great Genevese financier, became First Minister of France shortly
before the outbreak of the Revolution, and his name was at that time
the watchword of liberal France. Her mother was a highly gifted
woman, but stiff, reserved, and the slave of duty; she believed that
education did everything, nature little, and she laid pedantic stress
upon trifles, being of opinion that nothing is trifling from the moral
point of view. To this lady Rousseau's educational theories were
naturally highly antipathetic, and the consequence was that Rousseau,
with his belief in nature and in innate virtues, became her daughter's
ideal. This daughter, a frank, lively child, developed into a bright,
intelligent brunette, whose dark eyes sparkled with wit and beamed
with kind-heartedness. While Mme. Necker chiefly appreciated common
sense and the habit of self-examination, the daughter, who suffered
from the strict control under which she was kept, and whose great
gifts roused her mother's jealousy, grew to love all the qualities
and virtues which spring without cultivation from Nature's own health
and wealth. In her father's house she was from childhood brought
into contact with the most famous men of the day, who were amused and
attracted by her quick repartee and surprising originality. The lively,
marvellously intelligent child was her father's pride, and she returned
his affection with a boundless love and admiration which lasted all her
life and can be traced in most of her writings.
At fifteen years of age she began to write essays, novels, and
tragedies. One of her tragedies, entitled _Montmorency_, marks the
time when she began to feel attracted by the young Vicomte Mathieu
de Montmorency, who had distinguished himself in the American War
of Independence. Her parents being opposed to her marriage with a
Catholic, she was obliged to refuse his hand, but to the end of their
lives they remained faithful friends. Yielding to her mother's wishes,
Germaine Necker married in 1786 the Swedish Ambassador in Paris, Baron
Erik Magnus Staël Holstein, a favourite of Gustavus the Third. In order
to assist him to this wealthy and influential connection, Gustavus
confirmed the Baron in his post of ambassador in Paris for a certain
number of years. The bridegroom, who was double the age of his bride,
promised her parents that he would never take her to Sweden against
her will. He seems to have been the ordinary northern nobleman of the
period, very simple, polished in manner, but only half educated, a
spendthrift and a gambler. It was said of him that he would never have
found out how to boil a potato, much less have invented gunpowder.
Curiously enough, he sympathised with the Revolution.
Mme. de Staël's first book, _Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau_, was
published immediately before the Revolution. It is a panegyric and
a defence. At the close of the third letter she seeks to interweave
Rousseau's fame with that of her father, who, at the time she wrote,
had just been called to the head of affairs; at the end of the
fourth she hails the assembling of the States-General with youthful
enthusiasm, and expresses the hope that the great French nation
will attain by the path of enlightenment, reason, and peace, to the
possession of those blessings which other peoples had gained by the
shedding of streams of blood. She calls upon the nation to make it
a matter of honour not to go beyond the point which all are united in
regarding as their aim, and she closes with an apostrophe to Rousseau,
in which she laments that he did not live long enough to see the
approaching awe-inspiring spectacle, nor to encourage that patriot,
Necker, who merited a judge, admirer, and fellow-citizen such as he.
[Illustration: MADAME DE STAËL]
The Revolution broke out, and would not be stayed in its career at
what was the limit of her hopes and wishes, i.e. the acquisition of
a constitution after the English pattern. Necker was soon compelled
to flee, but his daughter remained in Paris, and, protected by her
husband's position, rescued many an innocent victim of the Reign of
Terror. With the assistance of the courageous German, Justus Erich
Bollmann, she saved the life of the man who was her lover at that
time, Narbonne, the former Minister of War. Bollmann got him safely
to London in 1792.[1] She had even laid a plan for the flight of the
royal family. The hatred of the revolutionary leaders was roused by her
behaviour; and it was with difficulty she escaped the mob's thirst for
revenge. She fled to Coppet, accompanied by her friend Montmorency,
who, as an aristocrat, was also in danger, and who disguised himself
as her lackey. Afterwards she went to England, where she published
a pamphlet in defence of Marie Antoinette, whom she did not know
personally, but by whose fate she had been deeply affected. This
pamphlet was soon followed by another, also called forth by current
events, entitled _De l'Influence des Passions sur le Bonheur des
Individus et des Nations_, a piece of declamatory writing, in which the
authoress exhibits no knowledge of life except when she treats of love,
and no political acumen except when she is writing of the Revolution.
There is a hollow, insincere ring in what she says on the subject of
ambition.
Though not formally banished by the Directory, Mme. de Staël was placed
under the surveillance of the police, and would have been arrested
if she had entered France without permission. As soon, however, as
Sweden had acknowledged the French Republic, she returned to Paris and
busied herself actively with politics. Her aim was a Parliamentary
constitution and peace with Europe. It was through her influence that
Talleyrand was made Foreign Minister. Her house was a great political
rendezvous, more especially of the Moderates, and it was not long
before Benjamin Constant played the leading part among the politicians
who assembled there, as well as occupied the first place in the good
graces of the mistress of the house.
When Bonaparte came to Paris as a conqueror towards the end of 1797,
after the campaign in Italy, he made an extraordinary impression upon
Madame de Staël. She sought every opportunity of approaching him, felt
herself alike attracted and overpowered by him. Whenever she tried to
interest him, it seemed as if she were struck dumb, she, the incessant
talker. The feeling of his unapproachableness tortured her. There is
no doubt that for a short time she nourished the hope of becoming the
friend of this Caesar, and it was a grievous disappointment to have
to relinquish the idea. From the moment she did so, she joined the
ranks of his political adversaries, continuing, however, for a time
to display a sort of coquetry as far as he was personally concerned.
Not till she was definitely repulsed, did her feeling change to pure
hatred. In the book which she published in the intermediate stage,
we have satirical allusions to Bonaparte's government along with
flattering allusions to himself personally. In conversation she openly
and constantly expressed her desire that he (and consequently the army
of her country under his command) might suffer defeat, in order that a
stop might be put to his tyranny.
It was in the year 1800 that she published her first large book, _De
la Littérature, considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions
Sociales_, a work which, from its general purport, must be classified
as belonging to that great body of writings in which, ever since the
days of the Renaissance, the relative merits of ancient and modern
literature have been discussed. Chateaubriand dealt with the same
problem very soon afterwards in his _Génie du Christianisme_. Mme.
de Staël and he both declare themselves in favour of the modern
literatures, but upon different grounds. He bases their superiority
upon the fact that they deal with Christian themes, of which the
ancient authors had no knowledge; Mme. de Staël bases it upon
progressing civilisation. She believes in the capacity of humanity
to improve, and in the gradual perfecting of social institutions,
and on this belief grounds her assurance that literature will
contain a steadily increasing treasure of experience and insight. At
this stage of her development there is no question of any profound
and systematic literary psychology; she calmly, for instance,
excludes imagination from the list of faculties which are capable
of development--why?--because in spite of all her enthusiasm for
Ossian, she cannot deny that Homer's is the fuller, richer, poetry.
The merit of her book, however, does not depend upon what it proves,
but upon what it proclaims and urges, namely the necessity for a new
literature, new science, and a new religion. She draws attention to
the literatures of England and Germany, to the Icelandic sagas, and
the old Scandinavian epics; but Ossian is to her the great type of all
that is splendid in the poetry of the North. She loves his seriousness
and melancholy, for, she says, "melancholy poetry is the poetry which
accords best with philosophy."[2] Writing of the Germans, she remarks:
"The most important book the Germans possess, and the only one that can
compare with the masterpieces of other languages, is _Werther_. Because
it calls itself a novel, many do not realise that it is a truly great
work.... The author of _Werther_ has been reproached for making his
hero suffer from other sorrows besides those of love, for allowing him
to be made so unhappy by a humiliation, and so resentful by the social
inequalities which were the cause of the humiliation; but to my mind
the author shows his genius in this quite as much as in anything else
in the book."
The fundamental idea of her book is, that free social conditions must
inevitably lead to a new development of literature, that it would be
absurd if a society which had won political liberty for itself were to
own only a literature shackled by rules. "Oh, if we could but find,"
she cries with youthful ardour, "a system of philosophy, an enthusiasm
for all that is good, a strong and righteous code of laws, which
should be to us what the Christian religion has been to the past!"
Jealous of her growing fame, and on the alert as the champion of
religion, Chateaubriand reviewed her book. Other critics had twitted
her with her enthusiasm for everything melancholy, and had inquired
what she thought of the Greeks, who were certainly not melancholy.
Chateaubriand seized the opportunity to strike a blow on behalf of
revealed religion. "Mme. de Staël," he says, "attributes that to
philosophy which I attribute to religion "; and addressing her, he
continues: "Your talent is but half developed; it is smothered by
philosophy. You seem to be unhappy, and how, indeed, should philosophy
heal the sorrow of your soul? Is it possible to fertilise one desert by
means of another desert?" He exhausts himself in mere phrases.
It was about this time that antagonism to Bonaparte, who was soon to
banish her again, this time for ten years, became the ruling idea in
Mme. de Staël's life. After the Italian campaign she had seen in him
the champion of freedom, had written him enthusiastic letters, and had
prevailed upon him to erase her father's name from the list of exiles.
But in the First Consul she saw only "a Robespierre on horseback," and
Bonaparte complained with reason that she inflamed men's minds against
him.
Her former enthusiasm had turned into passionate hatred. From her
salon she carried on a regular war against him. She and Constant were
unwearied in their satire of his associates, his person, his behaviour.
She scoffed at his little body and big head, at his arrogance and
his awkwardness. He was the _bourgeois gentilhomme_ on the throne,
annoyed by the wit of cultivated women, incapable of expressing
himself coherently, eloquent only when abusive. His genius was mere
charlatanism. He was not even a great general, for at Marengo he had
lost his head, and might have lost the battle if Desaix had not come to
his aid. There was something essentially vulgar about the man, which
even his tremendous power of imagination could not always conceal.
She entered into all sorts of intrigues with the generals who were
opposed to Bonaparte, either from principle, like Moreau, or from pure
envy, like Bernadotte. So far did she carry her hatred, that she was
beside herself with rage when she heard of the humiliation of England
by the Peace of Amiens, and kept away from Paris at the time of the
festivities held in honour of this peace.
The foreign diplomatists in Paris, to use Madame de Staël's own words,
"spent their lives with her." She conversed every day with numbers
of influential people, conversation being her greatest pleasure; and
Bonaparte is reported to have said that every one thought less of
him after having talked with her. He sent to inquire what it was she
really wanted, and if she would be satisfied if he paid her the two
millions which Necker had given in trust to the Treasury, and which
were being wrongfully kept back; she only answered that it was not a
question of what she wanted, but of what she thought. From the day when
Benjamin Constant first raised his voice in the Tribunate against one
of Bonaparte's proposals, her house in Paris was deserted, and all her
invitations were declined; and immediately after the publication of her
father's book, _Les dernières Vues de Politique et de Finances_, she
was banished from Paris by express command of the First Consul.
No heavier blow could have fallen upon Mme. de Staël. She herself
likened the sentence to one of death; for to her, who only really
lived when she was in the capital, and who could so ill dispense with
friends, intellectual intercourse, and a certain participation in the
great events of the day, it was misery to be thus torn from home and
country. "Every step the post-horses took caused me suffering, and when
the postillions inquired if they had not done well, I could not refrain
from bursting into tears at the thought of the sorry service they had
rendered me."[3] She was accompanied by Benjamin Constant; but when she
heard of her husband's illness she went to him, and nursed him till he
died.
In the following year, 1803, she published Delphine, a tale written
in five parts and in the form of letters, after the pattern of _La
Nouvelle Héloïse_. It is easy to trace the personal impressions and
reminiscences which form the groundwork of this novel. The story is the
story of a woman's dutiful renunciation of a happy marriage, and for
this the authoress's own refusal of Montmorency supplied a background
of fact. But the real theme of the book is the loving woman's conflict
with society, and the cruel, cold destruction by society of the
happiness of the individual. Looking at it in this light, we feel that
it was the fresh impressions of her later years, her relations with
her husband and Benjamin Constant, that gave the book its tone. Her
reputation had been injured by her separation from her husband, her
relations with Constant were no secret, and he was undoubtedly the
father of her daughter Albertine, born in 1797, the future Duchesse
de Broglie. When Mme. de Staël wrote _Delphine_ it had never occurred
to her to doubt that Constant would legitimise this daughter by a
speedy marriage; but, in spite of the great allowance always made by
public opinion for people of wealth and position, and her consequent
comparative independence of action, she bitterly felt both the covert
persecution of slander and the deliberate attempts at defamation made
by the pharisaical.
The spiritless, resigned motto of _Delphine_: "A man should be able
to defy public opinion, a woman to submit to it," almost betrays its
authoress, Madame de Staël's mother. The actual story harmonises
with the motto, but the spirit of the book and the very fact of its
publication contradict it. For the book is a justification of divorce,
and it appeared in the same year that Napoleon concluded the Concordat
with the Pope; it attacked indissoluble wedlock and the religious
sacrament of marriage, at the very moment when the marriage laws were
being made more stringent, and a portion of its old power was being
restored to the Church.
The book answers to its motto in so far that it teaches, through
the fate of its heroine, that if a woman, even after a generous and
prolonged sacrifice of her own well-being, transgress the rules of
society, though it may be only to prevent the ruin of her lover, she
is lost. It contradicts its motto in so far that the crying injustice
of such a fate speaks more powerfully than any declamation, of the
imperfection of the social organism and of the preposterousness of that
power to coerce and make unhappy, which man's short-sightedness and
pusillanimity have entrusted to the antiquated institutions under the
pressure of which Delphine is crushed. She is depicted from the very
first as a superior being, pure, benevolent, spirited, elevated by the
very fact of her purity above the pharisaical morality of society. Her
character is nowhere more charmingly suggested than in the scene where
an unfortunate and maligned woman enters the salon of the Tuileries,
and the other ladies immediately rise from their seats and move away,
leaving a great open space round the poor, marked creature; upon which
Delphine walks across the room and seats herself by her at whom all the
other women have vied in casting the first stone.
By a series of astoundingly base devices and intrigues, one of the
principal characters of the book, a female Talleyrand, succeeds in
separating Delphine from her lover, and uniting him to her antipodes,
the cold, orthodoxly pious Mathilde, who privately accepts from the
deserted Delphine the enormous dowry without which the marriage cannot
be arranged. By the time all the various deceptions are detected, the
totally unsuitable, unnatural pair, Mathilde and Léonce, are united.
Other equally odious marriages and equally unhappy love affairs are
grouped round this central couple, in order that the main idea of the
book may be made sufficiently clear. Henri de Lebensei, who is an
embellished edition of Constant, cannot be united to the woman he loves
until she has obtained a divorce from her husband, with whom she cannot
live, she declares, without destroying all that is good and noble in
her nature. M. de Serbeliane stands in the same hopeless position to
Thérèse d'Ervins as Delphine does to Mathilde's husband.
Delphine is represented as of so pure and self-sacrificing a nature
that she not only peremptorily rejects the idea of a union with
Léonce, which would necessarily destroy his wife's happiness, but will
not permit him to dwell upon the thought. She calms him; she points
him to a profounder morality and religion than that in which he, as a
child of the eighteenth century, has been brought up: "Léonce, I did
not expect to find such an indifference to religious ideas in you. I
take it upon me to reproach you for it. Your morality is only based
upon honour; you would have been much happier if you had given your
homage to those simple and true principles which teach us to submit our
actions to the dictates of our conscience, and free us from all other
yokes. You know that my education, far from enslaving my mind, has
made it if anything too independent. It is possible that superstition
is as yet more suitable for a woman than freedom of thought; weak and
wavering beings that we are, we need support on every side, and love is
a kind of credulity which is perhaps apt to ally itself with all the
other kinds of credulity and superstition. But the noble guardian of my
youth esteemed my character sufficiently to wish to develop my reason,
and never did he require of me to accept any opinion without examining
into it. I can therefore speak to you of the religion I love, as I can
speak on any other subject which my heart and mind have freely tested,
and you cannot attribute what I say to you to inculcated habit or the
unweighed impressions of childhood.... Do not, Léonce, refuse the
comfort which is offered to us by natural religion." We distinguish an
echo of Rousseau, and the influence of the reaction against Voltaire,
in this sermon which Necker's daughter places in the mouth of her
second self.
The plot develops; soon it becomes impossible any longer to maintain
the unnatural union, to endure the unnatural misery. Henri de Lebensei
writes the letter advising a divorce, which brought ill-fortune to
the book, and which fell like a firebrand into the clerical camp. He
writes to Délphine: "The man you love is worthy of you, madame, but
neither his nor your feeling is of any avail to alter the situation in
which an unhappy destiny has placed you. One thing alone can restore
your reputation and procure your happiness. Collect all your strength
to hear me. Léonce is not irrevocably bound to Mathilde; he can still
become your husband; in a month from now divorce will be legalised by
the Legislative Assembly." We must remember that the book appeared just
at the time of the reinstitution of Catholic marriage in France.
Here are more extracts from his letter: "You, who reprobate divorce,
believe your view to be the more moral. If it were so, it ought to be
the view taken by all sincere thinkers; for the first aim of thinking
man is to determine his duties to their full extent. But let us go
into the matter together; let us inquire whether the principles which
induce me to approve of divorce do not harmonise with the nature of man
and with the beneficent intentions which we ought to attribute to the
Divinity. The indissolubility of unhappy marriages makes life one long
succession of hopeless miseries. Some men say, indeed, that it is only
necessary to repress youthful inclinations, but they forget that the
repressed inclinations of youth become the lasting griefs of age. I do
not deny all the disadvantages connected with divorce, or rather, the
imperfections of human nature which make divorce necessary; but in a
civilised society which urges nothing against marriages of convenience,
or against marriages at an age when it is impossible to foretell the
future, a society whose law can neither punish the parents who misuse
their authority, nor the husband or wife who behaves badly--in such
a society the law which prohibits divorce is only harsh towards the
victims whose fetters it takes upon itself to rivet more firmly,
without in the least affecting the circumstances which make these
fetters easy or terrible to bear. It seems to say: 'I cannot ensure
your happiness, but I can at least vouch for the continuance of your
unhappiness'."
In such involved and eloquent periods is couched what has been called
Mme. de Staël's attack upon marriage. In reality it is, as we see,
only an attack upon the binding, oppressing power with which society
(itself first moulded into shape by the Church in the days when the
Church was the only spiritual power) has invested the first attachment
of youth--in Catholic countries by legislation, in Protestant by means
of public opinion, which metes out as stern justice as any marriage
laws. Her argument is based on the assumption that marriage can only
be considered that which it is maintained to be, namely an ideally
moral relation, when the two beings, who at a given moment of their
lives promise to live together and be faithful to one another for the
rest of their days, really know and love one another, and she points
out how exceedingly difficult it is for any human being thoroughly to
know himself and another human being. If marriage requires this mutual
knowledge as its foundation, then a union in which it is lacking is
not marriage. What kind of life can be based upon a sudden fancy, or
upon a lie, or upon a Yes wrung from a woman by fear? In every case in
which marriage does not rest upon a better foundation, its sanctity is
imaginary, is derived from a confusion of the real relation with the
ideal.