motto of the book, that a woman must bow to public opinion, she even
determines to place another obstacle between herself and Léonce. By the
time his wife dies, Delphine has taken the veil. Once more, though in
another form, we have strong opposition to a vow generally regarded as
sacred. Again it is Henri who is spokesman, but this time he appeals to
Léonce: "Are you able to listen to bold, salutary advice, the following
of which would save you from an abyss of misery? Are you capable of
taking a step which would offend what you have been accustomed all your
life to defer to, public opinion and established custom, but which
would be consonant with morality, reason, and humanity? I was born a
Protestant, and have, I grant, not been brought up in awe of those
insane and barbarous institutions of society which demand of so many
innocent beings the sacrifice of all natural inclinations; but ought
you to have less confidence in my judgment because it is uninfluenced
by prejudice? A proud and high-minded man should only obey the dictates
of universal morality. Of what signification are those duties which are
merely the outcome of accidental circumstances, and depend upon the
caprices of law or the will of a priest? duties that subject a man's
conscience to the judgment of other men, of men, too, who have long
bent their necks under the yoke of the prejudices and self-interest of
their order? The laws of France will release Delphine from the vows
unhappy circumstances have forced from her. Come and live with her upon
our native soil! What is it that keeps you apart? A vow she has made
to God? Believe me, the Supreme Being knows our nature too well ever
to accept irrevocable vows from us. Possibly something in your heart
rebels against profiting by laws which are the outcome of a Revolution
to which you are antagonistic? My friend, this Revolution, which has
unfortunately been soiled by so many violent deeds, will be extolled by
posterity because of the freedom it has bestowed upon France. If it is
followed only by fresh forms of slavery, this period of slavery will be
the most ignominious period in the history of the world; but if freedom
is its result, then happiness, honour, virtue, all that is noble in
humanity, is so inseparably bound up with freedom, that centuries to
come will be lenient in their judgment of the events which prepared the
way for the age of freedom."
Besides attacking to this extent certain definite social institutions,
the book makes protest throughout against the great mass of received
opinions, the prejudices with which most men are clad as it were in a
coat of triple mail, the beliefs which must not even be approached,
because the very ground around them is holy within a circumference of
so and so many square miles. It cannot be too plainly asserted that,
in this particular, _Delphine_ is a more vigorous, remarkable work
than most of the other productions of the Emigrant Literature. For
a nation has a literature in order that its horizon may be widened
and its theories of life confronted with life. In his early youth
society offers the individual an extraordinary, patched-together suit
of prejudices which it expects him to wear. "Am I really obliged,"
asks the man, "to wear this tattered cloak? Can I not dispense with
these old rags? Is it absolutely necessary for me either to blacken
my face or hide it under this sheep's mask? Am I compelled to swear
that Polichinelle has no hump, to believe that Pierrot is an eminently
honourable, and Harlequin a particularly serious man? May I not look
up into any of their faces, or write on any hand, 'I know you, fair
mask!'? Is there no help?" There is no help, unless you are prepared to
be beaten by Polichinelle, kicked by Pierrot, and whacked by Harlequin.
But literature is, or should be, the territory where officialism
ceases, established customs are disregarded, masks are torn off, and
that terrible thing, the truth, is told.
_Delphine_ met with much disapprobation. The most famous critic of the
day wrote: "One cannot conceive more dangerous and immoral doctrines
than those which are disseminated by this book. The authoress would
seem to have forgotten the ideas with which she, as Necker's daughter,
was brought up. Regardless of the Protestant faith of her family, she
expresses her contempt for revealed religion; and in this pernicious
book, which, it must be confessed, is written with no small ability,
she presents us with a long vindication of divorce. Delphine speaks
of love like a Bacchante, of God like a Quakeress, of death like a
grenadier, and of morality like a sophist." High-sounding words these,
but just the high-sounding words which the future must always listen
to from the toothless past, whose heavy artillery is charged to the
muzzle with the wet powder of orthodox belief and the paper balls of
narrow-mindedness.
Whereas Mme. de Staël's contemporaries lavishly praised the style
of the book and the literary ability of its authoress, in order to
be the better able to reprobate her views of life and her aims, the
modern critic has little to say for the loose and diffuse style which
the novel has in common with almost all others written in the form of
letters; but, as regards the ideas of the book, they hold good to-day;
they have actually not yet penetrated into all the countries of Europe,
although the present century has striven to realise them ever more and
more fully.
The breach between society and the individual depicted in _Delphine_
is entirely in the spirit of the Emigrant Literature. The same bold
revolt followed by the same despair in view of the uselessness of the
struggle, is to be found throughout the whole group of writings. In
the present case the revolt is a spirited, desperate attempt to hold
fast one of the gains of the Revolution at the moment when it is being
wrested away by the reaction. The despair is due to the sorrowful
feeling that no remonstrance will avail, that the retrograde movement
must run its course, must exceed all reasonable limits, before a better
condition of things can be looked for. Was a woman's novel likely to
prevail against an autocrat's compact with a Pope!
The "war with society" which she depicts is less a conflict with the
state or the law than with the jumble of conventions and beliefs, old
and new, artificial and natural, reasonable and unreasonable, hurtful
and beneficial, which, fused together into a cohesive and apparently
homogeneous mass, constitute the stuff whereof public opinion is made.
Just as the so-called sound common sense, which is always ready to set
itself in opposition to any new philosophy, is at any given time to a
great extent simply the congealed remains of a philosophy of earlier
date, so the rules of society and the verdicts pronounced by society in
accordance with these rules, verdicts always unfavourable in the case
of new ideas, are to a great extent founded upon ideas which in their
day had a hard struggle to assert themselves in face of the opposition
of the then prevailing public opinion. That which was once an original,
living idea, stiffens in time into the corpse of an idea. Social laws
are universal laws, the same for all, and, like everything that is
universal, they in numberless cases victimise. No matter how singular
the individual may be, he is treated like every one else. The genius
is in much the position of the clever head-boy in a stupid class; he
has to listen to the same old lessons over and over again because of
the dunces who have not learned them and yet must learn them. The
verdict of society is an irresponsible verdict; while the judgments of
the individual, as such, must always to a certain extent be a natural
product, those of society are in most cases a manufactured article,
provided wholesale by those whose business it is to concoct public
opinion; and no responsibility is felt by the individual in giving his
adherence to them. The natural course would be for the individual to
form his own views and principles, make his own rules of conduct, and,
according to his powers, search for the truth with his own brains; but
instead of this, in modern society the individual finds a ready-made
religion, a different one in each country, the religion of his parents,
with which he is inoculated long before he is capable of religious
thought or feeling. The result is that his religion-producing powers
are nipped in the bud, or if they are not, then woe be to him! His
essays are a gauntlet flung in the face of society. And in the same way
all originality of moral feeling is, in the majority of men, crushed
or checked by the ready-made moral code of society and ready-made
public opinion. The verdicts of society, which are the outcome of all
the pious and moral doctrines accepted by it on trust, are necessarily
untrustworthy, often extremely narrow-minded, not infrequently cruel.
It was Mme. de Staël's lot to be brought face to face with more
prejudices than the generality of authors are. She was a Protestant in
a Catholic country, and in sympathy with Catholics although brought
up in a Protestant family. In France she was the daughter of a Swiss
citizen, and in Switzerland she felt herself a Parisian. As a woman
of intellect and strong passions, she was predestined to collision
with public opinion, as the authoress, the woman of genius, to war,
offensive and defensive, with a social order which relegates woman to
the sphere of private life. But that she saw through the prejudices by
which she was surrounded, more clearly than did any other contemporary
writer, was principally due to the fact that, as a political refugee,
she was obliged to travel in one foreign country after another; this
gave her ever-active, inquiring mind the opportunity of comparing the
spirit and the ideals of one people with those of another.
[1] Friedrich Kapp: "Justus Erich Bollmann."
[2] _De la Littérature_, p. 257. Paris, 1820.
[3] _Dix Années d'Exil_, 1820, p. 84.
IX
EXILE
When the edict banishing Mme. de Staël from Paris was made known to
her, she inquired through Joseph Bonaparte, who was among the number
of her friends, whether she would be permitted to travel in Germany or
would be brought back from there. After some delay a passport was sent
her, and she set out for Weimar. There she made the acquaintance of the
ducal family, had long conversations with Schiller on the reciprocal
relations of French and German literature, and pestered Goethe with
questions upon every subject in heaven and earth. The eager discussion
of problematical questions was, he says, her special passion. But
what surprised both Goethe and the other German celebrities most was,
that she not only wished to make their acquaintance, but to influence
affairs generally; she always talked as if the moment for action had
come, and they must all be up and doing. She went on from Weimar to
Berlin, made acquaintance with Prince Louis Ferdinand, was taken up by
the Fichte, Jacobi, and Henriette Herz circles, and carried off A. W.
Schlegel as tutor to her children.
The following year she travelled in Italy, studied its ancient
monuments, its art, the southern manners and customs of its people, and
absorbed impressions of Italian nature at every pore. Then she returned
to Coppet and wrote _Corinne, ou l'Italie_.
Her longing for France, however, gave her no peace. She had been
forbidden to come within forty leagues of Paris, but she took up
her abode just outside that limit, first at Auxerre, then at Rouen.
(The prefect of this latter town was suspended for having shown her
some courteous attention.) She eventually received permission to
superintend the publishing of _Corinne_ from a country house only
twelve leagues from Paris. But the book was barely published before
a new edict banished her from France altogether. _Corinne_ was a
grand success, and Napoleon could not endure any success in which
he had no share. Mme. de Staël returned to Coppet, and, like the
Emperor, continued to extend her realm. It grew as her emotional
nature expanded, her intellectual grasp widened, and the number of her
friendships increased. She held a regular court at Coppet. Remarkable
men from all parts of Europe gathered round her there. In her house
were to be met statesmen like Constant--whom in her infatuation she
calls the cleverest man in the world--historians like Sismondi, poets
like Zacharias Werner and Oehlenschläger, German princes, Polish
princes and princesses, the flower of the aristocracy of birth and of
intellect. Since her visit to Germany she had steadily continued to
study the German language and literature, but she found that it would
be necessary for her to make another sojourn in that country if she
desired to present to her countrymen a complete picture of the new
world which had revealed itself to her. She had been in North Germany,
now she spent a year in Vienna, and upon her return to Switzerland set
to work upon her great three-volume book, _De l'Allemagne_. It was
completed in 1810. The next thing was to get it published in Paris.
A law had been passed which forbade the publication of any book until
it had been approved of by the Censors; on this followed another
regulation, specially aimed at Mme. de Staël, which gave the Chief of
the Police authority to suppress a book if he saw fit, even though it
had been published with the approval of the Censors. This was a law
which did away with all law. Having again received permission to take
up her abode at a distance of forty leagues from Paris to superintend
the publication of her book, Mme. de Staël went to Blois, lived first
at the château of Chaumont-sur-Loire, then at Fossé, and afterwards
at the country-houses of friends in the neighbourhood; she fluttered
round her beloved Paris at the required distance, as a moth flutters
round a candle. Once she even ventured into the capital. Meanwhile the
Censors examined her book, corrected, deleted, and gave the mangled
remains their _imprimatur_. Ten thousand copies were printed. But on
the day on which they were to be issued, the Chief of the Police sent
his gendarmes into the publisher's shop, after placing a sentinel at
every exit, and, by order of the Government, performed the heroic feat
of hacking the ten thousand copies to pieces. The mass was kneaded into
a dough, and the publisher received twenty louis d'or in compensation.
Mme. de Staël was at the same time ordered to deliver up her manuscript
(representing the labours and hopes of six years) and to leave France
in the course of twenty-four hours. In the letter which she received
from the Chief of the Police on this occasion occur the following
sentences: "You are not to seek the reason of the command I have
communicated to you in your omission of all reference to the Emperor in
your last work; that would be a mistake; no place could be found for
him in it that would be worthy of him: your banishment is the natural
consequence of the course you have persistently pursued for some years
past. It appears to me that the air of this country does not suit you;
as for us, we are, fortunately, not yet reduced to seeking models
amongst the people you so much admire. Your last work is not French."
That was what doomed her--it was _not French_. And to think that it
was the epoch-making book, _De l'Allemagne_, epoch-making in French
literature, because, not accidentally but on principle, it broke
with all antiquated literary traditions and indicated new sources of
life--to think that it was this book which the spiritual policeman
of the nation presumed to condemn as _not French_! And the cruelly
ironical attempt to assume a tone of gallantry! "It appears to me that
the air of this country does not suit you "--therefore be kind enough
to betake yourself elsewhere! We seem to hear the intoxicated vanity
of France itself speak: "Because you have ventured to love liberty
even now, when the rest of us are happy under tyranny; because, whilst
we have been sunning ourselves in the beams of Napoleon's glory, you
have dared to depict in Corinne the sovereign independence of genius,
and, yourself banished from Paris, have crowned your ideal at the
Capitol; because, at the moment when the eagles of France are shining
resplendent with the glory of a thousand victories, and foreign nations
have become our lieges, you, a weak woman, have had the audacity to
represent to us our sources of spiritual life as almost dried up,
and to point us to the despised Germany as a land whose poetry far
outshines our own, to hated England, perfidious Albion, as a country
whose love of liberty is more persistent and genuine than ours, and
to dying Italy, the subjugated province of France, as a country whose
simple manners and customs and vast superiority in art are worthy of
imitation--because of all these things, you shall be stigmatised as
unpatriotic, the cockade of your country shall be torn from your brow,
your books shall be destroyed, even your manuscripts shall be torn into
fragments, and you yourself, with a couple of spies at your heels,
shall be chased like a wild animal across the frontier of France before
twenty-four hours have passed."
The Prefect of the department was sent to demand the manuscript of
the book; Mme. de Staël succeeded in saving it by giving him a rough
copy. But anxiety about her book was for the moment the least of
her anxieties. She had hoped to cross to England, but, expressly to
prevent this, the Chief of the Police had added a postscript to his
letter, forbidding her to embark at any northern port. She was half
inclined to sail in a French ship bound for America, on the chance of
the ship being captured by the English, but abandoned this plan as too
adventurous. Despondent and sorrowful, she retired once more to Coppet.
Here fresh persecutions of every description awaited her. The Prefect
of Geneva, on the strength of the first order he received, gave her
two sons to understand that they also were forbidden ever to return to
France, and this merely because they had made a fruitless attempt to
obtain an audience of Napoleon on behalf of their mother. A few days
later Mme. de Staël received a letter from the Prefect, in which he,
in the name of the Chief of the Police, demanded the proof-sheets of
her book on Germany. It had been ascertained by means of spies that
the proofs must be in existence, and the French Government had no
intention of resting contented with half measures, with the destruction
of the printed book; the work was to be completely annihilated, any
future edition of it made impossible. The authoress replied that the
proofs had already been sent abroad, but that she would willingly
promise never again to print any of her works on the Continent of
Europe. "There was no great merit in such a promise," she remarks in
her _Dix Années d'Exil_, "for of course no Continental government would
have sanctioned the publication of a book which had been interdicted
by Napoleon." Not long after this, the Prefect of Geneva, Barante,
the father of the historian, was banished for having shown too great
leniency towards Mme. de Staël. Her son falling ill, Mme. de Staël
accompanied him by the advice of the doctors to the baths of Aix in
Savoy, some twenty leagues from Coppet. Scarcely had she arrived
there when she received, by special messenger, an intimation from
the Prefect of the Department of Mont Blanc that she was not only
forbidden to leave Switzerland on any pretext whatever, but even to
travel in Switzerland itself; two leagues from Coppet was indicated
as the distance beyond which she might not go. Not satisfied with
transforming her sojourn upon her own estate into an imprisonment, the
Government took care that she should suffer not only from the loss of
freedom, but from that special curse of prison life, solitude--doubly
painful to one of her peculiarly social disposition. Schlegel, who
had lived in her house as tutor to her children for eight years, was
ordered to leave, on the foolish pretext that he influenced her against
France. To the inquiry how he did this, the answer was returned, that
in the comparison which he, as literary critic, had instituted between
Racine's Phèdre and the Phædra of Euripides, he had pronounced himself
in favour of the latter. Montmorency was exiled for having spent a few
days at Coppet, and Mme. Récamier, whom Mme. de Staël had not time to
warn of the punishment attending even a brief visit, was forbidden
to return to France, because on her way through Switzerland she had
gone to cheer her old friend with a little conversation. Even a man
of seventy-eight, St.-Priest, an old ministerial colleague of her
father's, was exiled for having paid a polite call at Coppet.
The isolation which is the lot of those who set themselves in
opposition to despotic power was not new to her. For long no man
of rank or fame, no politician who wished to stand well with the
Government, had dared to visit her at Coppet. They were all prevented
by business or illness. "Ah!" she said once, "how weary I am of all
this cowardice which calls itself consumption!" But now, to the pain
of seeing herself abandoned by so many former friends was added that
of seeing her real friends punished with exile for the slightest
expression of good-will towards her. She complained that she spread
misfortune round her like an infectious disease.
It stood in her power even now, after years of exile, persecution, and
practical imprisonment, to obtain liberty, and permission once more
to write and publish; it was privately intimated to her that a slight
change of opinion or attitude would procure her the right to return
to France; but she would not purchase liberty at this price. And when
it was said to her later in more definite terms: "Speak or write one
little word about the King of Rome, and all the capitals of Europe will
be open to you;" all she replied was: "I wish him a good nurse."
Isolated and closely confined, she came to the decision to make a
determined attempt to escape from Coppet. It was her desire to go to
America, but that was impossible without a passport, and how was she
to procure one? She feared, besides, that she might be arrested on her
way to the port she must sail from, on the pretext that she intended to
go to England, which was forbidden her under penalty of imprisonment.
And she was well aware that when the first scandal had blown over,
there would be nothing to prevent the Government quietly leaving her
in prison; she would soon be completely forgotten. She contemplated
the possibility of reaching Sweden by way of Russia, the whole of
North Germany being under the control of the French. She believed she
could manage to escape through the Tyrol without being delivered up by
Austria, but a passport to Russia must be procured from St. Petersburg,
and she feared that if she wrote for this from Coppet, she might be
denounced to the French Ambassador; she must get to Vienna first and
write from there. For six months she pored over the map of Europe,
studying it to find a way of escape as eagerly as Napoleon studied it
to find the paths by which he was to proceed on his conquest of the
world. When, after a month's delay, a last petition for a passport
to America was refused (although Mme. de Staël had pledged herself,
if it were granted, to publish nothing there), the weak, brave woman
determined upon a decisive attempt to escape. One day in 1812, she and
her daughter drove away from Coppet, with their fans in their hands,
and not a single box or package in the carriage. They arrived safely
at Vienna, and wrote to St. Petersburg for Russian passports. But the
Austrian Government was so anxious to avoid complications with France
that Mme. de Staël was detained upon the frontier of Galicia, and
was followed by spies through the whole of Austrian Poland. When she
stopped on her journey to spend a single day at Prince Lubomirski's,
the Prince was obliged to give an Austrian detective a seat at his
table, and it was only by threats that Mme. de Staël's son prevented
the man taking up his position at night in her bedroom. Not till she
had passed the Russian frontier did she breathe freely again. But
the feeling of freedom did not last long, for she had barely reached
Moscow before rumours that the French army was approaching the city
compelled her to take flight again, and it was not until she reached
St. Petersburg that she could consider herself in safety.
The year before her flight from Coppet, Mme. de Staël, then forty-five
years of age, had been privately married to a young French officer of
twenty-three, Albert de Rocca, who had been severely wounded, and had
come to Switzerland a complete invalid, exhausted by loss of blood. The
sympathy which Mme. de Staël showed him roused a passionate devotion
in the young soldier, and this led to a secret union. Rocca joined Mme.
de Staël upon the Russian frontier.