and clefts of the mountains gradually assumed the fantastic appearances
which darkness imparts. But the general impression was not what a
Northerner calls romantic. The sea still glimmered through the delicate
foliage of the olives, its deep blue broken by branch and leaf. Then
it was I realised that there is a world, the world of which the Bay
of Naples is an image, of which Shakespeare knew nothing; because it
is great without being terrible, and enchanting without the aid of
romantic mists and fairy glamour. I now for the first time rightly
understood such painters as Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin;
I comprehended that their classic art is the expression of classic
nature; and by force of contrast I understood better than ever before
such a work as Rembrandt's etching of "The Three Trees"--which stand
like sentient beings, like types of northern humanity, on the swampy
field in the pouring rain. I understood how natural it is that a
land such as this should not have produced a Shakespeare, or needed a
Shakespeare, because here Nature has taken upon herself the task which
falls to the lot of the poet in the North. Poetry of the profound,
psychological species is, like artificial heat, a necessity of life
where nature is ungentle. Here in the South, from the days of Homer
to the days of Ariosto, poetry has been able to rest content with
mirroring, clearly and simply, the clearness and simplicity of nature.
It has not sought to probe the depths of the human heart, has not
plunged into caverns and abysses in search of the precious stones which
Aladdin sought, which Shakespeare found, but which the sun-god here
scatters in lavish profusion over the surface of the earth.
_Corinne, ou l'Italie_ is Mme. de Staël's best tale. In Italy, that
natural paradise, her eyes were opened to the charms of nature. She no
longer preferred the gutters of Paris to the Lake of Nemi. And it was
in this country, where a square yard of such a place, for instance,
as the Forum, has a grander history than the whole Russian empire,
that her modern, rebellious, melancholy soul opened to the influence
of history, the influence of antiquity with its simple, austere
calm. In Italy too, in Rome, that house of call for all Europe, the
characteristics and limitations of the different nations were first
clearly revealed to her. Through her, her own countrymen for the first
time became conscious of their peculiarities and limitations. In her
book, England, France, and Italy meet, and are understood, not by each
other, but by the authoress and her heroine, who is half English and
half Italian. Corinne is, in the world of fiction, like a prophecy of
what Elizabeth Barrett Browning was to be in the world of reality. One
thinks of Corinne when one reads that Italian inscription upon a house
in Florence: "Here lived Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poems are a
golden thread binding Italy to England."
The plot of _Corinne_ is as follows: A young Englishman, Oswald, Lord
Nelvil, who has lost the father he loved above everything on earth, and
whose grief is the more poignant because he reproaches himself for
having embittered the last years of that father's life, attempts to
distract his thoughts by travel in Italy. He arrives in Rome just as
the poetess, Corinne, is borne in triumph to the Capitol, and, although
public appearances and public triumphs do not harmonise with his ideal
of womanhood, he is quickly attracted by, and soon passionately in love
with, Corinne, who is as frank and natural as she is intellectual.
But though intercourse with her reveals all her beautiful and rare
qualities to him, he never loses the fear that she is not a suitable
wife for a highly born Englishman. She is not the weak, timid woman,
absorbed in her duties and her feelings, whom he would choose for his
wife in England, where the domestic virtues are a woman's glory and
happiness. He entertains morbid scruples as to whether his dead father
would have desired such a daughter-in-law as Corinne, a question which,
as time goes on, he plainly perceives must be answered in the negative.
Corinne, whose love is far deeper and fuller than his, is alarmed
by his vacillation, and, fearing that he may suddenly leave Italy,
endeavours to keep him there by rousing his interest in the history
and antiquities of the country, its art, its poetry, and its music.
Oswald is especially perturbed by the mystery attaching to Corinne's
life; her real name and her parentage are unknown; she speaks many
languages; she has no relatives; he fears something discreditable in
the circumstances which have thrust her out into the world alone. As a
matter of fact, Corinne is the daughter of an Englishman and a Roman
lady. After her father's second marriage she had been brought up by her
stepmother, in a little narrow-minded English country town. Tortured
by the petty restrictions which were designed to crush her spirit,
she had left England after her father's death, and had since lived
an independent, but absolutely blameless life as a poetess. She is
aware that her family and Oswald's are acquainted, that his father had
chosen her for his daughter-in-law, and that a match is now projected
between Oswald and her younger sister, Lucile. This not remarkably
probable complication provides a pretext for description of Italy.
Whenever Oswald entreats Corinne to tell him her past history, she
endeavours to postpone the moment of explanation; and she can find
no better means of diverting his thoughts than constituting herself
his cicerone, showing him ruins, galleries, and churches, and finally
carrying him off on a tour through the most famous parts of Italy.
Like a second Scheherazade, she strives to prolong her life and ward
off the threatening danger by daily showing him new splendours, in
comparison with which those of the _Thousand and One Nights_ pale; and
these splendours she provides with an accompaniment of subtle, profound
comment.
In this manner the description of Rome, the delineation of Neapolitan
scenery, and that of the tragic beauty of Venice, present themselves
naturally, one after the other. It is in Rome that Corinne's great
passion comes into being; so Rome provides the scenery for the first
act of this love story; its solemn grandeur and wide horizon harmonise
with these profound emotions and serious thoughts. In Naples her
love rises to its highest lyrical expression; here the volcano and
the smiling splendour of the bay are her background, and music upon
the sea accompanies her passionately sorrowful improvisation on the
subject of woman's love and woman's destiny. In Venice, where one is so
perpetually forced to reflect on the decay and annihilation of beauty,
Oswald leaves Corinne for ever.
The news that his regiment is ordered to India recalls him to England.
He considers himself betrothed to Corinne, and hastens to find her
stepmother and secure the restoration of the fugitive to her family
rights. But at Lady Edgermond's he meets Corinne's half-sister, Lucile,
and her modest, womanly loveliness by slow degrees obliterates the
impression made by the elder sister, whose brilliant gifts do not seem
so alluring from a distance, and whose independent, bold appearance
in the full sunshine of public life does not augur well for wedded
happiness in a country where the subdued light of home (with which
Lucile's subdued character is in admirable keeping) is the only one
in which a woman can show herself with advantage. Marriage with
Corinne would be a challenge to society; and he feels that it would,
consequently, be a slight to his father's memory. Marriage with Lucile,
on the other hand, would be unanimously approved of by society. In
Corinne, he would wed the foreign, the far off, that which would
be irreconcilable in the long run with the spirit of his country;
in Lucile, he would wed as it were England itself. Corinne, who in
agonising anxiety has followed him to England, learns his state of
mind, and sends him back his ring. Oswald believes that she has ceased
to love him, and marries Lucile. He learns of the wrong he has done
her, and the story ends tragically with his remorse, and Corinne's
death.
We have little difficulty in determining which of the events and
circumstances of the book had their counterparts in real life.
Oswald's melancholy brooding over the memory of his father, reminds
us that the authoress at the time she wrote was mourning Necker's
death. Another trait in Oswald borrowed from her own character, is
his very feminine fear of taking a step to which the sole objection
offered by his conscience is, that it would scarcely have won his dead
father's approbation. Possibly, too, his grief that the last years of
his father's life had been troubled by his conduct, had a point of
correspondence in the authoress's own history. In all else, Oswald's
personality is obviously a free rendering of that of Benjamin Constant.
Many small details betray that Mme. de Staël clearly had Constant
in her mind. Oswald comes from Edinburgh, where Constant spent part
of his youth; and it is stated that he is exactly eighteen months
younger than Corinne (Mme. de Staël was born on the 22nd of April,
1766, and Constant on the 25th of October, 1767); but far weightier
evidence is to be found in the whole cast of the character, in the
blending of chivalrous courage, displayed towards the outer world, with
unchivalrous cowardice, displayed towards the loving and long-loved
woman whom he abandons in order to escape from her superiority. But
remark that Mme. de Staël has created a typical Englishman out of these
and many added elements.
In Corinne the authoress has depicted for us her own ideal. She
has borrowed the chief characteristics of her heroine from her own
individuality. Corinne is not, like Delphine, the woman who is confined
to the sphere of private life; she is the woman who has overstepped
the allotted limits, the poetess whose name is upon all lips. The
authoress has given her her own exterior, only idealised, her own eyes,
even her own picturesque dress, with the Indian shawl wound about her
head. She has endowed her with her own clear, active intellect; but it
is with Corinne, as with herself--the moment passion grips her with
its eagle's talon, her intellect avails her nothing, she becomes its
defenceless prey. Like Mme. de Staël, Corinne is an exile, with all
the thoughts and sorrows of the exile. For in Italy she is severed
from the land of her birth, in England banished from the home of her
heart and its sunshine. Hence when Corinne sings of Dante, she dwells
sorrowfully on his banishment, and declares her belief that his real
hell must have been exile. Hence, too, when giving Oswald an account of
her life, she says that for a being full of life and feeling, exile is
a punishment worse than death; for residence in one's native country
implies a thousand joys which one first realises when bereft of them.
She speaks of all the manifold interests which one has in common with
one's fellow-countrymen, that are incomprehensible to a foreigner, and
of that necessity for constant explanation which takes the place of
rapid, easy communication, in which half a word does duty for a long
exposition. Corinne, too, like her creator, hopes that her growing
fame will bring about her recall to her native land, and reinstatement
in her rights. Finally, Mme. de Staël has endowed Corinne with her
own culture. It is expressly stated that it was her knowledge of the
literatures and understanding of the characters of foreign nations that
gave Corinne so high a place in the literary ranks of her own country;
her charm as a poet lay in her combination of the southern gift of
colour with the northern gift of observation. Employing all these
borrowed characteristics, and inventing many others, the authoress has,
it is to be observed, succeeded in producing a distinctly Italian type
of female character.
Mme. de Staël's literary activity divides itself, as it were, into two
activities--a masculine and a feminine, the expression of thoughts and
the dwelling upon emotions. We can trace this duality in _Corinne_. The
book has, unquestionably, more merit as an effort of the intellect than
as a work of creative imagination. A peculiar fervour and a certain
tenderness in the treatment of the emotions betray that the author is
a woman. Psychology is still in such a backward condition that as yet
only the merest attempt has been made to define the characteristic
qualities of woman's mind, of woman's soul, as distinguished from
man's; when the day comes for making the attempt in good earnest,
Mme. de Staël's works will be one of the most valuable sources of
enlightenment.
The woman's hand is, perhaps, most perceptible in the delineation
of the hero. The authoress supplies us with the reasons for each of
his distinguishing qualities. His sense of honour is explained by
his distinguished birth, his melancholy by his English "spleen" and
by his unhappy relations with the father whom he worshipped, as Mme.
de Staël worshipped hers, and by whose memory he allowed himself to
be influenced in a manner which reminds us of the way in which Sören
Kierkegaard was influenced by the memory of his father. Only one thing
does the writer leave unexplained in a person whose moral courage is
so extremely slight, and that is the recklessness with which he risks
his life. Female novelists almost invariably equip their heroes with a
courage which has no particular connection with their character, while
at the same time, in modern society, it is generally women who prevent
men from doing deeds of daring, and who also as a rule admire and
pay hysterical homage to essentially cowardly public characters--the
priests who carefully protect their own lives in epidemics, the
warriors who attack the enemy upon paper. The explanation would seem to
be that masculine courage is a quality which, regarded as the highest
attribute of man, becomes to woman a sort of ideal, but an ideal which
she does not understand, which she does not recognise in real life, and
which perhaps for this very reason she chooses to portray--and portrays
badly.
These remarks apply more particularly to Oswald's heroic behaviour on
the occasion of the fire at Ancona, where he saves the entire town
under the most terrible circumstances. He alone, with his English
followers, makes an attempt to extinguish the conflagration, an attempt
which is crowned with success. He rescues the Jews, who are shut up
in the Ghetto, where the people in their religious frenzy have left
them to be burned as a propitiatory offering. He ventures into the
burning asylum, into the room in which the most dangerous lunatics
are confined; these maniacs he controls and rescues from the flames
by which they are already surrounded; he loosens their chains, and
will not leave one recalcitrant behind. The whole scene is excellently
described, but, as already said, the psychology is weak. Mme. de
Staël makes full amends for this, however, in her description of the
impression made by these deeds upon Corinne's womanly heart. Oswald,
by leaving the town at once, manages to escape from all expressions
of gratitude; but on the return journey they come to Ancona again, he
is recognised, and Corinne is awakened in the morning by shouts of:
"Long live Lord Nelvil! long live our benefactor!" She goes out on the
piazza, is recognised as the poetess whose name is famous all over
Italy, and is received with acclamation. The crowd beseech her to be
their spokeswoman, and interpret their gratitude to Oswald. When he in
his turn appears on the piazza, he is amazed to see that the crowd is
led by Corinne. "She thanked Lord Nelvil in the name of the people, and
did it with such grace and nobility that all the inhabitants of Ancona
were enraptured." And, adds the authoress with feminine subtlety, she
said we in speaking for them. "You have saved us." "_We_ owe you our
lives." This _we_ makes the more impression because of the authoress,
earlier in the book, having dwelt upon the moment when Corinne and
Oswald first used the word we, in arranging a walk in Rome, feeling all
the happiness of the timid declaration of love therein implied. Now
Corinne dissolves that _we_, that she may range herself on the side
of those who owe him everything. And the story goes on to tell that
when she approached to offer Lord Nelvil in the name of the people
the wreath of oak and laurel leaves which they had woven for him, she
was overcome by an indescribable emotion, and felt almost afraid as
she drew near him. At the moment of her offering the wreath, the whole
populace, in Italy so susceptible and so ready to worship, fell on
their knees, and Corinne involuntarily followed their example. It is
in the delineation of feminine emotions that Mme. de Staël excels, the
emotions of a gifted woman who pays dearly for her gifts.
Domestic happiness and feminine purity are what touch Corinne most
deeply. She, the Sibyl, is moved when she reads the inscription on a
Roman woman's sarcophagus: "No stain has soiled my life from wedding
festival to funeral pyre. I have lived chastely between the two
torches." But wedded happiness was not to be hers. It was not for
Corinne as it was not for Mignon, the two children of longing who, the
one in French, the other in German literature, as it were personify
enthusiasm for Italy. Corinne herself says that only through suffering
can our poor human nature attain to an understanding of the infinite;
and she is as if created to suffer. But before she perishes as the last
victim in the ancient arena, she is adorned for the sacrifice and led
in triumphal procession.
When we first meet her, on her progress to the Capitol, she is simply
but picturesquely clad, with antique cameos in her hair, and a fine
red shawl wound turbanwise about her head, as in Gérard's well-known
portrait of Mme. de Staël. The costume suits Corinne: she is the
child of the land of colour, and she has not lost her love of colour;
even in stiff conventional England she has retained her fresh natural
tastes, her joy in what Gautier has called the trinity of beautiful
things--gold, purple, and marble.
Like all the other great types of the period, she must be seen in the
surroundings with which she harmonises, among which she is at home,
as René is in the primeval forest, Obermann upon the heights of the
Alps, and Saint-Preux by the Lake of Geneva. Her appearance has been
preserved to posterity in the painting which engravings have made so
familiar: Corinne improvising at Cape Miseno.
Her volcanic, glowing nature is at home in this volcanic, glowing
region. The Bay of Naples appears to be a great sunken crater,
surrounded by fair towns and forest-clad mountains. Encircling a sea
which is even bluer than the sky, it resembles an emerald goblet filled
with foaming wine, its rims and its sides adorned with vine leaves
and tendrils. Near land the sea is a deep azure blue; farther out it
is, as Homer said, wine-coloured; and above it shines a sky which is
not, as is generally believed, bluer than ours, but really paler, only
that its blue is underlaid by a white fire, which glows with a shimmer
that is both blue and white. It was in this region that the ancients
imagined hell to lie; the descent to it being through the cave of the
Lake of Avernus. They called it hell, this paradise. Its volcanic
origin and surroundings made them feel as if Tartarus were not far off.
Volcanic formations everywhere! One great mountain has a side which
looks as if it had been cut with a knife; half of that mountain fell
in an earthquake. Cape Miseno, the farthest-out point of land on one
side of the bay, with the little rocky island of Nisida in front of
it, and Procida and Ischia behind it, did not always consist, as now,
of two separate heights--long ago there was only one. The two craters
of Vesuvius were formed by the eruption which overwhelmed Pompeii.
Fertility and fire everywhere! A few steps from where the sulphureous
fumes of Solfatara force their way up into the air through the
crumbling lava, lie fields, some one mass of bright-red poppies, others
full of great blue flowers, of powerfully scented downy mints and other
herbs growing waist-high in such thronging profusion, such fruitfulness
and luxuriance, that one feels as if all this billowing fulness would
shoot up again in a single night, were it all cut down. And then
the overpowering perfume! a spicy fragrance unknown in the north, a
stupendous symphony of the scents of millions of different plants!
It is towards evening that Corinne and her friends find their way out
to Cape Miseno. From there one looks back upon the great town, and
one hears a dull sound, which is like the beat of its heart. After
sunset lights become visible everywhere; they are lying even in the
ruts of the roads; across the path and away up the mountain sides
bright flames leap and flit through the air; those which fly highest
resemble moving stars. These flames, which move with long leaps and are
extinguished for a moment after each leap, are the fire-flies of the
South. The myriads of lights flashing through the darkness transport
one in thought to fairyland. Right opposite, looking from Cape Miseno,
the fiery lava glows with a ruddy glare as it streams down the side of
Vesuvius.
It is here that they bring Corinne her lyre, and that she sings of the
glories of the scenery, and of the many memories of this land--of Cumæ,
where the Sibyl dwelt; of Gaeta, close to the spot where the tyrant's
dagger was plunged into Cicero's heart; of Capri and Baiæ, where men
recall the deeds of darkness of Tiberius and Nero; of Nisida, where
Brutus and Portia bade each other a last farewell; of Sorrento, where
Tasso, just escaped from a mad-house, a miserable, hunted creature,
ragged and unshaven, knocked at the door of the sister, who first did
not recognise him, and then could not speak for tears. It is here that
she ends her song with an elegy on all the suffering of this earthly
life and all its happiness.
Listen to the inspired words uttered by Corinne in these surroundings,
where beauty is based upon ruin, where happiness reveals itself
as a flitting, quickly extinguished flame, and where fertility is
perpetually endangered by a volcano.
She says: "Jesus permitted a frail and perhaps repentant woman to
anoint His feet with the most precious ointment; He rebuked those who
counselled her to keep it for a more useful purpose. 'Let her alone,'
He said; 'Me ye have not always with you.' Alas! all that is good
and great is with us upon this earth only for a short time. Old age,
infirmities, and death soon dry up the dewdrop which falls from heaven
and rests upon the flower. Let us then blend everything together--love,
religion, genius, sunshine and perfumes, music and poetry; the only
true atheism is coldness, selfishness, and baseness. It is said: 'Where
two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst
of them.' And what is it, O God, to be gathered together in Thy name,
if it be not to enjoy the wondrous gifts of Thy-fair nature, to render
homage to Thee for them, to thank Thee for life, and to thank Thee
most of all when another heart also created by Thee fully and entirely
responds to our own!"
Thus she speaks under the influence of her dual inspiration, in her
life's meridian, when she is attempting to interweave the happiness of
genius with the happiness of love, as the myrtle and the laurel were
interwoven in the wreath with which she was crowned at the Capitol. It
may not be; they untwist, they recoil from each other; and Corinne, the
inspired Sibyl, becomes one of the many crushed, despairing spirits
through whom the genius of the century utters its protest against
that society which, like these apparently safe towns, is undermined
by volcanic flames, flames which are never at rest, but find vent in
one outburst after another, throughout the whole of the restless and
unhappy nineteenth century.
XI
ATTACK UPON NATIONAL AND PROTESTANT PREJUDICES