In Lady Blennerhassett's enthusiastic and encyclopædic book on Madame de
Stael she quotes approvingly Sainte-Beuve's phrase that "with _Corinne_
Madame de Stael ascended the Capitol." I forget in which of his many
dealings with an author who, as he remarks in the "Coppet-and-Weimar"
_causeries_, was "an idol of his youth and one that he never renounced,"
this fancy occurs. It must probably have been in one of his early
essays; for in his later and better, Sainte-Beuve was not wont to give
way to the little flashes and crackles of conceit and epigram which many
Frenchmen and some Englishmen think to be criticism. There was, however,
some excuse for this. In the first place (as one of Charles Lamb's
literal friends would have pointed out), Madame de Stael, like her
heroine, did actually "ascend the Capitol," and received attentions
there from an Academy. In the second, there can be no doubt that
_Corinne_ in a manner fixed and settled the high literary reputation
which she had already attained. Even by her severest critics, and even
now when whatever slight recrudescence of biographical interest may have
taken place in her, her works are little read, _Corinne_ is ranked next
to _De l'Allemagne_ as her greatest production; while as a work of form,
not of matter, as literature of power, not of knowledge, it has at last
a chance of enduring when its companion is but a historical
document--the record of a moment that has long passed away.
The advocates of the _milieu_ theory--the theory which will have it that
you can explain almost the whole of any work of art by examining the
circumstances, history, and so forth of the artist--have a better chance
with _Corinne_ than with many books, though those who disagree with them
(as I own that I do) may retort that this was precisely because Madame
de Stael in literature has little idiosyncracy, and is a receptive, not
a creative, force. The moment at which this book was composed and
appeared had really many of the characteristics of crisis and climax in
the life of the author. She was bidding adieu to youth; and though her
talents, her wealth, her great reputation, and her indomitable
determination to surround herself with admirers still made her a sort of
queen of society, some illusions at least must have been passing from
her. The most serious of her many passions, that for Benjamin Constant,
was coming, though it had not yet come, to an end. Her father, whom she
unfeignedly idolised, was not long dead. The conviction must have been
for some time forcing itself on her, though she did not even yet give up
hope, that Napoleon's resolve not to allow her presence in her still
more idolised Paris was unconquerable. Her husband, who indeed had long
been nothing to her, was dead also, and the fancy for replacing him with
the boy Rocca had not yet arisen. The influence of the actual chief of
her usual herd of lovers, courtiers, teachers, friends (to use whichever
term, or combination of terms, the charitable reader pleases), A.W.
Schlegel, though it never could incline her innately unpoetical and
unreligious mind to either poetry or religion, drove her towards
æsthetics of one kind and another. Lastly, the immense intellectual
excitement of her visits to Weimar, Berlin, and Italy, added its
stimulus to produce a fresh intellectual ferment in her. On the purely
intellectual side the result was _De l'Allemagne_, which does not
concern us; on the side of feeling, tinged with æsthetic philosophy, of
study of the archaic and the picturesque illuminated by emotion--the
result was _Corinne_.
If there had been only one difference between this and its author's
earlier attempt at novel-writing, that difference would have given
_Corinne_ a great advantage. _Delphine_ had been irreverently described
by Sydney Smith, when it appeared a few years earlier, as "this dismal
trash which has nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic with gaping."
The Whigs had not then taken up Madame de Stael, as they did afterwards,
or it is quite certain that Mr Sydney would not have been allowed to
exercise such Britannic frankness. _Corinne_ met with gentler treatment
from his friends, if not from himself. Sir James Mackintosh, in
particular, was full of the wildest enthusiasm about it, though he
admitted that it was "full of faults so obvious as not to be worth
mentioning." It must be granted to be in more than one, or two important
points a very great advance on _Delphine_. One is that the easy and
illegitimate source of interest which is drawn upon in the earlier book
is here quite neglected. _Delphine_ presents the eternal French
situation of the "triangle;" the line of _Corinne_ is straight, and the
only question is which pair of three points it is to unite in an
honourable way. A French biographer of Madame de Stael, who is not only
an excellent critic and an extremely clever writer, but a historian of
great weight and acuteness, M. Albert Sorel, has indeed admitted that
both Léonce, the hero of _Delphine_, who will not make himself and his
beloved happy because he has an objection to divorcing his wife, and
Lord Nelvil, who refuses either to seduce or to marry the woman who
loves him and whom he loves, are equal donkeys with a national
difference. Léonce is more of a "fool;" Lord Nelvil more of a "snob." It
is something to find a Frenchman who will admit that any national
characteristic is foolish: I could have better reciprocated M. Sorel's
candour if he had used the word "prig" instead of "snob" of Lord Nelvil.
But indeed I have often suspected that Frenchmen confuse these two
engaging attributes of the Britannic nature.
A "higher moral tone" (as the phrase goes) is not the only advantage
which _Corinne_ possesses over its forerunner. _Delphine_ is almost
avowedly autobiographical; and though Madame de Stael had the wit and
the prudence to mix and perplex her portraits and her reminiscences so
that it was nearly impossible to fit definite caps on the personages,
there could be no doubt that Delphine was herself--as she at least would
have liked to be--drawn as close as she dared. These personalities have
in the hands of the really great masters of fiction sometimes produced
astonishing results; but no one probably would contend that Madame de
Stael was a born novelist. Although _Delphine_ has many more personages
and much more action of the purely novel kind than _Corinne_, it is
certainly not an interesting book; I think, though I have been
reproached for, to say the least, lacking fervour as a Staelite, that
_Corinne_ is.
But it is by no means unimportant that intending readers should know the
sort of interest that they are to expect from this novel; and for that
purpose it is almost imperative that they should know what kind of
person was this novelist. A good deal of biographical pains has been
spent, as has been already more than once hinted, on Madame de Stael.
She was most undoubtedly of European reputation in her day; and between
her day and this, quite independently of the real and unquestionable
value of her work, a high estimate of her has been kept current by the
fact that her daughter was the wife of Duke Victor and the mother of
Duke Albert of Broglie, and that so a proper respect for her has been a
necessary passport to favour in one of the greatest political and
academic houses of France; while another not much less potent in both
ways, that of the Counts d'Haussonville, also represents her. Still
people, and especially English people, have so many non-literary things
to think of, that it may not be quite unpardonable to supply that
conception of the life of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baroness of
Stael-Holstein, which is so necessary to the understanding of _Corinne_,
and which may, in possible cases, be wanting.
She was born on the 22nd of April 1766, and was, as probably everybody
knows, the daughter of the Swiss financier, Necker, whom the French
Revolution first exalted to almost supreme power in France, and then
cast off--fortunately for him, in a less tragical fashion than that in
which it usually cast off its favourites. Her mother was Suzanne
Curchod, the first love of Gibbon, a woman of a delicate beauty, of very
considerable mental and social faculties, a kind of puritanical
coquette, but devoted to her (by all accounts not particularly
interesting) husband. Indeed, mother and daughter are said to have been
from a very early period jealous of each other in relation to Necker.
Germaine, as she was generally called, had, unluckily for her, inherited
nothing of her mother's delicacy of form and feature; indeed, her most
rapturous admirers never dared to claim much physical beauty for her,
except a pair of fine, though unfeminine, eyes. She was rather short
than tall; her figure was square-set and heavy; her features, though not
exactly ill-formed, matched her figure; her arms were massive, though
not ill-shaped; and she was altogether distinctly what the French call
_hommasse_. Nevertheless, her great wealth, and the high position of her
father, attracted suitors, some of whom at least may not have overlooked
the intellectual ability which she began very early to display. There
was talk of her marrying William Pitt, but either Pitt's well-known
"dislike of the fair," or some other reason, foiled the project. After
one or two other negotiations she made a match which was not destined to
good fortune, and which does not strike most observers as a very
tempting one in any respect, though it carried with it some exceptional
and rather eccentric guarantees for that position at court and in
society on which Germaine was set. The King of Sweden, Gustavus, whose
family oddity had taken, among less excusable forms, that of a platonic
devotion to Marie Antoinette, gave a sort of perpetual brevet of his
ministry at Paris to the Baron de Stael-Holstein, a nobleman of little
fortune and fair family. This served, using clerical language, as his
"title" to marriage with Germaine Necker. Such a marriage could not be
expected to, and did not, turn out very well; but it did not turn out as
ill as it might have done. Except that M. de Stael was rather
extravagant (which he probably supposed he had bought the right to be)
nothing serious is alleged against him; and though more than one thing
serious might be alleged against his wife, it is doubtful whether either
contracting party thought this out of the bargain. For business reasons,
chiefly, a separation was effected between the pair in 1798, but they
were nominally reconciled four years later, just before Stael's death.
Meanwhile the Revolution broke out, and Madame de Stael, who, as she was
bound to do, had at first approved it, disapproved totally of the
Terror, tried to save the Queen, and fled herself from France to
England. Here she lived in Surrey with a questionable set of _émigrés_,
made the acquaintance of Miss Burney, and in consequence of the
unconventionalities of her relations, especially with M. de Narbonne,
received, from English society generally, a cold shoulder, which she has
partly avenged, or tried to avenge, in _Corinne_ itself. She had already
written, or was soon to write, a good deal, but nothing of the first
importance. Then she went to Coppet, her father's place, on the Lake of
Geneva, which she was later to render so famous; and under the Directory
was enabled to resume residence in Paris, though she was more than once
under suspicion. It was at this time that she met Benjamin Constant, the
future brilliant orator, and author of _Adolphe_, the only man perhaps
whom she ever really loved, but, unluckily, a man whom it was by no
means good to love. For some years she oscillated contentedly enough
between Coppet and Paris. But the return of Bonaparte from Egypt was
unlucky for her. Her boundless ambition, which, with her love of
society, was her strongest passion, made her conceive the idea of
fascinating him, and through him ruling the world. Napoleon, to use
familiar English, "did not see it." When he liked women he liked them
pretty and feminine; he had not the faintest idea of admitting any kind
of partner in his glory; he had no literary taste; and not only did
Madame de Stael herself meddle with politics, but her friend, Constant,
under the Consulate, chose to give himself airs of opposition in the
English sense. Moreover, she still wrote, and Bonaparte disliked and
dreaded everyone who wrote with any freedom. Her book, _De la
Littérature_, in 1800, was taken as a covert attack on the Napoleonic
_régime_; her father shortly after republished another on finance and
politics, which was disliked; and the success of _Delphine_, in 1803,
put the finishing touch to the petty hatred of any kind of rival
superiority which distinguished the Corsican more than any other man of
equal genius. Madame de Stael was ordered not to approach within forty
leagues of Paris, and this exile, with little softening and some
excesses of rigour, lasted till the return of the Bourbons.
Then it was that the German and Italian journeys already mentioned (the
death of M. Necker happening between them and recalling his daughter
from the first) led to the writing of _Corinne_.
A very few words before we turn to the consideration of the book, as a
book and by itself, may appropriately finish all that need be said here
about the author's life. After the publication of _Corinne_ she returned
to Germany, and completed the observation which she thought necessary
for the companion book _De l'Allemagne_. Its publication in 1810, when
she had foolishly kindled afresh the Emperor's jealousy by appearing
with her usual "tail" of worshippers or parasites as near Paris as she
was permitted, completed her disgrace. She was ordered back to Coppet:
her book was seized and destroyed. Then Albert de Rocca, a youth of
twenty-three, who had seen some service, made his appearance at Geneva.
Early in 1811, Madame de Stael, now aged forty-five, married him
secretly. She was, or thought herself, more and more persecuted by
Napoleon; she feared that Rocca might be ordered off on active duty, and
she fled first to Vienna, then to St Petersburg, then to Stockholm, and
so to England. Here she was received with ostentatious welcome and
praises by the Whigs; with politeness by everybody; with more or less
concealed terror by the best people, who found her rhapsodies and her
political dissertations equally boring. Here too she was unlucky enough
to express the opinion that Miss Austen's books were vulgar. The fall
of Napoleon brought her back to Paris; and after the vicissitudes of
1814-15, enabled her to establish herself there for the short remainder
of her life, with the interruption only of visits to Coppet and to
Italy. She died on the 13th July 1817: her two last works, _Dix Années
d'Exil_ and the posthumous _Considérations sur La Révolution Française_,
being admittedly of considerable interest, and not despicable even by
those who do not think highly of her political talents.
And now to _Corinne_, unhampered and perhaps a little helped by this
survey of its author's character, career, and compositions. The
heterogeneous nature of its plan can escape no reader long; and indeed
is pretty frankly confessed by its title. It is a love story doubled
with a guide-book: an eighteenth-century romance of "sensibility"
blended with a transition or even nineteenth-century diatribe of
æsthetics and "culture." If only the first of these two labels were
applicable to it, its case would perhaps be something more gracious than
it is; for there are more unfavourable situations for cultivating the
affections, than in connection with the contemplation of the great works
of art and nature, and it is possible to imagine many more disagreeable
_ciceroni_ than a lover of whichever sex. But Corinne and Nelvil (whom
our contemporary translator[1] has endeavoured to acclimatise a little
more by Anglicising his name further to Nelville), do not content
themselves with making love in the congenial neighbourhoods of Tiber or
Poestum, or in the stimulating presence of the masterpieces of modern
and ancient art. A purpose, and a double purpose, it might almost be
said, animates the book. It aims at displaying "sensibility so
charming"--the strange artificial eighteenth-century conception of love
which is neither exactly flirtation nor exactly passion, which sets
convention at defiance, but retains its own code of morality; at
exhibiting the national differences, as Madame de Stael conceived them,
of the English and French and Italian temperaments; and at preaching the
new cult of æsthetics whereof Lessing and Winckelmann, Goethe, and
Schlegel, were in different ways and degrees the apostles. And it seems
to have been generally admitted, even by the most fervent admirers of
Madame de Stael and of _Corinne_ itself, that the first purpose has not
had quite fair play with the other two. "A little thin," they confess of
the story. In truth it could hardly be thinner, though the author has
laid under contribution an at least ample share of the improbabilities
and coincidences of romance.
Nelvil, an English-Scottish peer who has lost his father, who accuses
himself of disobedience and ingratitude to that father, and who has been
grievously jilted by a Frenchwoman, arrives in Italy in a large black
cloak, the deepest melancholy, and the company of a sprightly though
penniless French _émigré_, the Count d'Erfeuil. After performing
prodigies of valour in a fire at Ancona, he reaches Rome just when a
beautiful and mysterious poetess, the delight of Roman society, is being
crowned on the Capitol. The only name she is known by is Corinne. The
pair are soon introduced by the mercurial Erfeuil, and promptly fall in
love with each other, Corinne seeking partly to fix her hold on Nelvil,
partly to remove his Britannic contempt for Italy and the Italians, by
guiding him to all the great spectacles of Rome and indeed of the
country generally, and by explaining to him at great length what she
understands of the general theory of æsthetics, of Italian history, and
of the contrasted character of the chief European nations. Nelvil on his
side is distracted between the influence of the beauty, genius, and
evident passion of Corinne, and his English prejudices; while the
situation is further complicated by the regulation discovery that
Corinne, though born in Italy of an Italian mother, is, strictly
speaking, his own compatriot, being the elder and lawful daughter of a
British peer, Lord Edgermond, his father's closest friend. Nay more, he
had always been destined to wed this very girl; and it was only after
her father's second marriage with an Englishwoman that the younger and
wholly English daughter, Lucile, was substituted in the paternal schemes
as his destined spouse. He hears, on the other hand, how Corinne had
visited her fatherland and her step-mother, how she had found both
intolerable, and how she had in a modified and decent degree "thrown her
cap over the mill" by returning to Italy to live an independent life as
a poetess, an improvisatrice, and, at least in private, an actress.
It is not necessary to supply fuller argument of the text which follows,
and of which, when the reader has got this length, he is not likely to
let the _dénoûment_ escape him. But the action of _Corinne_ gets rather
slowly under weigh; and I have known those who complained that they
found the book hard to read because they were so long in coming to any
clear notion of "what it was all about." Therefore so much argument as
has been given seems allowable.
But we ought by this time to have laid sufficient foundation to make it
not rash to erect a small superstructure of critical comment on the book
now once more submitted to English readers. Of that book I own that I
was myself a good many years ago, and for a good many years, a harsh and
even a rather unfair judge. I do not know whether years have brought me
the philosophic mind, or whether the book--itself, as has been said, the
offspring of middle-aged emotions--appeals more directly to a
middle-aged than to a young judgment. To the young of its own time and
the times immediately succeeding it appealed readily enough, and
scarcely Byron himself (who was not a little influenced by it) had more
to do with the Italomania of Europe in the second quarter of this
century than Madame de Stael.
The faults of the novel indeed are those which impress themselves (as
Mackintosh, we have seen, allowed) immediately and perhaps excessively.
M. Sorel observes of its companion sententiously but truly, "Si le style
de _Delphine_ semble vieilli, c'est qu'il a été jeune." If not merely
the style but the sentiment, the whole properties and the whole stage
management of _Corinne_ seem out of date now, it is only because they
were up to date then. It is easy to laugh--not perhaps very easy to
abstain from laughing--at the "schall" twisted in Corinne's hair, where
even contemporaries mocked the hideous turban with which Madame de Stael
chose to bedizen her not too beautiful head; at Nelvil's inky cloak; at
the putting out of the fire; at the queer stilted half-Ossianic,
half-German rants put in the poetess's mouth; at the endless mingling of
gallantry and pedantry; at the hesitations of Nelvil; at the agonies of
Corinne. When French critics tell us that as they allow the
good-humoured satire on the Count d'Erfeuil to be just, we ought to do
the same in reference to the "cant Britannique" of Nelvil and of the
Edgermond circle, we can only respectfully answer that we should not
presume to dispute their judgment in the first case, but that they
really must leave us to ours in the second. As a matter of fact, Madame
de Stael's goody English characters, are rather like Miss Edgeworth's
naughty French ones in _Leonora_ and elsewhere--clever generalisations
from a little observation and a great deal of preconceived idea, not
studies from the life.
But this (and a great deal more that might be said if it were not
something like petty treason in an introduction-writer thus to play the
devil's advocate against his author) matters comparatively little, and
leaves enough in _Corinne_ to furnish forth a book almost great,
interesting without any "almost," and remarkable as a not very large
shelf-ful in the infinite library of modern fiction deserves remark. For
the passion of its two chief characters, however oddly, and to us
unfashionably, presented, however lacking in the commanding and
perennial qualities which make us indifferent to fashion in the work of
the greatest masters, is _real_. And it is perhaps only after a pretty
long study of literature that one perceives how very little real passion
books, even pretty good books, contain, how much of what at times seems
to us passionate in them owes its appeal to accident, mode, and the
personal equation. Of the highest achievement of art--that which avails
itself of, but subdues, personal thought and feeling in the elaboration
of a perfectly live character--Madame de Stael was indeed incapable. But
in the second order--that which, availing itself of, but not subduing,
the personal element, keeps enough of its veracity and lively force to
enliven a composite structure of character--she has here produced very
noteworthy studies. Corinne is a very fair embodiment of the beauty
which her author would so fain have had; of the youthful ardour which
she had once actually possessed; of the ideas and cults to which she was
sincerely enough devoted; of the instruction and talent which
unquestionably distinguished her. And it is not, I think, fanciful to
discover in this heroine, with all her "Empire" artifice and convention,
all her smack of the theatre and the _salon_, a certain live quiver and
throb, which, as has been already hinted, may be traced to the combined
working in Madame de Stael's mind and heart of the excitements of
foreign travel, the zest of new studies, new scenes, new company, with
the chill regret for lost or passing youth and love, and the chillier
anticipation of coming old age and death. It is a commonplace of
psychology that in shocks and contrasts of this kind the liveliest
workings of the imagination and the emotions are to be expected. If we
once establish the contact and complete the circle, and feel something
of the actual thrill that animated the author, we shall, I think, feel
disposed to forgive Corinne many things--from the dress and attitude
which recall that admirable frontispiece of Pickersgill's to Miss
Austen's _Emma_, where Harriet Smith poses in rapt attitude with
"schall" or scarf complete, to that more terrible portrait of Madame de
Stael herself which editors with remorseless ferocity will persist in
prefixing to her works, and especially to _Corinne_. We shall consent to
sweep away all the _fatras_ and paraphernalia of the work, and to see in
the heroine a real woman enough--loving, not unworthy of being loved,
unfortunate, and very undeserving of her ill fortune. We shall further
see that besides other excuses for the mere guide-book detail, the
enthusiasm for Italy which partly prompted it was genuine enough and
very interesting as a sign of the times--of the approach of a period of
what we may call popularised learning, culture, sentiment. In some
respects _Corinne_ is not merely a guide-book to Italy; it is a
guide-book by prophecy to the nineteenth century.
The minor characters are a very great deal less interesting than Corinne
herself, but they are not despicable, and they set off the heroine and
carry out what story there is well enough. Nelvil of course is a thing
shreddy and patchy enough. He reminds us by turns of Chateaubriand's
René and Rousseau's Bomston, both of whom Madame de Stael of course
knew; of Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, with whom she was very probably
acquainted; but most of no special, even bookish, progenitor, but of a
combination of theoretic deductions from supposed properties of man in
general and Englishman in particular. Of Englishmen in particular Madame
de Stael knew little more than a residence (chiefly in _émigré_ society)
for a short time in England, and occasional meetings elsewhere, could
teach her. Of men in general her experience had been a little
unfortunate. Her father had probity, financial skill, and, I suppose, a
certain amount of talent in other directions; but while he must have had
some domestic virtues he was a wooden pedant. Her husband hardly counted
for more in her life than her _maître d'hôtel_, and though there seems
to have been no particular harm in him, had no special talents and no
special virtues. Her first regular lover, Narbonne, was a handsome,
dignified, heartless _roué_ of the old _régime_. Her second, Benjamin
Constant, was a man of genius, and capable of passionate if inconstant
attachment, but also what his own generation in England called a
thorough "raff"--selfish, treacherous, fickle, incapable of considering
either the happiness or the reputation of women, theatrical in his ways
and language, venal, insolent, ungrateful. Schlegel, though he too had
some touch of genius in him, was half pedant, half coxcomb, and full of
intellectual and moral faultiness. The rest of her mighty herd of male
friends and hangers-on ranged from Mathieu de Montmorency--of whom, in
the words of Medora Trevilian it may be said, that he was "only an
excellent person"--through respectable savants like Sismondi and Dumont,
down to a very low level of toady and tuft-hunter. It is rather
surprising that with such models and with no supreme creative faculty
she should have been able to draw such creditable walking gentlemen as
the Frenchman Erfeuil, the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian
Castel-Forte; and should not have produced a worse hero than Nelvil. For
Nelvil, whatever faults he may have, and contemptible as his vacillating
refusal to take the goods the gods provide him may be, is, after all, if
not quite a live man, an excellent model of what a considerable number
of the men of his time aimed at being, and would have liked to be. He is
not a bit less life-like than Byron's usual hero for instance, who
probably owes not a little to him.
And so we get to a fresh virtue of _Corinne_, or rather we reach its
main virtue by a different side. It has an immense historical value as
showing the temper, the aspirations, the ideas, and in a way the manners
of a certain time and society. A book which does this can never wholly
lose its interest; it must always retain that interest in a great
measure, for those who are able to appreciate it. And it must interest
them far more keenly, when, besides this secondary and, so to speak,
historical merit, it exhibits such veracity in the portraiture of
emotion, as, whatever be its drawbacks, whatever its little temptations
to ridicule, distinguishes the hapless, and, when all is said, the noble
and pathetic figure of Corinne.