represents all those of England; his travelling companion, Count
d'Erfeuil, all those of France; and it is against the prejudices
of these two nations, at that time the most powerful and the most
self-reliant in Europe, that the heroine does battle with her whole
soul. It is no coldblooded, impersonal warfare, for Corinne's future
depends upon whether she can succeed in freeing Oswald from his
national prejudices to such an extent as to enable him to be happy
with a woman like herself, whose life conflicts at every turn with
the English conception of what is becoming in woman. But while she is
attempting to widen Oswald's view of life and to impart pliancy to his
rigid mind, which always starts back again into its accustomed grooves,
she is at the same time carrying on the education of the reader. Mme.
de Staël continues in the domain of the emotions the task with which
we have seen her occupied in the domain of thought. She sketches the
first outlines of _national_ psychology, shows how there is a colouring
of nationality even in men's most private, personal feelings. Her
countrymen were then, much in the manner of the Germans of to-day,
attempting to blot out the national colours of neighbouring countries
in the complacent persuasion that they themselves had a monopoly of
civilisation. Her inmost desire is to show them that their conception
of life is but one among many conceptions that are equally justifiable,
some of them possibly more justifiable.
When we remember how powerful is the prejudice which, in every country
without exception, makes it a crime for the individual to deny that
his nation is in possession of all the virtues which it ascribes to
itself, and which so many a sanctimonious Jack-in-the-box finds it to
his advantage to assure it daily that it possesses, we shall understand
what courage Mme. de Staël displayed in attacking French national
vanity at such a period.
There is one great idea that is more fatal than any other to the
coercive power wielded by the established beliefs and customs of any
given society. It has nothing to do with the logic of the matter. One
would imagine that logic, let loose among the whole stock of prejudices
ruling in any given country at any given time, would work the same
havoc as a bull in a china-shop; but such is not the case; pure logic
does not affect the majority of mankind at all I No! if you would
really awaken and astound the generality of men, you must succeed
in making it plain to them that what they consider absolute is only
relative--that is to say, must show them that the standards which they
believe to be universally recognised, are only accepted as standards by
so and so many similarly constituted minds; whereas other nations and
other races have an entirely different conception of the befitting and
the beautiful. In this manner the general public of a country learn for
the first time that the art and poetry which they despise are regarded
by whole races as the highest, while their own, which to them seem the
finest in the world, are held in slight esteem by other nations; learn,
moreover, that it is vain to take refuge in the thought that all other
nations are mistaken in their judgment, seeing that each one of these
other nations believes that all the rest are mistaken. If I were asked
to define in one word the service rendered by Mme. de Staël to French
society, to its culture and literature, and through these to Europe in
general, I should express myself thus: By means of her writings, more
particularly her great works on Italy and Germany, she enabled the
French, English, and German peoples to take a _comparative_ view of
their own social and literary ideas and theories.
Count d'Erfeuil, in _Corinne_, is a cleverly drawn type of French
superficiality and vanity in combination with some of the most
charming and characteristic of French virtues. One does not really
appreciate the character until one has repeatedly reflected on the
amount of courage that was required to introduce into a circle of
foreigners, as the sole, and properly accredited, representative of
France, such an extremely narrow-minded personage as D'Erfeuil. He is
a young French _émigré_, who has fought with singular gallantry in the
war, has submitted to the confiscation of his large estates not merely
with serenity, but with cheerfulness, and has with great self-sacrifice
tended and supported the old uncle who brought him up, who like himself
is an _émigré_ and who without him would be absolutely helpless--in
short, there is a foundation of chivalry and unselfishness in his
character. When one talks to him, however, one feels it impossible to
believe that he is a man of much and sad experience, for he positively
seems to have forgotten all that has happened to him. He talks of the
loss of his fortune with admirable frivolity, and with equal, if less
admirable, frivolity on all other subjects.
Oswald meets him in Germany, where he is nearly bored to death; he
has lived there for several years, but it has never occurred to him
to learn a word of the language. He intends to go to Italy, but
anticipates no pleasure from travelling in that country; he is certain
that any French provincial town has more agreeable society and a better
theatre than Rome. "Do you not mean to learn Italian?" asks Oswald.
"No," he replies; "that is not part of my plan of study;" and he looks
as serious when giving this answer as if something very important
had led him to the determination. In Italy he does not vouchsafe the
landscape so much as a glance. His conversation turns neither on
outward objects nor on feelings; it hovers between reflection and
observation as between two poles, neither of which it touches;
its topics are always society topics; it is garnished with puns and
anecdotes, is chiefly about his numberless acquaintances, is indeed in
its essence nothing but society gossip. Oswald is astonished by this
strange mixture of courage and superficiality. D'Erfeuil's contempt
for danger and misfortune would have seemed admirable to him if it
had cost more effort, and heroic if it had not been the outcome of the
very qualities which render him incapable of deep feeling. As it is, he
finds it tiresome.
When D'Erfeuil for the first time sees St. Peter's in the distance,
he likens it to the dome of the Invalides in Paris--a comparison more
patriotic than apt; when he sees Corinne at the Capitol he feels a
desire to make her acquaintance, but no reverence for her. He is not
surprised that her heart has remained untouched in a country where
he finds no good qualities in the men, but he cannot help flattering
himself with the hope that she will be unable to resist the charms of a
well-bred young Frenchman. When she speaks to others in his presence in
Italian or English (languages he does not understand), he says to her:
"Speak French. You know the language and are worthy to speak it."
When he sees that Corinne loves Oswald he does not take it amiss,
though his vanity is wounded; but he thinks her passion foolish,
because of the improbability of its bringing her happiness. At the same
time he most strongly advises Oswald not to enter into a life-long
union with an unpresentable woman like Corinne. With all his daring,
he bows to the supreme authority of established custom. "If you will
be foolish," he says to Oswald, "at least do nothing irreparable;"
reckoning among irreparable follies marriage with Corinne. His ideas
on literary, correspond to his ideas on social subjects. In Corinne's
house the conversation frequently turns upon Italian and English
poetry. D'Erfeuil, starting from the premise that French poetry from
the time of Louis XV. onwards forms the unquestioned standard, is
naturally very severe in his judgment of all foreign productions.
To him the Germans are barbarians, the Italians are corrupters of
style, and "the taste and elegance of French style" are law-giving in
literature. "Our stage literature," he remarks, "is admittedly the
finest in Europe, and I do not think that it occurs even to the English
themselves to compare Shakespeare with our dramatists." In a company
of Italians he shrewdly enough, if without much delicacy, defines
Italian drama as consisting of ballets, silly tragedies, and wearisome
harlequinades; to him the Greek drama is coarse, Shakespeare formless.
"Our drama," he says, "is a model of refinement and beauty of form. To
introduce foreign ideas among us would be to plunge us into barbarism."
D'Erfeuil considers the antiquities of Rome altogether overrated. He is
not going to fatigue himself, he says, by toiling through all these old
ruins. He makes his way northwards, but is as bored by Alpine scenery
as he was by Rome. In the end he goes to England, where he assists
Corinne in her misfortunes; his deeds have ever been nobler than his
words. He cannot, however, when he sees how miserable her love for
Oswald has made her, deny his vanity the satisfaction of ringing the
changes upon "I told you so;" and he considers it a duty to himself not
to let the opportunity slip of offering himself as Oswald's successor.
For all this, it is true and unselfish devotion that he displays, and
Corinne is distressed by her inability to be more truly grateful to
him; but he is so careless and scatterbrained that she is constantly
tempted to forget his generous deeds just as he himself forgets them.
"It is very charming, no doubt," observes the authoress, "to set little
value on one's own good deeds, but it may be that the indifference with
which some men regard their own noble actions has its origin in their
superficiality." Without regard for anything but what she considers the
truth, she thus derives some of the most conspicuous virtues of her
countrymen from weaknesses in their character.
By means of this typical character of D'Erfeuil, Mme. de Staël shows
how in France all good feelings are held in check by one vice, that
fear of society which has its origin in vanity. It seems to her as if
all feeling, the whole of life, indeed, were ruled by _esprit_, by the
desire to appear to advantage, and by a fear which may be expressed
in the words, "What will people say?" An author who writes not long
after Mme. de Staël, the acute and original Henri Beyle, is of the same
opinion. His name for Frenchmen is _les vainvifs_ and he asserts that
all their actions are dictated by the consideration, _Qu'en dira-t-on_?
the fear, that is to say, of the unbecoming or ridiculous. The French
were then, what the Danes are still, very proud of their keen sense
of the comical; it was this which led them to describe themselves
modestly as the wittiest nation in the world. Corinne maintains that
this sense of the ridiculous, with the corresponding fear of being
ridiculous, destroys all originality in manners, in dress, and in
speech, prevents all free play of imagination, and stifles natural
expression of feeling. She maintains that feeling, that every kind of
intellectuality, is obliged to take the form of wit instead of the form
of poetry, in a country where the fear of becoming the victim of wit or
mockery makes each man try to be the first to seize those weapons. "Are
we," she asks D'Erfeuil, "only to live for what society may say of us?
Is what others think and feel always to be our guiding star? If this be
so, if we are intended to imitate each other for ever and ever, why has
each one of us been given a soul? Providence might have spared itself
this unnecessary outlay."
The national prejudices of France are typified in D'Erfeuil; in Oswald
we have a personification of all the prejudices which have been part
of England's strength and England's weakness throughout the centuries.
Powerful nations are always unjust, and their injustice both adds to
their power and limits it. It was upon this injustice that Mme. de
Staël considered it her mission to throw a very strong light.
The story of the book turns upon the attempt of a woman to regain,
by means of a man's love, that place in English society which she
has forfeited by too great independence, by entering the arena of
public life; consequently what the authoress chiefly dwells upon in
her delineation of English character is the narrowness of the English
conception of ideal womanhood. From this conception, with which he
has been brought up, Oswald makes sincere but fruitless efforts to
free himself. When, in Italy, he sees Corinne admired and loved for
her great gifts, without a thought being given to her sex or her
enigmatical past, he is greatly perplexed. There is something repulsive
to him in a woman's leading this public life. He is accustomed to look
upon woman as a sort of higher domestic animal, and for long cannot
reconcile himself to the idea of society forgiving her the crime of
having talent. He feels himself as it were humiliated and exasperated
by the thought; he regards it as impossible that a woman with such a
well-developed, independent mind should be capable of binding herself
faithfully to one man and living contentedly for him alone. And though,
in spite of everything, Corinne loves him, loves him with a passion
beside which all that he has seen or heard of pales, and which is so
unselfish that it leads her to risk her reputation for his sake without
demanding anything whatever in return, he forgets her, her great gifts,
her nobility of mind and soul, the moment he stands once again upon
English soil, inhales English mists and prejudices, and meets a fresh
young girl of sixteen, the very perfection of a wife after the English
recipe, reserved, ignorant, innocent, silent, a fair-haired, blue-eyed
incarnation of domestic duty.
The authoress tracks the prejudice which explains Oswald's conduct
to its source, which she finds to be the English conception of home.
Oswald's principal difficulty in coming to a decision about Corinne
is expressed in the words: "Of what use would all that be at home?"
"And home is everything to us--to the women, at least," remarks an
Englishman to Oswald; and the authoress herself remarks elsewhere:
"Though it is possible for an Englishman to find pleasure for a time
in foreign ways and customs, his heart invariably returns to the
impressions of his childhood. If you ask the Englishman you meet on
board ship in foreign climes whither he is bound, he answers, if he is
upon the return journey: '_Home_.'"[1] It is to this English love of
home that she attributes both the superstition that the independent
intellectual development of woman is absolutely incompatible with
the domestic virtues, and the English idolatry of these virtues.
And, strange as it may seem to us to see the Italian woman, nowadays
so indifferent to everything intellectual, set up as a model of
independence, there is no doubt that Mme. de Staël is right. The
ideal of well-being conveyed by the word home, is a genuine Northern,
Teutonic conception, originally so foreign to the Latin races that the
English word _home_ has passed into the Latin languages, because these
possess no equivalent. To this conception of home corresponds the word
"cosiness" (untranslatable into any Latin language), which was created
to express the pleasure of being able to sit warm and comfortable
within four walls. We have not far to seek for the origin of this
ideal. The inhabitant of Northern Europe, living in a raw climate,
amidst cold, harsh natural surroundings, finds the same pleasure in
the thought of sitting by a warm hearth whilst snow and rain beat
impotently on the window pane, which a Neapolitan feels in the thought
of sleeping under the warm, glorious, starry sky, or passing the cool
night in dance, play, and song, in the open air. But to each of these
different ideals of well-being and happiness corresponds a different
conception of virtues and duties, which the nation that possesses or
enforces them regards as the universal conception. It considers itself
the first among nations because it exacts the fulfilment of these
particular duties and possesses these particular virtues (which is not
surprising, seeing that both are naturally entailed by the national
character), and it moreover censures all the nations whose conceptions
differ from its own.
Speaking of England, Oswald asks Corinne: "How could you leave the home
of chastity and morality and make fallen Italy the country of your
adoption?" "In this country," Corinne replies, "we are modest; neither
proud of ourselves like the English, nor pleased with ourselves like
the French." It gratifies her to put both the Puritanic arrogance of
the Northerner and the vain Frenchman's fear of ridicule to shame, by
comparing them with the frank naturalness which the people of Italy
even in their humiliation have preserved. She describes, delicately and
truthfully, the touching naïveté with which the latter display their
emotions. There is no stiff reserve, as in England, no coquetry, as in
France; here the woman simply desires to please the man she loves, and
cares not who knows it. One of Corinne's friends, returning to Rome
after an absence of some duration, calls upon a distinguished lady.
He is informed by the servant that "the Princess does not receive
to-day; she is out of spirits, she is _innamorata_." Corinne tells
how indulgently a woman is judged in Italy, and how frankly she owns
her feelings. A poor girl dictates a love-letter to a writer in the
open streets, and the man writes it with the utmost seriousness,
never omitting to add all the polite forms which it is his business
to know; hence some poor soldier or labourer receives a letter in
which many tender assurances occupy the space between "Most honoured
contemporary!" and "Yours with reverential respect." _Corinne_ is
perfectly correct. I have myself seen such letters. And, on the other
hand, it seems as if learning had not been at all unusual among the
Italian women of those days. A Frenchman in _Corinne_ who calls a
learned woman a pedant, receives the reply: "What harm is there in a
woman's knowing Greek?"
Neither does Corinne fail to perceive that the official recognition
and support of duty and morality in the North is accompanied by the
greatest brutality in all cases in which the laws of society have once
been transgressed. She shows how the Englishman respects no promise
or relation which has not been legally registered, and how in strict
England the sanctity of marriage and an irreproachable home life
exist side by side with the most shameless and bestial prostitution,
just as the personal devil exists side by side with the personal God.
She remarks, with womanly circumspection and modesty, but yet quite
plainly: "In England it is the domestic virtues which constitute
woman's glory and happiness; but, granted that there are countries
in which love is to be met with outside the bonds of holy matrimony,
then undoubtedly among all these countries Italy is the one in which
most regard is shown to woman's happiness. The men of that country
have a code of morality for the regulation of those relations which
are without the pale of morality--a tribunal of the heart." It is the
same tribunal as that of the mediæval Courts of Love. Byron is greatly
impressed when he comes to Italy and finds this complete moral code,
exactly the opposite of the English. Mme. de Staël as usual tries
to explain the milder morality by the milder climatic conditions;
she says: "The aberrations of the heart inspire a more indulgent
compassion here than in any other country. Jesus said of the Magdalen:
'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.' Those
words were spoken under a sky as beautiful as ours. The same sky
invokes for us the same Divine mercy."
Corinne, who is herself a Catholic, teaches the Scottish Protestant
who loves her, to understand Italian Catholicism. "In this country,
Catholicism, having had no other religion to combat, has become milder
and more indulgent than it is anywhere else; in England, on the
other hand, Protestantism, in order to annihilate Catholicism, has
been obliged to arm itself with the utmost severity of principle and
morality. Our religion, like the religion of the ancients, inspires the
artist and the poet; is a part, so to speak, of all the pleasures of
our life; while yours, which has had to adapt itself to a country where
reason plays a much more important part than imagination, has received
an imprint of moral severity which it will always retain. Ours speaks
in the name of love, yours in the name of duty. Although our dogmas
are absolute, our principles are liberal, and our orthodox despotism
adapts itself to the circumstances of life, while your religious heresy
insists upon obedience to its laws without making any allowance for
exceptional cases."
She shows how, in consequence of this, there is always a certain dread
of genius, of intellectual superiority, in Protestant countries. "It
is a mistaken fear," she says; "for it is very moral, this superiority
of mind and soul. He who understands everything becomes very
compassionate, and he who feels deeply becomes good."
"Why are great powers a misfortune? Why have they prevented my being
loved? Will he find in another woman more mind, more soul, more
tenderness than in me? No, he will find less; but he will be content,
because he will feel himself more in harmony with society. What
fictitious pleasures, what fictitious sorrows are those we owe to
society! Under the sun and the starry heavens all that human beings
need is to love and to feel worthy of each other; but society! society!
how hard it makes the heart, how frivolous the mind! how it leads us to
live only for what others will say of us! If human beings could but
meet freed from that influence which all collectively exercise upon
each, how pure the air that would penetrate into the soul! how many
new ideas, how many genuine emotions would refresh it!"--"Receive my
last salutation, O land of my birth!" cries Corinne in her swan song
in praise of Rome--and one feels the bitterness of the exile and the
thrust at Napoleon in the words that follow: "You have not grudged
me fame, O liberal-minded people that do not banish women from your
temples, that do not sacrifice immortal talent to passing jealousies!
You welcome genius wherever you recognise it; for you know that it is
a victor without victims, a conqueror that does not plunder, but takes
from eternity wherewith to enrich time."
This sketch of the contrast between the emotional life of Catholicism
and that of Protestantism prepares for a digression on the contrast
between their respective views of art. On this latter point the
book makes a decided attack on Protestant arrogance and want of all
understanding of art, as exhibited by Oswald, who represents the
narrowest English ideas.
In the midst of this plastic and musical people, who are so
good-natured, so childlike, so careless of their dignity, and,
according to English ideas, so immoral, Oswald, who is accustomed to
regard it as the aim and end of existence to live up to certain insular
conceptions of duty and dignity, feels himself very ill at ease.
Devoid of all artistic feeling, he judges art now by a literary, now
by a moral, now by a religious standard; his prejudices are constantly
offended; he understands nothing. He notices some reliefs on the doors
of St. Peter's, and great is his amazement to find that they represent
scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Leda with the swan, and the like!
What is this but pure paganism! Corinne takes him to the Colosseum, and
(in this resembling his contemporary Oehlenschläger) his one thought is
that he is standing in a gigantic place of execution, his one feeling,
moral indignation at the crimes here perpetrated against the early
Christians. He enters the Sistine Chapel and, ignorant of the history
of art, is greatly outraged that Michael Angelo has ventured to portray
God the Father in ordinary human form, as though he were a Jupiter
or a Zeus. He is equally scandalised on finding in Michael Angelo's
prophets and sibyls none of that humble Christian spirit which he had
looked for in a Christian chapel.