to satisfy the gifted young man; his discontent is perpetually with
him, he drags it about as a man drags a weight attached to his leg.
Like René and Obermann, he belongs to a generation of sons to whom
their fathers did not appear to have left anything to do worth doing.
The future has no interest for him, for he has anticipated it in
imagination, and the past has made him old, for he has lived in thought
through many a century. He has desired much, but willed nothing, and
the more lacking in will he feels himself, the vainer does he become;
for vanity is the invariable stop-gap with which those in whom will
or ability is defective, attempt to fill the lacunae in their will
or ability. He wishes to love and to be loved, looking on love in
the light of a tonic for his self-esteem. He expects to attain to a
stronger persuasion of his own worth, to be raised in his own and other
people's eyes, by some great triumph and scandal. The happiness that
love is to bring to him is the happiness of feeling for once that his
will is strong, because he is able to bend another's to it. He is not
by nature more faithless than other men. It is in him to love more
tenderly, to act more unselfishly than many do, but for him to love
faithfully many circumstances would need to be altered. He is still so
young that there is more of curiosity and of the spirit of adventure
in his feeling for a woman than of real love; and even if he loved
deeply, he is too weak, too little of the man, to be able to love on
in spite of society's disapproval of his passion; above all, in spite
of his unlikeness to his father, he is too much his son to be able,
without despising or deceiving himself, to stake his whole existence
on one card. He differs from and yet resembles his father, just as the
beginning of the nineteenth century differed from and yet resembled the
eighteenth.
And who is _she_? She is carefully described by the author as being
such that Adolphe's love for her, however strong, is certain sooner
or later to be affected by social considerations. In the first place,
Adolphe is not the only man she has loved, and the verdict of society
has been passed upon her before they meet; she is not his equal in
its eyes, although she is so by birth. In the second place, she is
considerably older than he; and in the third, hers is a passionate,
power-loving nature, which could only be fused with his if social
conditions favoured the process, and which must make both unhappy if
they harden him against her.
When Adolphe makes her acquaintance, Eléonore is no young,
inexperienced girl, who learns for the first time what love is;
she is a woman, whose new emotions stand out upon a background of
sad, harrowing experience. The mark which this experience has set
upon her is the first noticeable trait in her personality. Eléonore
has relinquished her right to all the privileges and pleasures of
a safe-guarded, peaceful life. Although of good family and born to
wealth, she has left home and family to follow the man she loves,
as his mistress. She has chosen between the world and him, and has
ennobled her action by entirely, unconditionally sacrificing herself
for his sake. She has done him the greatest services, has saved his
fortune, and been as faithful as any wife could be, endeavouring by
this absolute fidelity to solace the pride wounded by the reprobation
and scorn of the world. Strength of will is the second noticeable
feature of the character.
When the first doubt of her friend's constancy assails her, the whole
edifice that she has raised crumbles to pieces. Does he love her, or
does he only treat her as a man of honour must? is he faithful, or is
he only too proud and too well-bred to show himself ungrateful and
indifferent? With tears she puts the question to herself, with anguish
answers it. It is at this moment that she meets Adolphe. He is drawn to
her with a desire in which his whole thirst for life and all that life
contains is concentrated, drawn as to one in whom he mysteriously feels
treasures of passion, tenderness, enthusiasm, intellect, and experience
to be accumulated, buried, as it were. And his longing and her regret,
his vanity and her despair, his youth and her disappointment take hold
of each other like two wheels in the works of a watch.
It is easy to foresee with what a fiery flame this passion will blaze
at first, to foretell what a full and mighty chord, what a joyful paean
will resound, as though both had won complete and lasting victory
and salvation. There is a new and strange mixture in her feeling--an
enthusiasm which is almost fanatical, because it must be equal to the
task of stifling his constantly recurring jealousy of the past; a faith
which is almost convulsive, because it is not based upon sound, natural
confidence, but upon a determination to believe in spite of everything,
even in spite of having already been deceived; and a fidelity which
suffers tortures from being constantly called upon to demonstrate its
existence, because it is the offspring of faithlessness towards the
past. This redoublement of passion constitutes the third marked feature
in Eléonore's character. "One regarded her," says Adolphe, "with the
same interest and admiration with which one gazes on a magnificent
thunderstorm."
It is in reality an entirely new female type which is here presented to
us, a type which many years later Balzac appropriates, styles "la femme
de trente ans," and varies with such genius that he may be said to be
its second creator, and which George Sand too developed and embellished
in a whole series of her novels. Under the treatment of these two
authors this type proved to be a whole, hitherto unknown, world, in
which every feeling, passion, and thought was infinitely stronger than
in the world of the girlish heart. In time the type passed from the
novel into the drama, and long usurped the French stage. In it the
early literature of the century found its queen, as in René it found
its king.[1]
The strong, Promethean generation to which Goethe belonged had produced
its type in Faust, the fully developed man, with the powerful,
cultivated intellect, who, having studied in all the schools and toiled
through all the sciences, becomes conscious in his manhood's prime of
a void in his heart, a thirst for youth, freshness, and simplicity.
Casting himself into the whirl of life, he falls in love with a child.
It is her simplicity and innocence that win and intoxicate him, and
arouse the desire of possession.
The unhappy generation of the homeless and exiled, the young and yet
old, the believers who were at the same time unbelievers, to which
Constant belongs, has its type in Adolphe, who, blasé in thought,
though a mere child in years and experience, seeks in love strong
sensations, violent emotion, knowledge of life, of passion, and of
the heart of woman, difficulties and dangers to overcome--in a word,
mastery over woman. The young girl brought up under her mother's eye
in an ordinary middle-class home does not attract him; it would not be
a sufficient triumph to master her. But with the superiority of years
and experience on the woman's side, the feeling and the relation change
character. The passion uniting two such dissimilar beings is something
less ordinary, less conventional, less happy, but more transient than
the love which we know as a social power. It is no longer the prelude
to a bourgeois wedding. It seems to come into existence when, under
certain conditions, the paths of two beings of a certain complex type
cross or intersect each other; but the result is not harmony.
It is not until considerably later that this new type of woman really
takes possession of French literature. Saint Simon, the Revolution
of July, and George Sand had to pave the way--Saint Simon with his
doctrine of the emancipation of woman, and his theory that humanity
can only be perfected in man and woman together, not in man alone; the
Revolution of July by destroying many of the arbitrary restrictions to
which woman had been subjected; and George Sand by carrying on, almost
alone, the same struggle for the liberation of woman, which for man
had been begun by the great Revolution. The fact that the type, and
with it the conflict of woman with society, appears in literature so
long before George Sand, is to be explained by the circumstance that
Eléonore is modelled from the strongest woman of the day, the woman who
ventured to oppose Napoleon himself--Mme. de Staël.
This new type forms a strong contrast to those female characters of
Goethe's in which German poetry attained its highest level, and in
which the characteristically Teutonic spiritual quality is expressed
more perfectly than it ever had been before. Although Gretchen and
Clärchen are the antitheses of each other, the one being mild and
submissive, the other fiery and daring, both are children, both are
absorbed by a single feeling, both have perfectly simple, single-minded
natures, Both love for the first and only time. Both give themselves
to the man they love without thought of marriage, with entire trust,
without any resistance, without even the wish to resist; the one from
deep womanly devotion, the other from lofty womanly enthusiasm. They
do not understand that they are doing wrong, they do not think at all.
Their whole being, their will, their thoughts pass out of their own
possession, they themselves do not know how. Their hearts are soft as
wax to receive an impression, but once received it is ineffaceable,
it is as though it were stamped in gold. Their innocence, purity, and
integrity are beyond compare. They are faithful by instinct, and do
not dream of the possibility of being anything else. They possess no
morality, but all the virtues; for human beings are moral consciously,
but good by nature. They do not consider themselves the equals of their
lovers, but look up to them, as if the old legend had been realised
and the sons of God had come down to the daughters of men. Gretchen is
amazed and overpowered by Faust's knowledge, Clärchen kneels like a
child before Egmont when he appears in his full splendour. They lose
themselves, they, as it were, disappear in their lovers. What we have
here is not two equals, who take each other's hands, and plight their
faith to each other, but a bewildered, admiring child clinging to a
man. He is her life, while she is but an episode in his. At a glance he
grasps and comprehends her whole nature; she is incapable of grasping
his from any point, incapable of penetrating and judging. She can see
neither his limits nor his faults. Whichever way she turns, she sees
him as something gigantic, looming on every side. Hence there is in
this love no criticism, no emancipation of the spirit, no employment
of the understanding. He is the great, the glorious one--like Faust,
who can talk of everything and has an answer for all questions, or like
Egmont, whose name as a hero and a saviour is upon every tongue and who
is known to the whole city. The reason why this love brings with it no
spiritual emancipation is that the young girl has no spirit, in the
sense of intellect; she is pure soul. When she performs actions which
would seem to require a certain amount of will or firm determination,
when Clärchen, for example, astonished and indignant that the citizens
of Brussels are indifferent and cowardly enough to allow their hero to
be carried off to prison and probable death, makes a public appearance
in the market-place, and vainly attempts to rouse their dull souls
with fiery words, the motive of the action is to be found in the
young girl's naïve belief that her lover's life must be of as great
importance to others as it is to her; as she sees nothing in the world
but him, she cannot imagine how others can think of anything else.
These young girls are genuine daughters of the great family to which
Ophelia and Desdemona belong.
A sharp contrast confronts us in the new type of Frenchwoman; instead
of sweetness, clinging affection, naturalness, we have passion, will,
energy, and conscious intelligence. For it was in the most remarkable
and intellectual woman of the day, a woman who had given up country,
peace, and prosperity, rather than submit to the petty tyranny with
which Napoleon's despotism pursued the unsubmissive, that Constant
found the new type.
The appearance of woman in literature as conscious intelligence is a
first step towards her appearance as genius. We already see Mme. de
Staël's turban appearing on the horizon. The woman who shares man's
passions and struggles will soon share his genius and his renown.
Yet a little while and the struggle ends in victory, the same woman
who succumbs under the name of Eléonore is crowned at the Capitol as
Corinne.
It only now remains to direct attention to the accurate psychological
observation in _Adolphe_, and to show the results arrived at. The hero
starts, as we have seen, with the idea that the conquest of Eléonore
is a task worthy of him; he imagines that he will be able coldly to
study her character, and calmly to lay his plan of campaign; but, his
susceptibility being quite as great as his egoism, he soon succumbs
to a fascination which completely overmasters him, and which so
increases his natural timidity that he cannot summon up courage to make
the declaration which he had promised his vanity to arrive at very
speedily. He writes, but Eléonore will have nothing to say to him, and
avoids him. Her resistance and coldness produce in him a submission
and devotion which soon become a species of worship. Never before has
Eléonore been thus loved, for however much true devotion her protector
has shown her, there has always been a touch of condescension in it. He
could have made a more honourable alliance; he has never said so, but
what is unsaid may quite well make itself felt. It is this reverence of
Adolphe for her which wins Eléonore. She gives herself to him, and he
is almost dazed with rapture and happiness. What first jars upon him is
her not being able (when the Count has gone from home for a day or two)
to let him out of her sight even for a few hours. She detains him when
he attempts to leave her; when he goes, she asks when he will return.
Pleased and flattered at first by this boundless devotion, he soon
finds that his time is so absorbed by her that he has not an hour at
his own disposal. He is compelled to refuse all invitations and break
off with all his acquaintances. This is no great loss to him, but he
would prefer being able to come and go as he pleases to being obliged
to put in an appearance at the stroke of the clock. She who had been
his aim and object in life is now a tie upon him.
Where are ye now, O touching romances, in which the lover never had
anything to do but to love, in which he rose up early to love, loved
all day, and for love passed sleepless nights! It is a wonderfully
naturalistic touch in _Adolphe_ that the lover feels his loss of time
to be indeed a loss.
It avails not that he asserts his right to dispose of his time as
he will, for the thought of the grief she endures when he fails to
appear, prevents his making any satisfactory use of the time gained,
especially as he is also tormented by a feeling of shame that another
human being should have such an ascendency over him. Then when he
returns to her, annoyed with himself for having come back much sooner
than was prudent for the sake of her reputation or his own work, he
finds her miserable because he has stayed away so long. For two hours
he has been suffering from the knowledge that she is longing, and now
he must suffer two more before he can pacify her. In spite of all this
he feels happy; he tells himself that it is sweet to be thus loved;
nevertheless, he is unconsciously consoling himself with the thought
that the peculiarities of their position must, sooner or later, put an
end to the situation.
The Count returns, and Adolphe first suffers from being compelled to
deceive him, and then endures the torture of seeing Eléonore sacrifice
everything for his own sake, give up at one and the same time her home
and her fortune. It is a double grief, partly selfish, for he mourns
over the inevitable restriction of his own liberty by the sacrifice she
is so happy in making for him, and partly compassionate, for he knows
with what hyena-like fury society will tear her reputation to pieces.
All she has won by years of irreproachable behaviour she loses in one
day. Her pride suffers agonies, and his devotion becomes a duty. From
henceforth each has a secret suffering which is not confided to the
other.
Adolphe's character begins to deteriorate. He fights a duel with a man
who has spoken slightingly of Eléonore, but himself unintentionally
injures her reputation by the incessant mockery of women and the
men who live in subjection to them in which he indulges as a kind
of relief from the feeling of his own dependence; men put their own
interpretation on his jests and jeers. He who cannot resist a tear,
makes a point of speaking of women with callous contempt.
Many have suffered the misery of loving without return; Adolphe's
torment consists in being loved after he has ceased to love. Eléonore
sees through his efforts to appear overjoyed when they meet, and one
of those terrible scenes ensues with which Mme. de Staël had made
Constant familiar; the exasperation of her passionate nature resembles
hatred. An attempt is made by Adolphe's relations, who disapprove of
his wasting his youth on such a connection, to get rid of Eléonore.
Adolphe's chivalrous feeling impels him to run away with her, and for a
time their tender feeling towards each other resembles love. Eléonore
makes fresh sacrifices which it galls Adolphe to accept. At one time
she suffers as much from not being loved as he from not loving; at
another she so intoxicates herself with her own passion that she sees
it double and believes that it is returned. Both live in the memory
of their former happiness, which is vivid enough to make parting seem
painful, even impossible, but not strong enough to impart any happiness
to their daily life. The tender but faint protestations of love made
now and again by Adolphe to Eléonore resemble the weak, colourless
leaves put forth from the branches of some uprooted tree.
He fails to make the being happy who is the cause of so much
unhappiness to himself. Every time she feels that she has won new
rights, he feels that he is bound by new fetters. Her passionateness
makes their daily life one incessant storm. In a biography of Constant
we find the following significant sentence: "This year Constant was
happy; Mme. de Staël was in Russia."
Eléonore inherits her father's fortune and is no longer dependent upon
Adolphe's protection. The world now suspects him of deriving pecuniary
advantage from the friendship; he is blamed for injuring her reputation
by being always in her company, and it is of course impossible for him
to explain that it is she who will not live without him.
His life is slipping away between his fingers; he is fulfilling none of
the promises of his youth; for, as he is not allowed to forget, there
is an insurmountable barrier between him and any possible future, and
that barrier is Eléonore. He determines to break off with her, but this
very determination makes his position more hopeless, for the moment he
resolves upon the death sentence (which he is too weak not to postpone)
all bitterness leaves him, and he feels such tender compassion for her
that she misunderstands and believes that all is well.
She makes a final violent effort to win him by rousing his jealousy;
but nothing now has any effect; on all sides the rupture is represented
to him as the most natural thing in the world, as a duty to his father,
to his own future, even to the unhappy being to whom he is chained, and
whom he is tormenting. She receives a letter which throws light on
his intentions, and soon after is attacked by a fatal fever and dies,
proclaiming her devotion to her lover with her last breath.
The moment Adolphe is free he realises that freedom is now useless
to him; he no longer knows what to do with it, and longs for the old
fetters.
Constant himself thus expresses the moral of the book: "The strongest
passion cannot survive the struggle with the established order of
things. Society is too powerful. It makes that love too bitter which
it has not recognised and stamped with the seal of its approval. Woe,
then, to the woman who rests her hope of happiness upon a feeling which
all things combine to poison, and against which society, when it is not
obliged to respect it as legal, enlists all that is basest in the human
heart, with the aim of destroying all that is good."
[1] The day came when criticism uplifted its voice against this
dethronement of youth and beauty. Jules Janin in his light way prefers
this complaint in the form of an attack on Balzac:--
"Formerly," he writes, "as far as the novel and the drama were
concerned, the woman of thirty to forty was regarded as past all
possibilities in the way of passion, but now, thanks to the discovery
of this new wide and smiling domain, she reigns supreme in both drama
and novel. A new world has superseded the old, the woman of forty has
suppressed the girl of sixteen.
"'Who knocks?' shouts drama in its deep voice. 'Who is there?' cries
the novel in gentler tones. 'It is I,' answers tremblingly the girl of
sixteen, with the pearly teeth, the snowy bosom, the soft outlines, the
bright smile, and the gentle glance. 'It is I! I am the same age as
Racine's Julie, Shakespeare's Desdemona, Molière's Agnès, Voltaire's
Zaire, Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Saint-Pierre's Virginie. It is I!
I am the same charming, volatile, delightful age as the young girls in
Ariosto, Lesage, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. It is I! I am innocent
youth, with its hopes, with its divinely beautiful, fearless attitude
towards the future. I am the age of chaste desires, of noble instincts,
of pride, and of innocence. Make room for me, dear sirs!' Thus speaks
the charming girl of sixteen to the novelists and the dramatists. But
the novelists and the dramatists at once reply: 'We are busy with your
mother, child; come again twenty years hence, and we shall see if we
can make something out of you.'
"In the novel and the drama of to-day, we have no one but the woman
of thirty, who will be forty to-morrow. She alone can love, she alone
can suffer. She is so much more dramatic, because she cannot afford
to wait. What can we make out of a little girl who can do nothing but
weep, love, sigh, smile, hope, tremble? The woman of thirty does not
weep, she sobs; she does not sigh, she utters anguished cries; she
does not love, she is consumed with passion; she does not smile, she
shrieks; she does not dream, she acts! This is drama, this is romance,
this is life. Thus speak, act, and reply our great playwrights and our
famous writers of fiction."
The intelligent, refined Madame Émile de Girardin defended Balzac,
answering very justly: "Is it Balzac's fault that thirty is now the
age of love? Balzac is obliged to paint passion where he finds it, and
nowadays it is not to be found in the heart of sixteen."
VIII
MADAME DE STAËL: "DELPHINE"
In one of his letters Byron writes of _Adolphe_: "The book contains
some melancholy truths, though I believe that it is too triste a work
ever to have been popular. The first time I ever read it was at the
desire of Mme. de Staël." Mme. de Staël herself says somewhere: "I do
not believe all men resemble Adolphe, but only vain men." Simple as the
observation is, we feel that it is written by a woman in self-defence;
for _Adolphe_ had struck home to Necker's daughter personally, had
bared her deepest heart wound.