MADAME DE STAËL VISITS GERMANY.
At Metz Madame de Staël was received in triumph. The Prefect of the
Moselle entertained her, parties were given in her honor, and all the
literary big-wigs of the place hastened to do her homage. She there,
for the first time, came into personal contact with Charles de Villers,
with whom she had previously corresponded on the subject of Kant. Of
course she was charmed with him, her first impulse invariably being to
find every clever or distinguished person delightful. Her friendship
with him resembled all her friendships. She began by expecting to have
inspired as much enthusiasm as she felt, possibly a little more, seeing
that she was a woman, and such a woman, and exiled to boot. Villers,
a cross-grained kind of Teuton, had no idea of allowing his theories,
which were extremely sturdy on all subjects, to be spirited away by any
of Madame de Staël’s conversational conjuring tricks. They discussed
philosophy, and he railed sourly at French taste; and, perhaps by way of
proving his final emancipation from all such fetters, he had obtained
the companionship of a certain Madame de Rodde, whom Madame de Staël
described, with some asperity, as a “fat German.”
But she separated from the philosopher still quite charmed with his
appreciation of the good and true, and not in the least repulsed by his
ways. On the contrary, she wrote to him shortly afterwards, reproaching
him passionately with his silence. One can imagine how absurd such
exactions must have seemed to the good Villers, with his head full
of Kant and Madame de Rodde to attend to his comforts; but the truth
was that Madame de Staël’s mood just then caused her to make herself
needlessly miserable about everything. To Mathieu de Montmorency she
wrote that she was filled with terror, and fancied that death must
shortly overtake her father, children, friends, everybody dear to her.
She seemed to forget entirely that it was her own choice which had taken
her to Germany; Napoleon had banished her merely from Paris; and there
was nothing to prevent her returning to Coppet to soothe the last years
and enjoy the conversation of her venerated father. But this did not suit
her; she required a wider intellectual horizon and more varied society.
For many reasons, some of them dependent on the political bias of
monarchical writers, it has been the fashion to proclaim Madame de
Staël’s opposition to Napoleon as inspired by pure hatred of despotism.
To us this does not seem quite a correct version. If it were, Madame
de Staël would have been a totally different person; colder, less
impulsively benevolent, less thoroughly womanly. All through her
life her conduct was determined by her feeling towards individuals.
While professing republicanism she counted, as we have seen, hosts of
reactionary friends; the claims to consideration of noble names and
social distinctions weighed powerfully with her; and all her love of
liberty could not save her from being torn by sympathy for every Royalist
head that fell during the Revolution. Such a catholicity of feeling
constitutes a charming woman, but not a great politician; and Madame de
Staël’s liberal instincts and penetrating insight only lent force to
her hatred of Napoleon, they did not originate it. There was a natural
antagonism between their natures—circumstances increased this, and
obstinacy on both sides confirmed it—and Madame de Staël made the most of
a persecution which, while condemning her to inaction, added enormously
to her fame.
That Napoleon in his most transcendent moments was great simply by
stupendous intellect and amazing will; that in his baser moments he was
inconceivably callous, cynical, arrogant and mean, perhaps few persons
in these days will be found to deny. But it is overstating the case
to assert, as has been done, that he persecuted Madame de Staël from
unmitigated envy of her superiority. Much as he resented intellectual
power in a woman, it is nevertheless most likely that what really
inspired his action against Madame de Staël was her turbulent disposition
and the restless mind which made her the centre of Parisian opposition.
As to this opposition itself, without any wish to detract from its
sublimity, it may fairly be asked whether—at the time Constant began his
denunciations, and Madame de Staël encouraged them—it was altogether
well-timed. To declaim against Napoleon’s growing despotism was perhaps
irresistible to independent spirits; but such declamation necessarily
remained sterile of results in the state in which France then was. What
would these orators have substituted for the strong will of a Dictator?
The greed for place of a Talleyrand? The mystic fervor of a Montmorency?
The dissolute ambition of a Barras? Between the sanguinary excesses of
the _Terreur Rouge_, the lust for revenge of the _Terreur Blanche_, the
incorrigible short-sightedness and criminal frivolity of the “Coblentz”
faction, the diseased logic of the Jacobins, and the frightful collapse
of intelligence, morality, decency, and humanity that extended from end
to end of France, it is difficult to understand what ruler could have
governed it for other ends than personal ones. Napoleon sprang armed
from the ruin of France, as a kind of fatal embodiment of all the evil
under which she groaned and all the crime that stained her. And yet who
shall say that his career of conquest, desolating as it was, could have
been spared from European history? It enters as a factor into almost all
that this closing century has brought us—the unity of Italy, the power
of Germany, France’s own awakening to the limitations of her destiny. It
was not given to any mortal, eighty years ago, to foresee all this; and
Madame de Staël, who was in most things of a preternatural acuteness,
only foresaw the coming despotism and its immediate, not its ultimate,
results. Nevertheless, had her bias against Napoleon not been a personal
one, she might have submitted more quietly to his first acts of tyranny,
and only protested when his insatiable ambition had prostrated France
at the feet of the nations. She might have done this, because she was
constantly led away by her feelings, and could be blind on occasion. That
she was not more dazzled by Napoleon must be considered a lucky accident.
In Germany the feeling in regard to her was not generally favorable.
The mightiest minds, indeed, admired her great intellect; and Goethe’s
unwilling homage is the brightest jewel in her crown. But it was as a
woman that she excited a somewhat sour antipathy. Her plaintive little
friend Madame de Beaumont had called her a _tourbillon_, and Heine
has only added a doubtful picturesqueness to this description when
designating her a “whirlwind in petticoats.” But as a most disturbing
element she certainly did introduce herself into German society. Rahel
Varnhagen acidly—it is difficult to help thinking ungenerously—echoes
the usual complaint of her obstreperousness, saying, with striking lack
of originality, by the way, “She is nothing to me but an inconvenient
hurricane.”
Schiller, as is well known, was infinitely more magnanimous. He had
made up his mind as to her kind of intellect before she came. In 1798
he had already pronounced her to be of an “exalted, reasoning, entirely
unpoetical nature”; and, although he clung, after seeing her, to his
conviction that “of poetry she had no conception,” he was obviously
surprised and enchanted at her native goodness, her healthy simplicity of
mind, and unaffectedness. To her penetration, brilliancy and vivacity, he
does full justice. And if, as her book on Germany afterwards showed, his
statement that “nothing existed for her unless her torch could illuminate
it,” was as misleading as are most metaphors, still its descriptiveness
enables one exactly to understand the particular sort of splendor with
which Madame de Staël flashed through the windings of the German mind.
Schiller—poor man!—was quite pathetic over her amazing volubility, which
left him, with his halting French, a hopeless distance behind her. It
is rather comic to trace the dismay at her exhausting personality which
pierces through all his admiration for, and interest in, her mind. To
Goethe, who was coquetting at Jena, and wished the brilliant stranger to
come there to him, Schiller later writes: “I saw the De Staël yesterday,
in my house, and again to-day at the Dowager Duchess’s. One would be
reminded of the sieve of the Danaïdes, if Oknos with his donkey did not
then occur to one.” He fears she will have to discover that the Germans
in Weimar can be fickle, as well as the French, unless it strikes her
soon that it is time she went. To Körner he complained that the devil had
brought the French female philosopher to torment him just in the middle
of his new play.
He found her, of all mortals within his experience, “the most
gesticulative, combative, and talkative,” even while admitting that she
was almost the most cultivated and intellectual of women. But he declared
that she destroyed all poetry in him, and waxed plaintive once again
over his ineffectual struggles with French. He proclaimed that not to
admire her for her fine mind and liberality of sentiment was impossible;
and he breathed a sigh of the most unfeigned relief when she departed.
All the Court personages felt that they had been having a severe time
of it; although the bright and petulant Duchess Amelia was enchanted in
the first instance, and wrote to Goethe imploring him to come and study
the phenomenon. He resisted for a long while, but finally arrived—not
without a previous sneer or two. Madame de Staël was charmed to know
him—in fact, her days in Weimar passed in a perfect effervescence of
delight. While the Germans were coldly, sometimes rather snarlingly,
criticizing her, she was admiring them. Schiller she speaks of with
the liveliest enthusiasm. Their acquaintance began with an animated
discussion on the respective merits of French and foreign dramas. Madame
de Staël maintained that Corneille and Racine were unsurpassable.
Schiller, of course, differed; and managed to make her heed his reasons,
in spite of his difficulty in speaking French. His quiet simplicity
and earnestness, as well as his originality of mind, became instantly
manifest to the illustrious stranger. With her, admiration meant always
the most ungrudging friendship; and this was the sentiment with which
Schiller inspired her for the rest of his days. Goethe she found cold,
and she was characteristically disappointed at his no longer displaying
the passionate ardor of Werther “Time has rendered him a spectator,” she
says; yet she admits the universality of his mind and his prodigious
information when once prevailed on to talk. It is provoking to think that
she never saw the best of Goethe, and that this disappointing result
was—although she was far, indeed, from guessing it—her own fault chiefly;
for she informed the poet that she intended to print his conversation,
and of this Goethe had a horror. He states as much in a letter to
Schiller, and gives as his reason the sorry figure which Rousseau had
cut in his correspondence—just then published—with Madame de la Tour
Franqueville and her friend.
The Dowager Duchess Amelia was a vivacious, pleasure-loving, singularly
intelligent, and liberal-minded woman, who had governed the duchy during
her son’s minority admirably, and made allies for herself among the
best German intellects. Thanks to her, her son Karl August had been so
trained, that, in the midst of a court circle to which the light of the
eighteenth century had barely penetrated, he showed a most manly contempt
for the ideals of mistresses of the robes and silver sticks in waiting,
and swept all such fripperies away to become the dearest friend of
Goethe. His duchess (whose courage both extorted Napoleon’s admiration
and saved her husband from further proofs of his ire) was a woman of
grand character, and as great a contrast, except in what was really best
in both of them, to her lively mother-in-law as could well be imagined.
She insisted on the most uncompromising observance of etiquette, and wore
to the last day of her life the costume which had prevailed in the years
when she was young.
Of this remarkable trio of exalted personages it was the reigning duchess
whom Madame de Staël selected for her friend. Indeed, she never mentions
the Dowager Duchess in corresponding with the daughter-in-law, and in
her _Allemagne_ dismisses the Grand Duke with a few lines, in which
she alludes to his military talents and speaks of his conversation as
_piquante_ and thoughtful.
From Weimar, Madame de Staël went to Berlin, with letters from their
highnesses of the little court to the lovely and charming Queen Louise.
In a well-known letter to the Grand Duchess (the first of their long
correspondence), she records a _fête_ which took place immediately
after her arrival. It was a masquerade representing Alexander’s return
to Babylon; and the beautiful queen, of whom Madame de Staël is lost
in admiration, danced in it herself. To this pageant succeeded various
costume quadrilles, in which Kotzebue appeared as a priest of Mercury,
poppy crowned, caduceus in hand, and so ugly and awkward, that Madame de
Staël wonders why her imagination was not irretrievably ruined by the
sight of him.
One likes to think of her at this court in the midst of such famous and
distinguished people; the personages so outwardly brilliant, so inwardly
dull, who surrounded her having vanished down the gulfs of Time, her
own unique personality stands out vividly against the picturesque but
confused background reconstructed by our fancy.
At Berlin she first saw and liked August Wilhelm Schlegel, destined
later to be so unwelcome to Sismondi, Bonstetten, and her other friends
at Coppet. She succumbed at once to the varied attractions of his
colossal learning, his surprising linguistic accomplishments, and his
great conversational powers. She felt that here was a foeman worthy of
her steel, and she magnanimously overlooked his acerbity, his pedantry
and vanity. She had indeed a royal indifference to the defects of great
minds. It was only the greatness she cared for.
Berlin was destined to be associated with the greatest, perhaps the most
genuine, grief of her life. She left it pleased with her reception,
enriched with new friends, new experiences, and new ideas. She had been
happier there than six months previously she would have admitted she
could ever be again; far happier than at Coppet, which for years past had
only been a place where she tarried and amused herself as she could until
the moment came for returning to Paris. She had treasured up a wealth of
conversation for her father—all kinds of novel and delightful impressions
which she felt would be listened to by nobody so appreciatively as by
him; and she started for Vienna, there to glean a little more. But she
had hardly set foot in Austria when a courier brought her the news that
her father was dangerously ill. He was, in truth, dead, and the messenger
knew it; but the fact was withheld, to be broken to her later on. She
instantly quitted Vienna, where, as she expresses it, “her happiness
had ended,” and started homewards. On the road her father’s death was
communicated to her. Her grief was overpowering and demonstrative to the
last degree. It was not only sorrow that she felt, but an overmastering
terror, for it seemed to her that with her father her last moral support
had vanished. Henceforward she would bend to the storms of life like a
reed.
On arriving at Coppet, she sank into a condition that temporarily
resembled dementia. The idea that in losing her father her whole
existence was irretrievably wrecked from its moorings, and would drift
aimlessly in the future, again filled her mind, and this time with
greater force. To every remonstrance she only answered, “I have lost my
father.” She soon recovered—strangely soon as it seemed to many—her old
elasticity and fire, but a curious secret change was wrought in her from
the hour of her loss. She showed mystic yearnings, and became even a
little superstitious. She invoked her father in her prayers, and nothing
deeply agreeable to her ever happened without her saying, “My father has
obtained this for me.”
One of Necker’s latest acts was to write a letter to Napoleon begging
him to rescind the order for Madame de Staël’s exile. Needless to say
that the pathetic request had no effect upon the person to whom it was
addressed. Domestic sentiment at no time appealed strongly to Napoleon,
and at this period he had almost reached his final pitch of unreasoning
and arrogant egoism. The murder of the Duc d’Enghien had hardened all
his nature, and in preparing to have himself proclaimed Emperor he had
kicked away any useless rubbish in the shape of scruples that might still
encumber him.
Now, when the first germ of decay had begun to consume the core of
his splendor, his attitude towards Madame de Staël itself altered.
His persecution of her ceased to be a capricious thing compounded of
spasmodic spite on his side and sporadic fears on hers, and became an
organized system of repression which placed its originator in a light all
the meaner that the woman against whom it was directed rose from this
time to a new and grander moral altitude.