of the correct local colouring for a poem she was planning on Richard
Coeur de Lion. Reading Byron seems to have inspired her with the
idea of this poem, which was, she said, to be a _Lara_, though not a
reflection of Byron's. The fear, however, that the fatigues of the
journey might be too great for her young daughter and De Rocca, decided
her to go to Stockholm instead. There she renewed her friendship with
Bernadotte and met her old friend, Schlegel, whom Bernadotte had made
a Swedish noble and his own private secretary. Through Schlegel,
Bernadotte also made the acquaintance of Constant, whom he created a
Knight of the Northern Star, and whom he vainly attempted to persuade
into concurrence in his ambitious designs on the French throne. As
far as Bernadotte's character was concerned, Mme. de Staël was less
keen-sighted than Constant; she always speaks of him with warmth; their
common hatred of Napoleon was, doubtless, a bond of union. In her case
it became a dumb hatred from the moment that the allied armies marched
against France. She laments the necessity of wishing Napoleon success,
but she can no longer separate his interests from those of France.
Possessed of more strength of character than Constant, she rejected the
overtures made to her by Napoleon during the Hundred Days. She survived
his final downfall, and saw with sorrow the return of the Bourbons,
more virulent enemies of freedom than the autocrat they displaced.
She foregathered once more with Constant in Paris in 1816; and in the
following year she died.
This brief summary of the life of a remarkable woman and of the
life-conflict of her maturer years, is a sufficient groundwork for
the elaboration of a complete picture of her character as a woman and
a writer. Innate warmth of heart and intelligence were her original
gifts; her warm-heartedness developed into broad-minded philanthropy,
and her intelligence into a power of receptivity and reproduction which
was akin to genius.
She possessed in a marked degree several of the characteristics of the
eighteenth century--sociability, for instance, and love of conversation
accompanied by remarkable conversational powers. Whereas George Sand,
the great authoress of the nineteenth century, was reserved and
silent in company, and only revealed her inner self when she wrote,
Mme. de Staël was a lively improvisatrice. She possessed the gift of
electrifying; her words shed a stream of light upon the subject of
which she spoke. All who knew her personally said that her books were
as nothing in comparison with her conversation. One of her critics ends
a review thus: "When one listens to her, it is impossible not to agree
with her; if she had said all this instead of writing it, I should not
have been able to criticise;" and a great lady said jestingly: "If I
were Queen I should command Mme. de Staël to talk to me constantly."
The countless sayings which have been preserved give us, in spite
of the chilling influence of print, some idea of the sparkle and
originality of her conversation. One day when she was discoursing on
the unnaturalness of parents arranging marriages instead of doing the
only right thing, allowing the young girl to choose for herself, she
cried laughingly: "I shall _compel_ my daughter to marry for love." One
of Napoleon's friends having informed her that the Emperor would pay
her the two millions her father had entrusted to the Bank of France
if he were certain of her attachment, she replied: "I knew that a
certificate of birth would be required before I could obtain my money,
but I did not expect to be asked for a declaration of love."
But behind the ready wit and the facility of expression which are the
qualities developed by a social age, lay much of the fervour and the
soul which the nineteenth century has not failed to appreciate. The
much admired châtelaine of Coppet, the fêted, fascinating leader of
society, was a genuine, natural woman. The want of sympathy between her
and her mother had, as already noted, early strengthened her tendency
to believe in and love human nature. The idea of duty as conflicting
with nature rather than guiding it was repulsive to her. In her work
_De l'Influence des Passions_, she considers the passions in their
relation, not to the idea of duty, but to the idea of happiness,
investigating into the proportionate infringement of each upon our
happiness. In Corinne she says: "Nothing is easier than to make a
grand pretence of morality while condemning all that is noble and
great. The idea of duty ... can be turned into a weapon of offence,
which the mediocre, perfectly satisfied with their mediocrity and
narrow-mindedness, employ to impose silence upon the gifted, and to rid
themselves of enthusiasm, of genius, in short, of all their enemies."
The temperamental foundation upon which Mme. de Staël built was
genuinely feminine. The final ideal of this undeniably ambitious woman
was a purely personal, purely idyllic one--happiness in love. It is
upon this that her two great novels, _Delphine_ and _Corinne_, turn;
the improbability of finding it in marriage as ordained by society, and
the impossibility of finding it outside marriage, are her fundamental
ideas; and the perpetual conflict between domestic happiness and noble
ambitions or free love, is merely the expression of her constant
complaint, that neither genius nor passion is compatible with that
domestic happiness which is her heart's eternal desire. In her books
the woman only seeks the path of fame when she has been disappointed
in all her dearest hopes. To Mme. de Staël the heart is everything;
even fame was to her only a means of conquering hearts. Corinne says:
"When I sought glory, I always had the hope that it would make people
love me," and Mme. de Staël herself exclaims: "Do not let us give our
unjust enemies and our ungrateful friends the triumph of crushing,
of suppressing our powers. It is they who force those who would so
willingly have been content with feeling, to seek fame."
It is this warm-heartedness, one might almost say motherliness, which,
in her case, gives the melancholy of the age a peculiar imprint. Hers
is not only that universal human melancholy that arises from the
certainty with which two human beings who love one another can say:
"The day is coming when I shall lay you in the grave, or you me." Still
less is it the egotistical despondency to be found in so many of the
male writers of the day. It is a depression connected with the struggle
for ideal equality and liberty of those revolutionary times, it is the
sadness of the enthusiastic reformer.
From her youth she had been such an enthusiast on the subject of
equality that even in the matter of ability she regarded all men as
essentially equal, assuming only the most trifling difference between
the genius and the ordinary man. From the time she sat upon her
father's knee she had cherished the strongest faith in the power of
liberty to make men happy and to call forth all that is good in them,
and her faith did not waver even on the September day when she was
compelled to flee from that Reign of Terror which was the result of an
experiment in equality, or when, under the Consulate, she was banished
by the dictatorship into which liberty had resolved itself. But it is
small wonder that a veil woven of sadness and despondency early dimmed
the brightness of her spirit. At the close of a letter to Talleyrand,
whom in the days of her power she had saved from banishment, but who
was not sufficiently grateful to attempt to make her any return, she
writes: "Farewell! Are you happy? with so superior an intellect do you
not penetrate to what is at the core of everything--unhappiness?" And
in _Corinne_ the heroine repeats what Mme. de Staël herself often said:
"Of all the capacities with which nature endowed me, the capacity of
suffering is the only one I have developed to its full extent."
Healthy-minded as she was, she came in time to take a brighter view of
life. A relative who knew her well writes: "Possibly there was a time
when life, death, melancholy, and passionate self-sacrifice played too
great a part in her conversation; but when these words spread like a
contagion throughout her whole circle, and actually began to be heard
amongst the servants, she took a deadly loathing to them."[1] She
succeeded in advancing beyond the intellectual stage at which so many
of her French contemporaries stopped short.
It is, indeed, one of the most noticeable things about her, this
development of her critical faculty in the spirit and direction of
the nineteenth century. Originally she was a true Parisian, with no
real appreciation of the beauties of nature. When, after her first
flight from Paris, she saw the Lake of Geneva for the first time, she
exclaimed in her home-sickness: "How much more beautiful were the
gutters of the Rue du Bac!" Not many years later she described the
scenery of Italy, in _Corinne_, in truly glowing language. In her
earlier years she was in love with, infatuated with, Paris, which to
her represented civilisation, yet it was she who first taught the
Frenchman to appreciate the characteristic and the good qualities of
the other European nations. For she possessed the true critical gift,
that is, she had the power of steadily enlarging her mind, increasing
her receptivity, and destroying her prejudices in the bud, thereby
holding herself in constant preparedness to understand.
It is to this we must ascribe her marvellous power of attraction; and
this explains how, banished and disgraced as she was, she enjoyed the
power and influence of a queen at Coppet. Although our countryman
Oehlenschläger does not seem to have had any clear appreciation of
the real greatness of the woman whose guest he was, he gives a very
charming description of Mme. de Staël and his visit to her in 1808.
"How intellectual, witty, and amiable Mme. de Staël was," he says,
"the whole world knows. I have never met a woman possessed of so
much genius; but, probably on that very account, there was something
masculine about her. She was square built, with marked features. Pretty
she was not, but there was something most attractive in her bright
brown eyes, and she possessed in a very high degree the womanly gift of
winning, subtly ruling, and bringing together men of the most different
characters. That in matters of the heart she was the true woman, she
has shown us in _Delphine_ and _Corinne_. Rousseau himself has not
depicted love with more fire. Wherever she appeared she collected round
her all the men of intellect, drawing them away even from young and
beautiful women. When one remembers that in addition to all this she
was very rich and very hospitable, giving magnificent entertainments
every day, one does not marvel that, like some queen or fairy, she
drew men to her enchanted castle. One is almost tempted to believe
that it was to indicate this dominion of hers that she always had a
little leafy branch by her at meals, which she took in her hand and
played with. The servants had to lay one beside her plate every day,
for it was as necessary to her as knife, fork, and spoon."
Men made their way to Coppet, as some fifty years earlier they had
made their way to the adjacent Ferney, where Voltaire, also an exile
dwelling as close to the frontiers of France as possible, gathered the
picked men of Europe round him in the last years of his life. One is
irresistibly tempted to compare the influence which emanated from the
aged man at Ferney with that exercised by the owner of Coppet. The
years spent at Ferney are in every respect the most glorious period of
Voltaire's life. It was from there that he, as the champion of justice
and toleration, compassed achievements which no one could have believed
to be within the power of a private individual whose only weapon was
his pen.
Three years of his life at Ferney were devoted to litigation on behalf
of Jean Calas. Calas was a merchant of Toulouse, aged sixty-eight,
a Protestant. His youngest son had become converted to Catholicism,
and was completely estranged from his family. The eldest son, a
wild, dissipated young man, committed suicide. The Catholic clergy
immediately spread a rumour among the people that the father had
strangled his son out of hatred for the Romish faith, which the
latter, it was said, had intended to embrace on the following day. The
whole family was imprisoned. The suicide's corpse lay in state, and
performed one miracle after another. The bi-centenary of the massacre
of St. Bartholomew in Toulouse occurred at the time of the trial, and
in their fanatical excitement, thirteen judges, despite all proofs
of his innocence, and without a shadow of evidence of his guilt,
condemned Calas to be broken on the wheel. The sentence was carried
out, the old man protesting his innocence to the last. His children,
under the pretext of a reprieve, were shut up in a monastery and
forced to adopt the Catholic faith. Then Voltaire at Ferney wrote his
celebrated treatise on tolerance, and moved heaven and earth to get
the case tried over again. He appealed to the public opinion of the
whole of Europe. He compelled the Council of State in Paris to demand
the minutes of the trial from the Parliament of Toulouse. They were
refused; there were delays of every kind; but in the end, after three
years of unwearied fighting, Voltaire gained his point. The Toulouse
sentence was pronounced unjust, the dead man's honour was cleared, and
an indemnification was paid to his family. All who desire to be just
to Voltaire ought to remember that it is during this period that the
phrase, _Écrasez l'infâme_, perpetually recurs in his letters.
It was at Ferney that Voltaire gave shelter to the Sirven family. The
father was a Calvinist, but one of his daughters had been forced into
a convent. Upon her becoming insane, she was released, whereupon she
drowned herself in a well not far from her father's house. The father,
mother, and sister are accused of murdering the nun, are tried, and
all condemned to death. The unhappy family, knowing of no sanctuary
in the whole of Europe except Voltaire's house, escape to Ferney, the
mother dying of grief upon the way. Voltaire, the banished man, by his
eloquence and his ardour compels the French courts to try this case
also again, and the family is acquitted.
Three years later Étalonde found refuge at Ferney. Two young men, De
la Barre and Étalonde, were accused in 1765 of having passed a church
procession without taking off their hats, which was a true accusation,
and of having thrown a crucifix into the water, which was a false one.
They were both examined under torture, and afterwards De la Barre was
broken on the wheel. He went bravely to his death, his only words
being: "I could not have believed that they would kill a young man for
such a trifle." Étalonde, who was condemned to lose his right hand and
have his tongue cut out, escaped to Ferney, and no one dared to lay
hands on him in Voltaire's house.
Yet another human life did Voltaire succeed in saving while he lived
at Ferney. A young married couple named Montbailli were condemned to
death on a false accusation of murder. The man was first broken on
the wheel and then burned, but the burning of the woman was deferred
because she was pregnant. Voltaire hears of the case, sees through
the infamous charge with his lightning glance, appeals to the French
ministry, proves that an innocent man has been put to death, and saves
the woman from the stake.
Besides protecting the life of the accused, he defended the honour of
the dead. One of the last pieces of news that he received on his own
deathbed was, that his appeal against the unjust sentence which had
cost General Lally his life had been successful, that the sentence was
reversed, the dead man acquitted. During these years Voltaire also
found time to transform Ferney from a poor village into a prosperous
town, to labour zealously for the abolition of serfdom in France, and
to write a number of his most important books, in all of which his one
aim was to undermine the dogmas of Christianity, which appeared to him
to be at the root of the power of the priesthood and all the evils
resulting therefrom. Nor did he neglect the claims of polite society;
he built a private theatre, and engaged the best actors to play in it;
and he was visited at Ferney by the most gifted and able men of the day.
The renown of Coppet cannot be compared with that of Ferney, but none
the less it is a fair renown. From this place of banishment also,
emanated the ardent desire for justice, the love of freedom and the
love of truth.
Somewhat later in the nineteenth century each of the three principal
countries of Europe sent its greatest author into exile; England sent
Byron; Germany, Heinrich Heine; and France, Victor Hugo; and not one
of these men lost any of his literary influence from the fact of his
exile. But with the beginning of the century the time had gone by when
men of letters were a great power. Even a genius of Voltaire's calibre
would hardly have exercised the powerful, tangible influence in this
century which he did in his own. And Mme. de Staël was far from being
Voltaire's equal in genius. Moreover, her task was of an entirely
different nature. The outward power of the Church was temporarily
broken, and in any case her mind was far too religious ever to have
permitted her following in Voltaire's steps. The political despotism
was so pronounced, that merely to omit the French Emperor's name from a
work on Germany was regarded as a political demonstration and punished
accordingly. But there was a task left undone by the Revolution with
all its great outward reforms, a task the doing of which could not
be forbidden by Imperial edict, and that was, the undermining of the
mountain of religious, moral, social, national, and artistic prejudices
which weighed upon Europe with an even heavier pressure than did the
dominion of Napoleon, and which indeed had alone made that dominion
possible. Voltaire himself had been entangled in many of these
prejudices, especially the artistic and national. From Coppet, Mme. de
Staël waged war upon them all. And none the less she, like Voltaire,
found time to fulfil all social duties; she too had her own theatre,
and she both wrote plays for it, and acted in them. The châtelaine of
Coppet was as untrammelled intellectually and as noble in her aims
as was the philosopher of Ferney; she was less fortunate and less
powerful, but on account of her sex and her sufferings she is even more
interesting. Voltaire succeeded in doing much for others. Mme. de Staël
barely succeeded in defending herself.
[1] Mme. Necker de Saussure: _Notice sur le Caractère et les Écrits de
Mme. de Staël_, p. 358.
X
"CORINNE"
In her book, _Essai sur les Fictions_, Mme. de Staël makes the first
attempt to define her literary ideal. Her motto is: Avoid legend and
symbol, avoid the fantastic and the supernatural; it is nature, it is
reality, that must reign in poetry. She does not as yet seem to have
apprehended the fundamental difference between poetry as psychical
delineation, and poetry as the free play of the imagination, the
difference which later became so clear to her that we may call the
apprehension of it one of her most important deserts as an authoress;
for it was by means of this clear apprehension that she assisted her
countrymen to an understanding of the relative position of their
national poetic art. The French are, namely, accustomed to regard
knowledge of human nature founded upon observation as the substance,
the essence of poetry--such knowledge as is displayed in Molière's
_Tartuffe_ and _Misanthrope_. And just as Frenchmen as a rule seek
the essence of poetry in observation, Germans seek it in intensity of
feeling, and Englishmen in an exuberance of imagination which refuses
to be restricted by rules, and leaps at a bound from the horrible to
the ideal, and from the serious to the comic, not limiting itself to
the natural, but also not employing the supernatural otherwise than as
a profound symbol.
The poetry which radiates from the Italian soil and the Italian
people is something different again from all these. In Corinne, the
improvisatrice, Mme. de Staël seeks to personify poetical poetry as
opposed to psychological poetry, i.e. poetry as understood by Ariosto,
as opposed to the poetry of Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe. In spite
of her intention, however, she unconsciously makes Corinne half
northern. No one who has not laboured painfully to attain to a real,
thorough understanding of the point of view of an entirely foreign
race can know how difficult it is to shake off one's innate national
prejudices. To do so it is necessary to breathe the same air, to live
for some time in the same natural environments, as the foreign race.
But for the foreign travel made obligatory by her banishment, Mme. de
Staël could not have expanded her power of apprehension as she did.
In all modesty I lay claim to be able to speak on this matter from
experience. It was during lonely walks in the neighbourhood of Sorrento
that I first succeeded in seeing Shakespeare at such a distance
that I could get a full view of him and really understand him and,
consequently, his antithesis. I remember one day in particular which
was in this respect to me very momentous.--I had been spending three
days in Pompeii. Of all its temples, that of Isis had interested me
most. Here, thought I, stood that goddess whose head (now in the
National Museum) has open lips and a hole in the back of the neck. I
went down to the underground passage behind the altar, from which the
priests, by means of a neatly adjusted reed, enabled the goddess to
deliver oracles. The reflection involuntarily occurred to me that, in
spite of the craft of the priests and the credulity of the people, it
must have been extremely difficult to produce any effect of mystery
in this climate. The temple is a pretty little house standing in the
bright sunshine; there is no abyss, no darkness, no horror; even at
night its outlines must have stood clearly defined in the moonlight or
the starlight. The landscape, in combination with the sober sense of
the Roman people, prevented any development of mysticism or romance.
I went on to Sorrento. The road, hewn in the mountain side, follows the
sea, now projecting into it, now receding from it; where it recedes one
looks down upon a great ravine, filled with olive trees. The aspect of
the country is at once grand and smiling, wild and peaceful. The bare
rocks lose their austerity, illuminated by such a brilliant sun, and in
every ravine lie white cottages, or villas, or whole villages, framed
in the shining green foliage of the orange trees or the soft velvety
grey of the olives. Upon the other side the white towns lie strewn, as
if scattered by a sugar-sifter, on the wooded sides of the mountains,
right up to the topmost ridge. The sea was indigo blue, in some places
steel blue, the sky without a cloud; and in the distance lay the
enchantingly beautiful rocky island of Capri. Nowhere else is to be
found such a glorious harmony of line and colour. Elsewhere, even in
the most beautiful spots, there is always something to take exception
to--the lines of Vesuvius, for example, melt almost too softly into
the air. But Capri! The contours of its jagged rocks are like rhythmic
music. What balance in all its lines! How grand and yet how delicate,
how bold and yet how charming it all is! This is Greek beauty--nothing
gigantic, nothing that appeals to the vulgar, but absolute harmony
within clearly defined bounds. From Capri one sees the islands of the
sirens, past which Ulysses sailed. Homer's Ithaca was like this, only
perhaps less beautiful; for Greek-peopled Southern Italy is the only
living evidence of what the climate of Greece was in ancient days; the
land of Greece itself is now but the corpse of what it was.