SOME LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS
Switzerland has not produced much native literary genius. The literary
associations of the land are mostly concerned with strangers who went
to it as a land of refuge or as visitors. True, in the thirteenth
century Zurich was famous for its poets, for its share in the making
of the Nibelungen and the Minnelieder, and for the "Codex
Manesse"--the collection of the works of 150 German and Swiss poets of
the day. Again in the days of Rousseau--perhaps the most famous of
Swiss writers--there was quite a herd of sentimental novelists at
Lausanne. But, on the whole, it cannot be said that the Swiss have
shown themselves conspicuously a people of imagination. In war they
have a magnificent record: in science and in philosophy a record above
the average: in poetry and romance they have little to show. But if
colonists and visitors who associated themselves strongly with Swiss
life be taken into account, then Switzerland becomes one of the most
interesting literary centres of Europe.
[Illustration: THE STATUE OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ON THE ISLAND IN
THE RHONE, GENEVA.]
From Madame de Stael and her _salon_ at Coppet (to cite one example)
what invitations crowd to literary pilgrimages! Madame de Stael was
destined by birth for that literary limelight which she loved so well.
Her mother, Mademoiselle Curchod, afterwards Madame Necker, was the
charming young Swiss who inspired a discreet passion in the stately
bosom of Gibbon, the historian of _The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_. Gibbon had been sent to Switzerland by his father because he
had shown leanings towards the Roman Catholic faith. The robust
Protestantism of Lausanne was prescribed as a cure for a religious
feeling which was not welcome to his family. The cure was complete, so
complete that Gibbon was left with hardly any Christian faith at all.
Whether because that left an empty place in his heart, or in the
natural order of things, Gibbon took refuge in a love affair, a very
discreet, cold-blooded affair on his part; but, judging by the
correspondence which has survived, a more serious matter to the girl
whose affections he engaged.
Gibbon tells the story of his early love himself, in a letter which is
full of unconscious humour, since he writes of it without a tremor and
with all the decorous stateliness which he gave to the narrative of a
Diocletian:
I need not blush at recollecting the object of my choice; and
though my love was disappointed of success, I am rather proud
that I was once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted
sentiment. The personal attractions of Mademoiselle Susan
Curchod were embellished by the virtues and talents of the
mind. Her fortune was humble, but her family was respectable.
Her mother, a native of France, had preferred her religion to
her country. The profession of her father did not extinguish
the moderation and philosophy of his temper, and he lived
content with a small salary and laborious duty in the obscure
lot of minister of Crassy, in the mountains that separate the
Pays de Vaud from the county of Burgundy. In the solitude of a
sequestered village he bestowed a liberal, and even learned,
education on his only daughter. She surpassed his hopes by her
proficiency in the sciences and languages; and in her short
visits to some relations at Lausanne, the wit, the beauty, and
erudition of Mademoiselle Curchod were the theme of universal
applause. The report of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I
saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in
conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and
the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and
knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance. She permitted me to
make two or three visits at her father's house. I passed some
happy days there, in the mountains of Burgundy, and her parents
honourably encouraged the connection. In a calm retirement the
gay vanity of youth no longer fluttered in her bosom, and I
might presume to hope that I had made some impression on a
virtuous heart. At Crassy and Lausanne I indulged my dream of
felicity; but on my return to England I soon discovered that my
father would not hear of this strange alliance, and that
without his consent I was myself destitute and helpless. After
a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; I sighed as a lover, I
obeyed as a son: my wound was insensibly healed by time,
absence, and the habits of a new life. My cure was accelerated
by a faithful report of the tranquillity and cheerfulness of
the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship and
esteem.
Gibbon was a very pompous gentleman, but a gentleman. He might
otherwise, without departing from the truth, have shown that the
little Swiss beauty was far more in love with him than he with her,
and her tranquillity and cheerfulness in giving him up were of hard
earning. She contrived in time to forget the lover who probably would
have made her more famous than happy, and married a Mr. Necker, a rich
banker of her own country. (Berne at that time was one of the chief
financial centres of Europe.) To him she bore the girl who was to be
Madame de Stael, as pompous in mind as Gibbon, but somewhat warmer in
temperament.
Many years after the romance had died, when Madame Necker was a happy
matron, Gibbon, still a bachelor, decided to make Switzerland his
permanent home. Motives of economy, not of romance, dictated this
choice. In 1783 he moved to Lausanne, where he completed his history,
established a literary _salon_, and enjoyed life in spite of somewhat
serious attacks of gout. M., Mdme., and Mslle. Necker (the last to
become Madame de Stael) were frequent visitors, and he attached
himself to Madame Necker by the bonds of a close but strictly Platonic
friendship. In 1787 Gibbon completed his famous history, and seems to
have contemplated afterwards a marriage "for companionship sake." But
he never fixed on a lady, and died a bachelor six years after.
During Gibbon's life the Neckers had established their country-seat at
Coppet, near Geneva, which was afterwards the seat of Madame de
Stael's court. Though born Swiss, Madame de Stael was altogether
French in sympathy, detested Switzerland, and was impatient at any
talk of its natural beauties. "I would rather go miles to hear a
clever man talk than open the windows of my rooms at Naples to see the
beauties of the Gulf," she said once. Napoleon, as the greatest man of
the age, of course, attracted her. I suspect that she would have been
a most ardent Napoleonist if he had made love to her. "Tell me," she
said to Napoleon once, "whom do you think is the greatest woman in
France to-day?" And Napoleon answered, "The woman who bears most sons
for the army." It was not an ingratiating reply. But Napoleon, who
detested the idea of petticoat government and was never inclined to
chain himself by any bonds to an interfering and ambitious woman,
disliked Madame de Stael: and she in time learned to hate him, and
intrigued against the man whom she could not intrigue with. The upshot
was exile for her. She was turned out of Paris, much to her rage. On
several occasions she sought to return. But Napoleon was inexorable.
She replied to his enmity by industry as a conspirator. Fouche, who
speaks of her as "the intriguing daughter of Necker," credits Madame
de Stael with having been regarded by Napoleon as "an implacable
enemy," of having been the focus of the Senate conspiracy against
Napoleon in 1802, and of being "the life and soul" of the opposition
to him in 1812. It was certainly a remarkable woman who could thus
stand up against Napoleon.
Madame de Stael's _salon_ at Coppet became a centre famous over all
Europe. Her powers of intrigue supplemented her literary fame, and
that was very great and well deserved. As an essayist she has a clear
and warm style, and as a writer she could be betrayed into forgetting
her personal rancours. There is, for example, no more true criticism
of the literary style of Napoleon (who wrote newspaper "leaders" in
his day) than that it was, as de Stael wrote, so vigorous that you
could see that the writer "wished to put in blows instead of words."
An American traveller who paid a pilgrimage to the shrine of Madame de
Stael at Coppet gives this picture of the lady:
Her features were good, but her complexion bad. She had a
certain roundness and amplitude of form. She was never at a
loss for the happiest expressions; but _deviated into anecdotes
that might be an offence to American ears_!
Baron de Voght, who seemingly had not an American Puritanism of ear,
wrote more warmly about the famous lady to a mutual friend, Madame
Recamier:
It is to you that I owe my most amiable reception at Coppet. It
is no doubt to the favourable expectations aroused by your
friendship that I owe my intimate acquaintance with this
remarkable woman. I might have met her without your
assistance--some casual acquaintance would no doubt have
introduced me--but I should never have penetrated to the
intimacy of this sublime and beautiful soul, and should never
have known how much better she is than her reputation. _She is
an angel sent from heaven to reveal the divine goodness upon
earth._ To make her irresistible, a pure ray of celestial light
embellishes her spirit and makes her amiable from every point
of view.
At once profound and light, whether she is discovering a
mysterious secret of the soul or grasping the lightest shadow
of a sentiment, her genius shines without dazzling, and when
the orb of light has disappeared, it leaves a pleasant twilight
to follow it.... No doubt a few faults, a few weaknesses,
occasionally veil this celestial apparition; even the initiated
must sometimes be troubled by these eclipses, which the Genevan
astronomers in vain endeavour to predict.
Still another pen picture of the same lady, from Benjamin Constant,
who was her lover for many years and found the burden of maintaining
an affection to match hers too great:
Yes, certainly I am more anxious than ever to break it off. She
is the most egoistical, the most excitable, the most
ungrateful, the most vain, and the most vindictive of women.
Why didn't I break it off long ago? She is odious and
intolerable to me. I must have done with her or die. She is
more volcanic than all the volcanoes in the world put together.
She is like an old _procureur_, with serpents in her hair,
demanding the fulfilment of a contract in Alexandrine verse.
Byron was one of the famous men who visited the _salon_ of Madame de
Stael. He was drawn to Switzerland in the course of his "parade of the
pageant of his bleeding heart," and found much prompting in Swiss
scenery to proclaim his sorrows:
Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.
To Madame de Stael he presented a copy of _Glenarvon_, an English
novel in which his "devilish" character had been exposed. It was an
effective introduction; and was aided in its theatrical effect by the
fact that an English lady fainted in Madame de Stael's drawing-room
when Byron's name was announced as a visitor. But evidently Byron
failed sadly to live up to his wicked reputation. Whether it was his
famous hostess who was disappointed or some one else, he made no fame
at Coppet. The de Staels' son-in-law, Duke Victor de Broglie,
writes with palpable sourness of the visit of this ineffectual Satan:
[Illustration: CHATEAU DE PRANGINS.]
Lord Byron, an exile of his own free will, having succeeded,
not without difficulty, in persuading the world of fashion in
his own country that he was, if not the Devil in person, at
least a living copy of Manfred or Lara, had settled for the
summer in a charming house on the east bank of the Lake of
Geneva. He was living with an Italian physician named Polidori,
who imitated him to the best of his ability. It was there that
he composed a good many of his little poems, and that he tried
his hardest to inspire the good Genevans with the same horror
and terror that his fellow-countrymen felt for him; but this
was pure affectation on his part, and he only half succeeded
with it. "My nephew," Louis XIV. used to say of the Duc
d'Orleans, "is, in the matter of crime, only a boastful
pretender"; Lord Byron was only a boastful pretender in the
matter of vice.
As he flattered himself that he was a good swimmer and sailor,
he was perpetually crossing the Lake in all directions, and
used to come fairly often to Coppet. His appearance was
agreeable, but not at all distinguished. His face was handsome,
but without expression or originality; his figure was round and
short; he did not manoeuvre his lame legs with the same ease
and nonchalance as M. de Talleyrand. His talk was heavy and
tiresome, thanks to his paradoxes, seasoned with profane
pleasantries out of date in the language of Voltaire, and the
commonplaces of a vulgar Liberalism. Madame de Stael, who
helped all her friends to make the best of themselves, did what
she could to make him cut a dignified figure without success;
and when the first movement of curiosity had passed, his
society ceased to attract, and no one was glad to see him.
Omitting from this chapter Rousseau and Voltaire, as having closer
kinship to political philosophy than to literature, a next famous name
to be recalled of this epoch is the author of _Obermann_, Etienne
Pivert de Senancour. Senancour was born in France in 1770. He was
educated for the priesthood, and passed some time in the seminary of
St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and
passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France
in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of
letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in
1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only:
_Eternite, deviens mon asile!_ The influence of Rousseau,
Chateaubriand, and Madame de Stael shows in Senancour. _Obermann_ is a
collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of
Nature and of the human soul. Senancour has been introduced to the
English-speaking public by the lofty praise of Matthew Arnold, who
apostrophises him in _Obermann_:
How often, where the slopes are green
On Jaman, hast thou sate
By some high chalet-door, and seen
The summer-day grow late;
And darkness steal o'er the wet grass
With the pale crocus starr'd,
And reach that shimmering sheet of glass
Beneath the piny sward,
Lake Leman's waters, far below!
And watch'd the rosy light
Fade from the distant peaks of snow;
And on the air of night
Heard accents of the eternal tongue
Through the pine branches play----
In a later time practically all the most famous writers of English had
some relation to Switzerland. Trelawney (Shelley's friend) was led
first to seek Shelley's acquaintance through his introduction to
"Queen Mab" by a Lausanne bookseller. Before he retraced his way to
Italy in the hope of meeting Shelley there, Trelawney records that he
saw an Englishman breakfasting: "Evidently a denizen of the North, his
accent harsh, his skin white, of an angular and bony build, and
self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. With him, two ladies,
whom it would appear from the blisters and blotches on their cheeks,
lips and noses, that they were pedestrian tourists, fresh from the
snow-covered mountains. The party breakfasted well, while the man
cursed the godless wretches who have removed Nature's landmarks by
cutting roads through Alps and Apennines. 'They will be arraigned
hereafter with the unjust,' he shouted." Trelawney asked Wordsworth
(for it was he, with his wife and sister) what he thought of Shelley
as a poet--to which he replied, "Nothing." A Scotch terrier followed
the Wordsworths into their carriage; "This hairy fellow our
flea-trap," the poet shouted out, as they went off.
Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Arnold--all had close associations
with Switzerland, and there still continues to flow there a constant
stream of the world's genius. It is everybody's playground, and seems
to have the power to tempt the man of imagination to longer stay. One
effect is to give to Swiss people of the better educated classes a
curiously international knowledge. Many of them seem to know all
languages and to study all contemporary literature.