is the same as to say that a human face would be beautiful without features. A blank surface is conceivable as a blank surface, but not as a physiognomy; and to speculate concerning ideal humanity divorced from social systems imposes on thought the most futile exercise that ever occurred to an enlightened mind. Such being the case, it is not surprising that Madame de Staël should eventually have abandoned her self-imposed task. Even as much of it as she accomplished landed her on a moving morass of conclusions of which the essential nullity must have been evident to herself before anybody. For the rest, her analysis of the various passions is admirable. One wonders as one reads how a young woman could have reached so perfect a comprehension of the springs of human action. The penetration displayed is unerring, and only equalled by the masculine vigour of touch. A good example is the following: "Truly great men are such as have rendered a greatness like their own less necessary to successive generations." And here is another striking passage: "A revolution suspends every action but that of force. Social order establishes the ascendancy of esteem and virtue, but a revolution limits men's choice to their physical capacities. The only sort of moral influence that it does not exclude is the fanaticism of such ideas as, not being susceptible of any restraint, are weapons of war and not exercises of the mind. To aspire to distinction in times of revolution one must always outstrip the actual momentum of events, and the consequence of this is a rapid descent which one has no power of staying. In vain one perceives the abyss in front. To throw oneself from the chariot is to be killed by the fall, so that to avoid the danger is more perilous than to face it. One must of one's own accord tread the path that leads to ruin, since the least step backwards overturns the individual but does not hinder the event."
This is a very good example both of the clearness of Madame de Staël's thought and the careless confusion of her style. She introduced metaphors just as they occurred to her, without any preparatory gradations of thought.
The second section of the work is devoted to the examination of natural affections such as family love, friendship, and pity. Here, again, the analysis is delicate and true, but the mind, fatigued by the futility of the theme, recoils from such minute dissection of emotion. Passion, being comparatively rare, is always interesting, but sentiment does not bear prolonged contemplation.
Finally come the remedies to be applied to the evils worked by passion. They consist in philosophy, in study, and the practice of benevolence, joined, if possible, to a child-like faculty of extracting from each hour just the amount of happiness that it contains. With this lame and impotent conclusion the book practically ends, for all the remaining reflections do not avail to place in any clearer light the uncertain and colourless thought of the writer.
Her next work was that on Literature Considered in Relation to Social Institutions. Its object was to establish the continuous progress and ultimate perfectibility of the human mind, and the happy influence exercised by liberty upon literature.
The theory of the authoress was that the progress of philosophy, i.e. thought, had been gradual, while that of poetry had been spasmodic.
Art, indeed, offering, by its early maturity, an awkward contradiction to her system, she proceeded to get rid of it by describing it as the product of imagination rather than of thought, and by adding that its plastic and sensuous qualities rendered it capable of flourishing under systems of government which necessarily crush every other form of intellectual activity. To prove the perfectibility of the human mind, she then had but poetry and philosophy. To the latter she assigned the really glorious future, while the former she regarded as finished. She was the first of the Romanticists, in the sense that she preferred the poetry of the north to that of the south; and her predilections in this line carried her so far, that she placed Ossian above Homer. She considered that the early forms of poetry—in other words, mere transcripts of material impressions—were superior to those later creations in which sentiment enters as an element. And this idea, which seems at first a contradiction to her theory of perfectibility, was really intended to confirm it. For, in her view, the value of literature consisting, exclusively in the amount of thought that it contained, introspective poetry became a mere bridge which the mind traversed on its way to wider horizons.
Madame de Staël was not only not a poet herself, but she was incapable of appreciating the higher forms of poetry. In her excursions through the regions of literature, she was always in pursuit of some theory which would reconcile the contradictions of human destiny. Man, regarded as socially perfectible, being her ideal, she was in haste to classify and relegate to some convenient limbo the portions of a subject which did not directly contribute to her hypotheses. Having disposed, therefore, of poetry and art, she undertook to consider literature from the point of view of psychology. She was only pleased with it when self-conscious and analytical. Dante probably perplexed her, and she evoked to condemn him the perruqued shade of "Le Goût." Shakespeare she applauded, as might be expected, chiefly in consideration of Hamlet; while Petrarch pleased her principally because he was harmonious; and Ariosto because he was fanciful. The true significance of the Renaissance escaped her. She sought for the origin of each literature in the political and religious institutions of the country where it arose, instead of regarding both literature and social conditions as simultaneous products of the national mind. Her erudition was inadequate to her task, and the purpose of her work, by warping her judgments, contributed to make them superficial. While pronouncing the English and French drama to be essentially superior to the Greek, she characteristically preferred Euripides to his two mighty predecessors. The grandeur of the dominant idea of Greek tragedy—that of an inevitable destiny, against which man struggles in vain—appears to have escaped her altogether. This is not surprising, since such a conception was entirely opposed to her own order of mind and to the age in which she lived. The root of all the social theories then prevailing was the value of the individual. Man was not a puppet of the gods, but the architect of his own fate. To lose hold of ideal virtue was to become incapable of governing or being governed; and ideal virtue was a definite entity which anybody might possess who chose. This—rather crudely stated—was Madame de Staël's point of view. Her enthusiasm rejected all idea of limited responsibilities. The ethical value of the Æschylean trilogy—the awful sense of overhanging doom which pervades it—did not appeal to her, because it tended to the annihilation of the struggling soul. In other words, she liked self-conscious drama, and was attracted to Euripides by his creation of artificial situations, in which interesting personages had room and leisure to explain themselves.
With Aristophanes she was frankly disgusted; from her didactic standpoint, because of his pronounced indecency; and on artistic grounds, because he attacked living individuals instead of creating characters, like Tartufe and Falstaff. To his beauties she remained entirely blind, and this, perhaps, is to be explained by her deficiency in the æsthetic faculty. It is said that Châteaubriand first taught her to appreciate nature, and Schlegel to perceive the loveliness of art. Chênedollé complained that she had lived for years opposite Lake Leman "without finding an image" in regard to it; and she herself once frankly admitted that of her own accord she would hardly open her window to gaze on the bay of Naples, while she would go a hundred miles to converse with a new mind.
Its defects admitted, we may own that Madame de Staël's work contains many charming chapters. If, true to her theory, she provokes her reader by preferring the Latin poets to the Greek ones, and Quintilian to Cicero, simply because of their later date; if she persists, rather than modify her views, that the sterile scholasticism of the Middle Ages was not a real retrogression, and strangely overlooks, in her admiration for Christianity, the intellectual benefits which man owes to the Arabs; on the other hand, she has flashes of admirable insight. invasion of Italy by the barbarians, and the part played by Christianity in fusing the two races, is very suggestive. But, unfortunately, it is suggestive only, and sins by a sketchiness which, more or less, mars the whole book. This was one of Madame de Staël's defects. She abounded in ideas, but failed either in the power or the patience to work them out.
Two other interesting chapters are those on the "Grace, Gaiety, and Taste of the French Nation," and on "Literature in the Reign of Louis XIV." The peculiar social influences which, among successive generations of courtiers, produced the best writers of France, are very happily described; but here again the conclusions are indicated rather than developed. Madame de Staël stated her conviction that the palmy days of French wit were over, and that the literature of the future, if it wished to flourish, must invest itself with greater gravity.
Convinced that the moment had come for the dramatist to pack up his puppet-show and despatch it to a museum of antiquities, she laid down rules for an ideal republican literature, and prescribed strong emotions, careful analysis of character, and a high moral tone as indispensable ingredients. She was in fact one of the first to admire and write that appalling product, the novel with a purpose.
Anything duller than Delphine it would be difficult to imagine. From the first page to the last there is hardly one line of genuine inspiration. All is forced, exaggerated, overstrained. The misfortunes of the heroine are so needlessly multiplied, that they end by exasperating the reader; and the motif of the book—the contrast between conventional and moral ideals—fails in true dramatic interest. The plot is as follows: Madame de Vernon has a daughter, Mathilde, beautiful and sanctimonious, whom she desires to marry to Léonce de Mondoville, a young Spaniard of noble birth and aristocratic prejudices. Madame de Vernon has in the whole world one friend, Delphine d'Albémar, a miracle of grace, wit, and beauty, who does acts of unheard of generosity, and generally by some evil chance accomplishes them at the moment when they lead to unlucky results for herself. She is a young widow, and has been left by her elderly and devoted husband a fortune, of which she proceeds to divest herself as rapidly as possible. One of her favourite objects of charity is Madame de Vernon, who does not deserve her pity, since the pecuniary embarrassments under which she suffers arise from her love of card-playing and general mismanagement. But Delphine adores her friend, who is represented as extremely charming, and is in some respects a well-drawn character. Her life is one long act of dissimulation. She masks her cynicism cleverly, under an appearance of indolence, which dispenses her from ever taking inconvenient resolutions, or appearing agitated by events which should—but do not—move her. She has some faint affection for her generous dupe—Delphine; but not enough to be prevented from taking every mean advantage of her. There is some difficulty in arranging Mathilde's marriage, on account of the want of a dowry. Delphine hastens to supply this, and then the bridegroom elect, Léonce, appears on the scene. He is described as divinely handsome. The cold and pietistic Mathilde falls in love with him immediately (as was her duty, since he was to be her husband), but so, unfortunately, does Delphine. What is still worse, he is by no means attracted by his fiancée, but reciprocates the young widow's passion. Then the drama begins. Madame de Vernon, while seeming to see nothing, sees everything. Mathilde is really blind. Delphine is agitated, but resolved, if possible, to be happy. This, by the way, is the only gleam of common sense that she has throughout the book. Unfortunately, she manages to compromise herself (of course quite innocently) by espousing the cause of a pair of guilty but repentant lovers; and Madame de Vernon cleverly uses the awkward positions in which she places herself, in order to detach Léonce from her. He marries Mathilde and is madly unhappy. Delphine pours out her feelings in long letters to her sister-in-law and confidant, Mademoiselle d'Albémar, letters which she writes, by the way, on recovering from fainting-fits, or when lying in bed, or when on the verge of distraction. The whole of the novel is told in letters, and is proportionately long-winded and unnatural.
Not long after the marriage Madame de Vernon dies, and on her death-bed confesses her perfidy to her victim. Then the mutual passion of Delphine and Léonce enters upon a new and harrowing phase. They determine to remain technically virtuous, but to see one another constantly—of course unknown to Mathilde. This unnatural situation—unnaturally prolonged, becomes unbearable through its monotonous misery.
Finally Mathilde discovers the state of the case and conjures Delphine to separate herself from Léonce. Madame d'Albémar consents, and disappears. Léonce is then described by his confidant as being on the point of madness. He alternately loses consciousness, and rushes about with dishevelled hair and distraught looks. Delphine goes to Switzerland, and there proceeds to compromise herself anew, this time beyond recall, for the sake of a rejected lover who had behaved disgracefully to her.
She had taken refuge in a convent of which the superioress, Madame de Ternan, turns out to be the aunt of Léonce. This lady is something of the same sort as Madame de Vernon—except that her egotism, although quite as systematic, is not so base. But it can become so on occasion, and, as she is rather fond of Delphine and anxious to keep her with her to solace her old age, she plays into the hands of Madame de Mondoville (the mother of Léonce) and cleverly contrives to make Delphine take the veil. Barely has this been done when Léonce appears and claims her as his own, Mathilde having in the meanwhile died. Then is the exhausted reader harassed anew by a fresh spectacle of poignant anguish. A Monsieur de Sebersci suggests that Delphine should break her vows, quit her convent, and join Léonce, pointing out that, thanks to the Revolution, they can be quite respectably married in France. Delphine is horrified at first, but Léonce, having announced the firm intention of putting an end to his existence if she remains a nun, she finally escapes and joins him. One begins to hope that they are going to be happy at last, when the "purpose" of the book presents itself. Madame de Staël was anxious to prove that social conventions may not be braved with impunity, but overtake and crush the nature which defies them. Delphine throughout had listened to no voice but that of her conscience and her heart: she is consequently the victim of calumny. Léonce is principally swayed by passion. He defies society in the end to possess Delphine, but has no sooner induced her to break her vows for him than he begins to feel the stigma of the act. He leaves her, and seeks death on the battlefield. Death spares him, but he is arrested as an aristocrat and condemned to be shot. Delphine follows him, and by her eloquence wrings a pardon from the judge. Léonce, enlightened by the approach of death as to the nothingness of the world's opinion, is prepared to live happily at last with the woman whom he still professes to adore. But all at once the order for his release is rescinded and he is taken out to die. Delphine accompanies him, and talks all along the road. Indeed, she is superfluously eloquent, from the first page of her history to the last. When Léonce has been strung up by her to the highest pitch of exalted feeling, she takes poison and dies at his feet. He is then shot; and the lovers are interred in one grave by Monsieur de Serbellane, who has appeared again in the last chapter, after having been the primary though unwitting cause of his unhappy friends' woes.
It is difficult to understand why critics like Sainte Beuve should so warmly have praised this novel. No doubt it shows talent, especially in the analysis of mental struggle; but it is false from beginning to end. All the characters want vitality, although some of the qualities attributed to them are described with penetration and force. Delphine and Léonce talk too much, and faint too much, and are simply insupportable. Finally, the book is drearily monotonous and unrelieved by one gleam of poetry or humour.
Corinne is_a classic of which everybody is bound to speak with respect. The enormous admiration which it excited at the time of its appearance may seem somewhat strange in this year of grace; but then it must be remembered that Italy was not the overwritten country it has since become. Besides this, Madame de Staël was the most celebrated woman, and, after Napoleon, the most conspicuous personage of her day. Except Châteaubriand, she had nobody to dispute with her the palm of literary glory in France. Her exile, her literary circle, her courageous opinions, had kept the eyes of Europe fixed on her for years, so that any work from her pen was sure to excite the liveliest curiosity.
Corinne is a kind of glorified guide-book, with some of the qualities of a good novel. It is very longwinded, but the appetite of the age was robust in that respect, and the highly-strung emotions of the hero and heroine could not shock a taste which had been formed by the Sorrows of Werther. It is extremely moral, deeply sentimental, and of a deadly earnestness—three characteristics which could not fail to recommend it to a dreary and ponderous generation, the most deficient in taste that ever trod the earth.
But it is artistic in the sense that the interest is concentrated from first to last on the central figure, and the drama, such as it is, unfolds itself naturally from its starting-point, which is the contrast between the characters of Oswald and Corinne.
Oswald Lord Nelvil is a young man of exquisite sensibility and profound melancholy. He comes to Rome (after distinguishing himself heroically during a fire at Ancona) accompanied by a young Frenchman, the Count D'Erfeuil, whom he has casually met. One of the first sights which greets them on their arrival in the Eternal City is the triumphal procession of "Corinne" on her way to be crowned in the Capitol. She is a musician, an improvisatrice, a Muse or Sibyl, with all the poetry and passion of Italy stamped upon her radiant brow. In the midst of her improvisation she exchanges glances with Lord Nelvil, and the fate of both is sealed. He is intended to be a typical Englishman imbued with a horror of eccentricity in women. His ideal of the sex is a domestic angel, and he feels bound to disapprove of Corinne, who lives alone, though young and beautiful, and offers the spectacle of her various talents to the profane view of the crowd. The Count D'Erfeuil mocks at everything, and is the most amusing character in the book; feels no scruples about knowing Corinne, and, having quickly discovered that his reserved English friend pleases her, he persuades that gentleman to call on her also. Corinne speaks English wonderfully, and allows Lord Nelvil to divine that there is a mystery about her past. Once she betrays great agitation on hearing the name of Edgermond, which is the patronymic of a certain Lucile, whom Lord Nelvil's father had destined him to marry. Grief at the death of this father is, by the way, the ostensible cause of his persistent melancholy, but he also vaguely hints at remorse. He promises that he will one day confide his history to Corinne, who on her side prepares herself to tell him hers. But as she greatly fears the effect of it on him, and is deeply in love, she puts off the evil hour, and, in order to keep him with her, offers to be his cicerone in Rome. Together they wander among the ruins, visit the galleries, and drive on the Appian Way. Corinne explains everything, discourses on everything, and Oswald interrupts her with exclamations of rapture at her wit and learning. This novel form of courtship lasts for some weeks, and finally the lovers proceed to Naples. Corinne persuades Oswald that there is nothing at all extraordinary in such conduct in Italy, where everyone, according to her, may do as he likes. But the Count D'Erfeuil makes remarks which, although intended to be merely flippant, are sensible enough to convince Lord Nelvil that he must either marry Corinne or leave her. He is very much in love, or fancies himself so. Nevertheless he hesitates because of the mystery surrounding his inamorata. Who is she? What is her name? Whence comes her fortune? If she is not quite blameless, he thinks he can never marry her, for that would be derogating from the traditions of his order and outraging the shade of his father. The mental struggle which he undergoes is visible to Corinne and fills her with anguish and alarm. At last, during an expedition to Vesuvius, Oswald speaks. He had been at one time in love with an unworthy French woman; had lingered in France when his father required his presence in England, and had finally returned, only to find him dead. From that hour he had known no peace: remorse had pursued him; his filial love, which was morbidly excessive, caused him to look upon himself as almost a parricide, and he considered that he was thenceforward morally bound to do nothing which his father might disapprove. This absurd conclusion afflicts Corinne visibly, and the sight of her agitation reawakens all Oswald's doubts. He conjures her to tell him her history. She consents; but begs for a few days' grace, and employs the interval in planning and carrying out a fête on Cape Misenum. In front of the azure, tideless sea she takes her lyre and pours out an improvisation on the past glories of that classic shore. This, although Oswald does not know it, is an adieu to her past life, for she foresees that what she has to tell him of herself will entirely change her destiny. Either he will refuse to marry her, and then she will never know happiness again, but wingless, voiceless, will go down to her tomb, or else he will make her his wife, and the Sibyl will be lost in the peeress.
The next day she leaves with him the narrative of her youth. She is the daughter of Lord Edgermond by an Italian wife, consequently the half-sister of Lucile. At the age of fifteen she had gone to England, and fallen under the rule of her step-mother, Lady Edgermond, a cold and rigid Englishwoman, who cared for nothing outside her small provincial town, and regarded genius as a dangerous eccentricity. In the narrow monotony of the life imposed upon her Corinne nearly died. At the age of twenty-one she finally escaped and returned to Italy, having dropped her family name out of respect for Lady Edgermond's feelings. Until her meeting with Oswald she had led the life of a muse, singing, dancing, playing, improvising for the whole of Roman society to admire, and had conceived no idea of greater felicity until learning to love. This love had been a source of peculiar torment to her from the fact of her divining how much the unconventionality of her conduct, when fully known to him, must shock Oswald's English notions of propriety. In the first moment, however, his love triumphs over these considerations, and he resolves to marry Corinne. Only he wishes first—in order that no reproach may attach to her—to force Lady Edgermond once again to acknowledge her as her husband's daughter. He goes to England, partly for this purpose, partly because his regiment has been ordered on active service.
In England he again meets Lucile, a cold-mannered, correct, pure-minded, but secretly ardent English girl, with an odd resemblance in many ways to a French jeune fille. He mentions the subject of her step-daughter to the upright but selfish Lady Edgermond, who has set her heart on seeing Oswald the husband of Lucile. She is too honourable to try and detach him from Corinne by any underhand means, but does what she knows will be far more effectual; that is, she makes him acquainted with the fact that his father had seen Corinne in her early girlhood, had admired her, but had strongly pronounced against the marriage proposed by Lord Edgermond between her and Oswald. In the view of the late Lord Nelvil, she was too brilliant and distinguished for domestic life. This is a terrible blow to Oswald. He begins to think he must give up Corinne, and is strengthened in the idea by perceiving that the beautiful and virtuous Lucile is in love with him. Finally he marries her, decided at the last by Corinne's inexplicable silence. She has not answered his letters for a month, and he concludes that she has forgotten him. But her silence is owing to her having left Venice and come to England. She loses a whole month in London, for very insufficient reasons—necessary, however, to the story—and at last follows Oswald to Scotland just in time to learn that he is married, to fall senseless on the road-side, and to be picked up by the Count d'Erfeuil. She returns heart-broken to Italy, and dies slowly through four long years of unbroken misery.
When she is near her end Oswald comes to Florence, accompanied by his wife and child. He had begun to regret Corinne as soon as he had married Lucile, who, on her side, being naturally resentful, takes refuge in coldness and reserve. As soon as Lord Nelvil learns that his old love is in Florence and dying he wishes ardently to see her, but she refuses to receive him. He sends the child to her, and she teaches it some of her accomplishments. Lucile visits her secretly, and is converted by her eloquence to the necessity of rendering herself more attractive to her husband by displaying some graces of mind.
At last Corinne consents to see Oswald once again, but it shall be, she determines, in public. This is one of the most unnatural scenes in the book. Corinne invites all her friends to assemble in a lecture hall. Thither she has herself transported and placed in an arm-chair. A young girl clad in white and crowned with flowers recites the Song of the Swan, or adieu to life, which Corinne has composed, while Oswald, listening to it and gazing on the dying poetess from his place in the crowd, is suffocated with emotion and finally faints. A few days later Corinne dies, her last act being to point with her diaphanous hand to the moon, which is partially obscured by a band of cloud such as she and Lord Nelvil had once seen when in Naples.
Even as a picture of Italy, Corinne leaves much to be desired. Madame de Staël's ideas of art were acquired. She had no spontaneous admiration even for the things she most warmly praised, and her judgments were conventional and essentially cold. Some of the descriptions are good in the sense of being accurate and forcibly expressed. But even in the best of them—that of Vesuvius—one feels the effort. Madame de Staël is wide-eyed and conscientious, but has no flashes of inspired vision. She can catalogue but not paint. A certain difficulty in saying enough on æsthetic subjects is rendered evident by her vice of moralising. Instead of admiring a marble column as a column, or a picture as a picture, she finds in it food for reflection on the nature of man and the destiny of the world. Some of her remarks on Italian character are extremely clever, and show her usual surprising power of observation; but they are generally superficial.
This was due, in part, to her system of explaining everything by race and political institutions, in part to her passion for generalization. Because Italians had produced the finest art and some of the finest music; because they had no salons and wrote sonnets; because they had developed a curiously systematic form of conjugal infidelity; finally, because they had no political liberty, Madame de Staël constructed a theory which represented them as simply passionate, romantic, imaginative and indulgent. This theory has cropped up now and again in literature from her days to our own, and if partially correct, overlooks the subtler shades and complex contradictions of the Italian mind.
Roman society in the beginning of this century was far from being the transfigured and exotic thing represented in Corinne. The modern Sibyl's prototype, poor Maddalena Maria Morelli, was mercilessly pasquinaded, and on her road to the Capitol pelted with rotten eggs. This gives a very good idea of the sort of impression that would have been produced on a real Prince of Castel-Forte and his fellows by the presence in their midst of a young and beautiful woman, unmarried, nameless, and rich. Corinne's lavish exhibition of her accomplishments is another "false note," as singing and dancing were but rarely, if ever, performed by amateurs in Italy. What redeems the book are the detached sentences of thought that gem almost every page of it. Madame de Staël had gradually shaken off the vices of style which her warmest admirers deplore in her, and in her Allemagne she was presently to reveal herself as singularly lucid, brilliant, and acute. This work of hers on Germany is, perhaps, the most satisfactory of her many productions. As a review of society, art, literature, and philosophy, it naturally lends itself to the form best suited to her essentially analytical mind.
Madame de Staël was always obliged to generalize, that being a law of her intelligence, and this disposition is accentuated in the Allemagne, through her desire to establish such contrasts between Germany and France, as would inspire the latter with a sense of its defects. She saw Germany on the eve of a great awakening, and was not perhaps as fully conscious of this as she might have been. As Sainte Beuve happily says, she was not a poet, and it is only poets who, like birds of passage, feel a coming change of season. Germany appealed to her, however, through everything in herself that was least French; her earnestness, her vague but ardent religious tendencies, her spiritualism, her excessive admiration of intellectual pursuits. She was, therefore, exceptionally well-qualified to reveal to her own countrymen the hitherto unknown or unappreciated beauties of the German mind.
She was, on the other hand, extremely alive to the dulness of German, and especially of Viennese, society, and portrays it in a series of delightfully witty phrases. The Allemagne is indeed the wittiest of all her works, and abounds in the happiest touches.
The opinions expressed on German literature are favourable towards it, and on the whole correct. If she betrays that Schiller was personally more sympathetic to her than Goethe, she nevertheless was quick to perceive in the latter the strain of southern passion, the light, warmth, and colour, which made his intellect less national than universal.
Her chapters on Kant and German philosophy generally, are luminous if not exhaustive. She takes the moral sentiment as her standpoint, and pronounces from that on the different systems. Needless to say, she admires metaphysical speculations, and considers them as valuable in developing intellect and strengthening character.
Les Dix Années d'Exil is a charming book. Apart from its interest as a transcript of the writer's impressions during her exile at Coppet and subsequent flight across Europe, it contains brilliant pictures of different lands, and especially of Russia. One is really amazed to note how much she grasped of the national characteristics during her brief sojourn in that country. The worst reproach that can be addressed to her description is that, as usual, it is rather too favourable. Her anxiety to prove that no country could flourish, during a reign such as Napoleon's, made her disposed to see through rose-coloured spectacles the Governments which found force to resist him.
The Considerations on the French Revolution were published posthumously. According to Sainte Beuve, this is the finest of Madame de Staël's works. "Her star," he says, "rose in its full splendour only above her tomb." It is difficult to pronounce any summary judgment on this book, which is partly biographical and partly historical. The first volume is principally devoted to a vindication of Necker; the scond to an attack on Napoleon; the third to a study of the English Constitution and the applicability of its principles to France. The two first volumes alone were revised by the authoress before her death. We find in this work all Madame de Staël's natural and surprising power of comprehension. She handles difficult political problems with an ease that would be more astonishing still, had the book more unity. As it is, each separate circumstance is related and explained admirably, but one is not made to reach the core of the stupendous event of which Europe still feels the vibration. Her portrait of Napoleon is unsurpassable for force and irony, for sarcasm and truth. All she possessed of epigrammatic power seems to have come unsought to enable her to avenge herself on the mean, great man who had feared her enough to exile and persecute her.
In closing this rapid review of her works, one asks why was Madame de Staël not a greater writer? The answer is easy; she lacked high creative power and the sense of form. Her mind was strong of grasp and wide in range, but continuous effort fatigued it. She could strike out isolated sentences alternately brilliant, exhaustive, and profound, but she could not link them to other sentences so as to form an organic page. Her thought was definite singly, but vague as a whole. She always saw things separately, and tried to unite them arbitrarily, and it is generally difficult to follow out any idea of hers from its origin to its end. Her thoughts are like pearls of price profusely scattered, or carelessly strung together, but not set in any design. On closing one of her books, the reader is left with no continuous impression. He has been dazzled and delighted, enlightened also by flashes; but the horizons disclosed have vanished again, and the outlook is enriched by no new vistas.
Then she was deficient in the higher qualities of imagination. She could analyse but not characterise; construct but not create. She could take one defect like selfishness, or one passion like love, and display its workings; or she could describe a whole character, like Napoleon's, with marvellous penetration; but she could not make her personages talk or act like human beings. She lacked pathos, and had no sense of humour. In short, hers was a mind endowed with enormous powers of comprehension, and an amazing richness of ideas, but deficient in perception of beauty, in poetry, and true originality. She was a great social personage, but her influence on literature was not destined to be lasting, because, in spite of foreseeing much, she had not the true prophetic sense of proportion, and confused the things of the present with those of the future—the accidental with the enduring.