of religion have been imperfect. One school of writers, who regard
religion as inaccessible by the path of reason, and who believe it to
have been imparted to man once for all by divine revelation, seek to
restore it to its original form. Another school, rightly appalled by
the evils resulting from intolerance and fanaticism, have rejected
religion as a delusion, and have sought to base an ethical system
upon a purely earthly foundation. A third have believed themselves
able to steer a middle course; they accept something which they call
natural religion, or the religion of reason, and which consists only
of the purest dogmas and the simplest fundamental principles. But
the adherents of this school, like those of the first two, believe
that mankind can attain to absolute truth--that truth, therefore,
is one and unchangeable; they stigmatise all who believe less than
themselves as ungodly, and all who believe more as priest-ridden and
superstitious. In opposition to all these three schools, Constant
regards religion as progressive; he starts from the premise that the
religious feeling is a fundamental element of the human soul, that
it is only the forms it assumes which differ, and that these are
capable of ever-increasing perfection. He has obviously read Lessing's
_Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts_; but he is more in sympathy with
his own contemporaries, Kreuzer and Görres, than with Lessing. He
either does not understand or does not appreciate the latter's delicate
and yet profound irony; he is captivated by the Romantic-Protestant
revival ideas, and assimilates as much of them as a French Liberal
politician and converted Voltairean can. He strongly objects to the
spirit of intolerance and persecution which makes itself felt so
strongly in Lamennais' book on "Indifference in Matters of Religion"
unlike Chateaubriand and De Maistre, he objects to the temporal power
of the Papacy, or to any other combination of spiritual and temporal
power; but he imagines that in his _sentiment religieux_ he has
discovered a kind of spiritual primary element, incapable of further
resolution, an element which is unalterable and universal, i.e.
diffused over the whole earth and unaffected by time; and upon this
theory, which is incompatible with the data of psychology, he bases his
whole conservative system. As far as possible he evades troublesome
questions: he refuses, for example, to decide whether mankind came
into being in a savage or in a paradisaically perfect condition; and
he expressly states that he begins with a delineation of the lowest
fetish worship only for the sake of order, that he by no means denies
that this pitiable stage may have been the result of a fall, this
hypothesis, indeed, seeming to him a very probable one.--Few books have
more rapidly grown old-fashioned than this of Constant's, which is now
merely of historical interest as typical of the half-heartedness and
indecision of the period in which it was written.
In the early years of the French Revolution, Constant was appointed
gentleman-in-waiting to the Duchess of Brunswick. In this position he
heard the Revolution spoken of with that mixture of fear and abhorrence
of which we have an example in the dialogue of Goethe's play, _Der
Bürgergeneral_; but he had no difficulty in forming an independent
and unprejudiced estimate of the significance of the great movement.
In Brunswick, as elsewhere, much of his time seems to have been spent
in amours, one following on the other in rapid succession. He himself
jestingly assumed _Sola inconstantia constans_ as his motto. He
married, solely out of ennui, it would appear, divorced his wife after
the honeymoon, and presently fell in love with a lady who was at the
time sueing for a divorce from her husband. For this lady's sake he
returned at a later period to Brunswick. Her maiden name was Charlotte
von Hardenberg, and many years afterwards she became his second wife.
In the letters of this Brunswick period to Mme. de Charrière, Constant
appears as aimless and bored as he is sagacious and witty. He makes
merry over his stupid, little-minded associates, and for a time even
over his feeling for the lady of his heart, until it suddenly occurs
to him that jesting on this latter subject is scarcely seemly, and he
decides to forego it. So far there was neither a centre nor an object
in his life.
Towards the close of 1774, however, a decisive change took place.
He met Mme. de Staël, and it became apparent that neither of these
two minds could produce the best of which it was capable without the
assistance of the other. Constant was then twenty-seven years of age,
Mme. de Staël twenty-eight. He had just arrived in Paris, the city to
which his ambition had long attracted him, but which he now saw for
the first time. He was introduced into the best society, frequented
the houses of Mme. Tallien, Mme. Beauharnais, and Mme. de Staël, and
made an impression both by his personal beauty and his intellectual
gifts. With his fresh complexion and fair hair he resembled a young
Northerner, but in mind he was the acute Frenchman, and in culture the
cosmopolitan. He made an impression on the most gifted Frenchwoman of
the day that was never effaced, even when the circumstances of life
estranged and separated them, and it was soon no secret that Mme.
de Staël's admiration had become passionate love. She imparted to
the rising states man her faith in political liberty, her enthusiasm
for the rights of the individual, and for a government which should
assure them; and her fiery ardour inspired him with her spirit of
enterprise and with her confidence in the power of words and of deeds
to influence, to re-mould life in spite of destiny. In return for this,
her relation to him seems, by setting her at variance with society, to
have supplied her with the greater part of the passions, emotions, and
rebellious thoughts which form the kernel of her imaginative writings.
At Mme. de Staël's house Constant met a whole host of foreign
diplomatists, disaffected journalists, and plotting women, who for the
moment influenced him against the Convention. He soon, however, arrived
at convictions of his own, refuted his first newspaper articles, and,
more radical than his friend, joined the "Patriot" party in opposing
the so-called Moderates, in whom he perceived no moderation. The year
1795 he spent, on the invitation of Mme. de Staël, at her country-house
of Coppet, in Switzerland; the following year she was separated from
her husband.
When, as First Consul, in 1799, Napoleon gave France a constitution,
in which autocracy was veiled by a slight pretence of freedom,
he nominated-Constant, formerly his ardent admirer, a member of
the Tribunate. In this capacity Constant, supported by some few
sympathisers, carried on an honourable struggle against the Napoleonic
absolutism, a struggle which attracted the attention of all Europe, and
highly exasperated the First Consul. In 1802 the latter made the famous
remark about the five or six metaphysicians among the Tribunes who
deserved to be drowned, and not long after, these five or six, namely
Constant and his friends, were expelled by the votes of a servile
majority. Mme. de Staël and her father, the famous Necker, showing
themselves actively antagonistic to Napoleon's autocratic policy, were
both banished from France. Constant, who followed Mme. de Staël to
Coppet, was forbidden to return. In May 1802, Mme. de Staël became a
widow. In 1803-4 she and Constant travelled together in Germany. She,
loving him devotedly, evidently seems to have expected that he would
marry her; but it is plain that he did not reciprocate her feeling; it
was only out of weakness and compassion that he concealed from her his
constant correspondence with Charlotte von Hardenberg. Having probably
invented some pretext for leaving her, he went to Weimar alone. There,
in 1804, he translated Schiller's _Wallenstein_ into French. It was
not Constant but A. W. Schlegel who accompanied Mme. de Staël to Italy
in 1805 (as tutor to her children), on the journey immortalised in
_Corinne_. Constant was privately married to his Charlotte in the
summer of 1808, and so little was Madame de Staël resigned to his
defection, that terrible scenes occurred when she unexpectedly met the
newly married pair in the neighbourhood of Geneva. Charlotte, driven to
despair by her rival's furious jealousy, made an unsuccessful attempt
to commit suicide. So great was Madame de Staël's influence over
Constant, that she actually persuaded him to leave his wife and return
for a time with her to Coppet.
For some years after this episode Benjamin Constant lived in quiet
retirement at Göttingen, occupied with collecting material for his
work on the origin and development of religion. The defeat of Napoleon
in 1813 brought him and his friend Madame de Staël once more into
the political arena. Her influence at the courts of Russia, Germany,
and Sweden gave him a voice in the proceedings against the defeated
autocrat. He went to Paris in Bernadotte's train, and, although he was
in favour of the restoration of the monarchy, he strove ardently to
save all that could be saved of constitutional liberty. He published
masterly pamphlets on the liberty of the press, on ministerial
responsibility, &c. It is well known that immediately after this,
his blind infatuation for Mme. Récamier caused him to take such
violent action against Napoleon on the latter's return from Elba, that
there seems something traitorous in his acceptance of a post in the
Council of State during the Hundred Days, and his collaboration in the
Emperor's attempt to give France a species of constitution.
We must not judge Constant as a politician by this unfortunate episode.
Under the Bourbons, and even during the first years of the reign of
Louis Philippe, he was the determined and eloquent leader of the
Liberal Opposition. Though never remarkable for purity of character,
he had noble impulses. When in 1830 he received a letter from one of
his friends in Paris saying, "A terrible game is being played here;
our heads are in danger; come and add yours!" he did not hesitate for
a moment, but came and undauntedly sided with the revolutionists. A
few months later, however, although he was at the time leader of the
Opposition, he accepted 100,000 francs from Louis Philippe for the
purpose of paying his gambling debts. Constant was an accomplished
dialectician. No truth, he was accustomed to observe, is complete
unless it includes its antithesis. He succeeded in completing many
truths. The imprint set upon him by the period in which his youth had
fallen was never effaced. The doubleness which in the other notable men
of the same generation is only a secondary quality, is in Constant's
character the essential, distinguishing, and, at the same time,
disturbing trait.
_Adolphe_, the chief work of this man's youth, deserves some study.
In it we find the following utterance: "What surprises me is, not
that humanity should feel the need of a religion, but that it should
in any age fancy itself strong enough, and sufficiently secure from
disaster, to venture to reject anyone religion. It seems to me as if in
its weakness it should rather be prone to invoke the aid of them all.
Is there, in the dense darkness which surrounds us, any ray of light
that we can afford to reject? Does there float on the whirling torrent
which carries us along with it any branch to which we dare refuse to
cling?" We feel that the author is more certain of the existence of
the whirling torrent than of the branch. His manner of recommending
religion reveals his own lack of it, and a profound depth of melancholy.
The explanation is simple. There was a reaction against Voltaire in the
air at that time, a reaction practically inaugurated by Rousseau--the
rebound of repressed, unconsulted, ignored feeling. A half-unconscious
effort was going on in men's minds to restore the balance between
the demands and the possibilities of the human soul which had been
disturbed during the autocratic reign of critical intellect; and this
half-conscious tendency was plainly perceptible even in men whose
natures were really akin to Voltaire's, and who, had they been born
thirty years earlier, would have been his eager sympathisers and
fellow-workers. Voltaire had not only criticised, he had been forced
by the evils of the times and by his unruly wit into an attitude of
aggression. With all available weapons, even poisoned ones, he had
attacked those purely external, palpable forms of authority, which in
his time stood in the way of honourable human conditions, nay, made
them impossible. Now all these powers had fallen, and the times once
more craved authority. There are inner, spiritual authorities. The
Right, the Good, the True are such. But the enthusiastic attempts to
introduce and establish a free form of government which should realise
these ideals without the invocation of any authority unexplainable
by reason, had resulted in the savage excesses of lawlessness. What
wonder, then, that not only many ordinary individuals began to grope
after planks from the wreck of the once powerful political and
religious systems, but that also a majority of the most highly gifted
came forward as the champions of some authority, either temporal or
spiritual, which they supported for the sake of the principle, but with
no real belief or confidence in it.
They had no real confidence, for the simple reason that for them, as
genuine and intelligent sons of the young nineteenth century, it was
impossible to believe in the strength of a stem which their fathers had
sawn through. Chateaubriand's faith in legitimacy was as faint-hearted
as Constant's in religion in general. Men were uneasy in their minds.
The old house was burned down. The new was not even begun. And, instead
of boldly beginning to erect a new building, events led them to seek
refuge among the ruins of the old, the half-burned materials of which
they built up as best they could. During this performance they were
perpetually tempted to try experiments not planned from the first.
After some vain attempts to give solidity to the building by the
addition of new material, they would in despair give a kick at the
shaky, newly built walls, which brought them down again. No group of
writers whose aim was to preserve society ever brought such passionate
accusations against it as the authors of the Emigrant Literature. It is
one of these accusations of society which forms the basis of Benjamin
Constant's _Adolphe_.
Adolphe is a love story which, in its presentment of the relations
of the individual to society, takes a quite different point of view
from _Werther_. In _Werther_ outward, and, by reason of these, also
inward, obstacles prevent the union of a couple obviously made for
each other. In _Adolphe_ outward, and because of them, also inward,
reasons part two beings who are united. _Werther_ represents the power
of society, and of once-accepted social responsibilities, to hinder
a love match. _Adolphe_ describes the power of society and of public
opinion to absolve from accepted personal responsibilities and to sever
a long-united pair. The books, taken together, form a double picture of
the pope-like power of society to bind and loose. But whereas _Werther_
depicts the feelings of the pre-revolutionary, enthusiastic, energetic
generation to which its author belonged, the feelings described in
_Adolphe_ are those of the first French generation of the new century.
Unlike former love stories, _Adolphe_ does not delineate love only
in its first awakening in the dawn of delusive hopes, but follows it
through its whole existence, depicts its growth, its strength, its
decay, its death, and even pursues it to the other side of the grave
and shows the feelings into which it is transformed. Hence _Adolphe_,
even more than _René_, is the story of the individual's rude awakening
from delusion, the representation of the anguish of disappointment.
It is the flower of life which is here stripped of its petals one by
one and carefully dissected. In this point, too, the book is a great
contrast to _Werther, Werther_ is naïve in comparison. It is the same
flower, the perfume of which is a deadly poison to Werther, that is
calmly dissected by Adolphe. The change is expressed in the very
costume; the blue coat and yellow waistcoat have made way for our dull,
funereal black.
But the flame which is extinguished in the man's breast now burns in
the woman's. _Adolphe_ is woman's _Werther_. The passion and melancholy
of the new age have advanced another step; they have spread to the
other sex. In _Werther_ it was the man who loved, suffered, stormed,
and despaired; in comparison with him the woman was sound, strong, and
unharmed--perhaps a trifle cold and insignificant. But now it is her
turn, now it is she who loves and despairs. In _Werther_ it was the
woman who submitted to the laws of society, in _Adolphe_ it is the man
who does so. The selfsame war waged by Werther in the name of his love
is now waged by Eléonore, and with equally tragic result.
It is scarcely an exaggeration to call this romance the prototype of a
whole new species of fiction, namely that which occupies itself with
psychical analysis. It is its treatment of love that is new. Far behind
us now lies the time when Amor was represented as the charming child we
all know from Thorwaldsen's bas-reliefs. To Voltaire Amor was the god
of pleasure. "Les ris, les jeux et les plaisirs" were his attendants.
To Rousseau he is the god of passion. With Goethe he has ceased to be a
beneficent spirit; we understand when we read Goethe what Schopenhauer
meant when he wrote that Amor pursues his way, indifferent to the
misery of the individual. In Faust, the first poem of the new era,
he is transformed from a roguish boy into a criminal. Faust seduces
Gretchen and deserts her; Gretchen's love-story means the death of
her mother, her brother, her infant, and herself. She, the innocent,
loving girl, kills her mother with the sleeping-draught she administers
in order that Faust may visit her by night; Faust and Mephistopheles
together slay the brother who attempts to avenge his sister's disgrace;
from fear of shame Gretchen kills her new-born child, for which she is
thrown into prison and finally executed. Goethe's passion for truth
impelled him to paint a very different picture of Amor from that which
represents him as the rose-crowned boy. And in Goethe it is not only in
its consequences but in its very nature that love is fraught with fate.
In _Elective Affinities_ he has made a study of the mysterious and
irresistible attraction and repulsion by which the mutual relations of
souls are determined, as if they were chemical substances. The book is
a kind of study of passion from the point of view of natural philosophy;
Goethe shows us its rise, its magic power as a mysterious natural
force, its foundation in the unfathomed depths of our soul.
An attempt had thus been made to explain the attraction to which we
give the name of love by instituting a parallel between it and the
attraction with which we are familiar in inanimate nature. But there
was yet another step to be taken, namely, to dissociate love from
everything with which it had hitherto been connected, and analyse it.
This task fell to the lot of the unsettled, unsatisfied generation
to which Constant belongs. However much men had differed in their
conception of love, its causes and its consequences, they had all
agreed in accepting the emotion itself as something understood,
something simple. They now for the first time began to treat it as
something composite, and to attempt to resolve it into its elements.
In _Adolphe_, and the fiction which follows in its steps, an accurate
calculation is made of how many parts, how many grains, of friendship,
how many of devotion, of vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual
attraction, hope, imagination, disappointment, hatred, weariness,
enthusiasm, calculation, &c. on the part of each, go to make up the
compound which the two concerned call their love. With all this
analysis the emotion lost its supernatural character, and the worship
of it ceased. Instead of its poetry, its psychology was offered to
the reader. What happened resembled that which happens when we look
at a star through a telescope; its bright rays disappear, only the
astronomical body remains: before, in the bright full moon we saw only
a clear, shining disc with an unchanging face; now, we distinguish a
multitude of mountains and valleys.
From the moment when men began to desire really to understand, they
necessarily fixed their attention less upon that first awakening of
the emotion, which poets had sung and celebrated from time immemorial,
than upon its later development, its duration and its cessation. In
those tragedies which are to be found in the literature of all races,
which are, as it were, their hymns to love, the death of the lovers
follows close upon the blossoming time of their love. Romeo sees
Juliet; they adore one another; after a few days and nights passed in
the seventh heaven, both lie dead. The question of constancy does not
occur. Our Danish love-tragedy, _Axel and Valborg_, seems, indeed, to
deal with nothing but constancy; the whole plot turns on the prolonged
engagement of the lovers, a characteristically national pivot--but _in
Axel and Valborg_ constancy is glorified as a virtue, not explained
as a product, for the play is a lyrical tragedy, not a psychological
analysis.
It is the question of the conditions of constancy which is treated of
in _Adolphe_--under what conditions is passion lasting or otherwise?
And it is the answer to this question which is really an impeachment
of society. For it is maintained that while society, in this case
represented by public opinion, upholds those unions which are of its
own institution, it at the same time basely strives to destroy all
possibilities of faithfulness in any union it has not sanctioned, even
if that union be to the full as honourable, to the full as unselfish,
as any of those which it fences round and supports.
Constant prefers his accusation in a story which could hardly be
less pretentious. It contains but two characters, no scenery, and
there is not a single fortuitous incident in the whole course of its
action. Everything occurs according to the natural laws indicated by
the relations of the couple to each other and to society in general.
The reader follows this history of two souls to its close much as a
student of chemistry watches the fermentation of two substances in an
inexplosible phial and observes the results. Who, then, are these two
characters?
In the first place, who is _he_? He is a very young man, who (like
the author) has been given an appointment at one of the little German
courts, after completing his studies at a small German university.
He has been tolerably dissipated, but has also gone through a course
of serious and laborious study. His relations with his father, an
outwardly cold, ironical man, who represents the culture of the
eighteenth century, have increased the hero's youthful taste for
powerful, passionate emotions, and his leaning to the unusual, the
extravagant. His father's severe discipline has inspired him with an
impatient longing for freedom from the bonds which gall him, and a
strong disinclination to let himself be trammelled by new ones.
At this stage of his development he comes to a court where monotony
and formality reign. To him, who from his earliest youth has felt an
unconquerable aversion to dogmatism and formalism, it is positive
suffering to be obliged to listen to his companions' eternal
platitudes. "The self-satisfied chatter of mediocrity about absolutely
unquestionable and unshakable religious, moral, or social principles,
all considered of equal importance, drove me to contradict, not so much
because I was of a different opinion as because I had no patience with
such clumsy, stolid certainty. I was involuntarily on the alert against
all these general maxims which are considered universally applicable,
without restriction or modification. The blockheads knead their
morality into such an indivisible mass that it cannot possibly permeate
their actions and be applicable in individual cases."
He revenges himself for the boredom which his associates inflict
on him by jesting at them and their ideals, and soon acquires a
character for ill-natured frivolity. He does not himself approve of
his own contradictory, mocking spirit. "But," he says, "I may urge in
self-defence that it takes time to accustom one's self to such beings,
to that which selfishness, affectation, vanity, and cowardice have
made of them. The astonishment a man in his early youth feels at such
an artificial, arbitrarily regulated state of society witnesses rather
to the naturalness of his character than to depraved tendencies.
Besides, this society has nothing to fear from such as us; it weighs us
down, its foolish influence is so strong that it quickly moulds us to
the general pattern. Then we only wonder that we were ever astonished.
We become accustomed to the new life as men become accustomed to the
air in a room full of people, where at first they feel as if they could
not breathe."