distinguished people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that we
naturally seek to know what constituted their peculiar charm. It seems
to me to have been conversation, which is both an art and a gift. In
these exclusive meetings women did not reign in consequence of their
beauty so much as their wit. Their vivacity, intelligence, and tact, I
may add also their good-nature, were a veil to cover up all
eccentricities. It was when Madame du Deffand was eighty, and blind,
that Horace Walpole pronounced her to be the most interesting woman in
France. Madame de Staël, never beautiful, was the life of a party at
forty-five; Madame Récamier was in her glory at fifty; Hannah More was
most sought when she was sixty. There can be no high society where
conversation is not the chief attraction; and men seldom learn to talk
well when not inspired by gifted women. They may dictate like Dr.
Johnson, or preach like Coleridge in a circle of admirers, or give vent
to sarcasms and paradoxes like Carlyle; but they do not please like
Horace Walpole, or dazzle like Wilkes, or charm like Mackintosh. When
society was most famous at Paris, it was the salon--not the card table,
or the banquet, or the ball--which was most sought by cultivated men and
women, where conversation was directed by gifted women. Women are
nothing in the social circle who cannot draw out the sentiments of able
men; and a man of genius gains more from the inspiration of one
brilliant woman than from all the bookworms of many colleges. In society
a bright and witty woman not merely shines, but she reigns. Conversation
brings out all her faculties, and kindles all her sensibilities, and
gives expression to her deepest sentiments. Her talk is more than music;
it is music rising to the heights of eloquence. She is more even than an
artist: she is a goddess before whom genius delights to burn
its incense.
Success in this great art of conversation depends as much upon the
disposition as upon the brains. The remarkable women who reigned in the
salons of the last century were all distinguished for their
good-nature,--good-nature based on toleration and kind feeling, rather
than on insipid acquiescence. There can be no animated talk without
dissent; and dissent should be disguised by the language of courtesy. As
vanity is one of the mainsprings of human nature, and is nearly
universal, the old queens of society had the tact to hide what could not
easily be extirpated; and they were adepts in the still greater art of
seeming to be unconscious. Those people are ever the most agreeable who
listen with seeming curiosity, and who conceal themselves in order to
feed the vanity of others. Nor does a true artist force his wit. "A
confirmed punster is as great a bore as a patronizing moralist."
Moreover, the life of society depends upon the general glow of the
party, rather than the prominence of an individual, so that a brilliant
talker will seek to bring out "the coincidence which strengthens
conviction, or the dissent which sharpens sagacity, rather than
individual experiences, which ever seem to be egotistical. In agreeable
society all egotism is to be crushed and crucified. Even a man who is an
oracle, if wise, will suggest, rather than seem to instruct. In a
congenial party all differences in rank are for the time ignored. It is
in bad taste to remind or impress people with a sense of their
inferiority, as in chivalry all degrees were forgotten in an assemblage
of gentlemen." Animated conversation amuses without seeming to teach,
and transfers ideas so skilfully into the minds of others that they are
ignorant of the debt, and mistake them for their own. It kindles a
healthy enthusiasm, promotes good-nature, repels pretension, and rebukes
vanity. It even sets off beauty, and intensifies its radiance. Said
Madame de la Fayette to Madame de Sévigné: "Your varying expression so
brightens and adorns your beauty, that there is nothing so brilliant as
yourself: every word you utter adds to the brightness of your eyes; and
while it is said that language impresses only the ear, it is quite
certain that yours enchants the vision." "Like style in writing," says
Lamartine, "conversation must flow with ease, or it will oppress. It
must be clear, or depth of thought cannot be penetrated; simple, or the
understanding will be overtasked; restrained, or redundancy will
satiate; warm, or it will lack soul; witty, or the brain will not be
excited; generous, or sympathy cannot be roused; gentle, or there will
be no toleration; persuasive, or the passions cannot be subdued." When
it unites these excellences, it has an irresistible power, "musical as
was Apollo's lyre;" a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, such as, I
fancy, Socrates poured out to Athenian youth, or Augustine in the
gardens of Como; an electrical glow, such as united the members of the
Turk's Head Club into a band of brothers, or annihilated all
distinctions of rank at the supper-table of the poet Scarron.
We cannot easily overrate the influence of those who inspire the social
circle. They give not only the greatest pleasure which is known to
cultivated minds, but kindle lofty sentiments. They draw men from the
whirlpools of folly, break up degrading habits, dissipate the charms of
money-making, and raise the value of the soul. How charming, how
delightful, how inspiring is the eloquence which is kindled by the
attrition of gifted minds! What privilege is greater than to be with
those who reveal the experiences of great careers, especially if there
be the absence of vanity and ostentation, and encouragement by those
whose presence is safety and whose smiles are an inspiration! It is the
blending of the beatitudes of Bethany with the artistic enjoyments of
Weimar, causing the favored circle to forget all cares, and giving them
strength for those duties which make up the main business of human life.
When woman accomplishes such results she fills no ordinary sphere, she
performs no ordinary mission; she rises in dignity as she declines in
physical attractions. Like a queen of beauty at the tournament, she
bestows the rewards which distinguished excellence has won; she breaks
up the distinctions of rank; she rebukes the arrogance of wealth; she
destroys pretensions; she kills self-conceit; she even gains
consideration for her husband or brother,--for many a stupid man is
received into a select circle because of the attractions of his wife or
sister, even as many a silly woman gains consideration from the talents
or position of her husband or brother. No matter how rich a man may be,
if unpolished, ignorant, or rude, he is nobody in a party which seeks
"the feast of reason and the flow of soul." He is utterly insignificant,
rebuked, and humiliated,--even as a brainless beauty finds herself _de
trop_ in a circle of wits. Such a man may have consideration in the
circle which cannot appreciate anything lofty or refined, but none in
those upper regions where art and truth form subjects of discourse,
where the aesthetic influences of the heart go forth to purify and
exalt, where the soul is refreshed by the communion of gifted and
sympathetic companions, and where that which is most precious and
exalted in a man or woman is honored and beloved. Without this influence
which woman controls, "a learned man is in danger of becoming a pedant,
a religious man a bigot, a vain man a fool, and a self-indulgent man a
slave." No man can be truly genial unless he has been taught in the
school where his wife, or daughter, or sister, or mother presides as a
sun of radiance and beauty. It is only in this school that boorish
manners are reformed, egotisms rebuked, stupidities punished, and
cynicism exorcised.
But this exalting influence cannot exist in society without an
attractive power in those ladies who compose it. A crowd of women does
not necessarily make society, any more than do the empty, stupid, and
noisy receptions which are sometimes held in the houses of the
rich,--still less those silly, flippant, ignorant, pretentious,
unblushing, and exacting girls who have just escaped from a fashionable
school, who elbow their brothers into corners, and cover with confusion
their fathers and mothers. A mere assemblage of men and women is nothing
without the charms of refinement, vivacity, knowledge, and good-nature.
These are not born in a day; they seldom mark people till middle life,
when experiences are wide and feelings deep, when flippancy is not
mistaken for wit, nor impertinence for ease. A frivolous slave of dress
and ornament can no more belong to the circle of which I now speak, than
can a pushing, masculine woman to the sphere which she occasionally
usurps. Not dress, not jewelry, not pleasing manners, not even
innocence, is the charm and glory of society; but the wisdom learned by
experience, the knowledge acquired by study, the quickness based on
native genius. When woman has thus acquired these great resources,--by
books, by travel, by extended intercourse, and by the soaring of an
untrammelled soul,--then only does she shine and guide and inspire, and
become, not the equal of man, but his superior, his mentor, his guardian
angel, his star of worship, in that favored and glorious realm which is
alike the paradise and the empire of the world!
AUTHORITIES.
Miss J. M. Luyster's Memoirs of Madame Récamier; Memoirs and
Correspondence by Lenormant; Marquis of Salisbury's Historical Sketches;
Mrs. Thomson's Queens of Society; Guizot's sketch of Madame Récamier;
Biographie Universelle; Dublin Review, 57-88; Christian Examiner,
82-299; Quarterly Review, 107-298; Edinburgh Review, 111-204; North
British Review, 32; Bentley's Magazine, 26-96; The Nation, 3, 4, 15;
Fraser's Magazine, 40-264.
MADAME DE STAËL,
* * * * *
A. D. 1766-1817.
WOMAN IN LITERATURE.
It was two hundred years after woman began to reign in the great cities
of Europe as queen of society, before she astonished the world by
brilliant literary successes. Some of the most famous women who adorned
society recorded their observations and experiences for the benefit of
posterity; but these productions were generally in the form of memoirs
and letters, which neither added to nor detracted from the splendid
position they occupied because of their high birth, wit, and social
fascinations. These earlier favorites were not courted by the great
because they could write, but because they could talk, and adorn courts,
like Madame de Sévigné. But in the eighteenth century a class of women
arose and gained great celebrity on account of their writings, like
Hannah More, Miss Burney, Mrs. Macaulay, Madame Dacier, Madame de la
Fayette,--women who proved that they could do something more than merely
write letters, for which women ever have been distinguished from the
time of Héloïse.
At the head of all these women of genius Madame de Staël stands
pre-eminent, not only over literary women, but also over most of the men
of letters in her age and country. And it was only a great age which
could have produced such a woman, for the eighteenth century was more
fruitful in literary genius than is generally supposed. The greatest
lights, indeed, no longer shone,--such men as Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton,
Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Molière,--but the age was fruitful in great
critics, historians, philosophers, economists, poets, and novelists, who
won immortal fame, like Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, Addison, Gibbon,
Bentley, Hume, Robertson, Priestley, Burke, Adam Smith, in England;
Klopstock, Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Lessing, Handel, Schlegel, Kant, in
Germany; and Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Marmontel, D'Alembert,
Montesquieu, Rollin, Buffon, Lavoisier, Raynal, Lavater, in France,--all
of whom were remarkable men, casting their fearless glance upon all
subjects, and agitating the age by their great ideas. In France
especially there was a notable literary awakening. A more brilliant
circle than ever assembled at the Hôtel de Rambouillet met in the salons
of Madame Geoffrin and Madame de Tencin and Madame du Deffand and Madame
Necker, to discuss theories of government, political economy, human
rights,--in fact, every question which moves the human mind. They were
generally irreligious, satirical, and defiant; but they were fresh,
enthusiastic, learned, and original They not only aroused the people to
reflection, but they were great artists in language, and made a
revolution in style.
It was in this inquiring, brilliant, yet infidel age that the star of
Madame de Staël arose, on the eve of the French Revolution. She was born
in Paris in 1766, when her father--Necker--was amassing an enormous
fortune as a banker and financier, afterwards so celebrated as finance
minister to Louis XVI. Her mother,--Susanne Curchod,--of humble Swiss
parentage, was yet one of the remarkable women of the day, a lady whom
Gibbon would have married had English prejudices and conventionalities
permitted, but whose marriage with Necker was both fortunate and happy.
They had only one child, but she was a Minerva. It seems that she was of
extraordinary precocity, and very early attracted attention. As a mere
child Marmontel talked with her as if she were twenty-five. At fifteen,
she had written reflections on Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," and was
solicited by Raynal to furnish an article on the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. So brilliant a girl was educated by her wealthy parents
without regard to expense and with the greatest care. She was fortunate
from the start, with unbounded means, surrounded with illustrious
people, and with every opportunity for improvement both as to teachers
and society,--doubtless one important cause of her subsequent success,
for very few people climb the upper rounds of the ladder of literary
fame who are obliged to earn their living; their genius is fettered and
their time is employed on irksome drudgeries.
Madame de Staël, when a girl, came very near losing her health and
breaking her fine constitution by the unwise "cramming" on which her
mother insisted; for, although a superior woman, Madame Necker knew very
little about the true system of education, thinking that study and labor
should be incessant, and that these alone could do everything. She
loaded her daughter with too many restraints, and bound her by a too
rigid discipline. She did all she could to crush genius out of the girl,
and make her a dictionary, or a machine, or a piece of formality and
conventionalism. But the father, wiser, and with greater insight and
truer sympathy, relaxed the cords of discipline, unfettered her
imagination, connived at her flights of extravagance, and allowed her to
develop her faculties in her own way. She had a remarkable fondness for
her father,--she adored him, and clung to him through life with peculiar
tenderness and devotion, which he appreciated and repaid. Before she
was twenty she wrote poetry as a matter of course. Most girls do,--I
mean those who are bright and sentimental; still, she produced but
indifferent work, like Cicero when he was young, and soon dropped rhyme
forever for the greater freedom of prose, into which she poured from the
first all the wealth of her poetic soul. She was a poet, disdaining
measure, but exquisite in rhythm,--for nothing can be more musical than
her style.
As remarked in the lecture on Madame Récamier, it is seldom that people
acquire the art of conversation till middle life, when the mind is
enriched and confidence is gained. The great conversational powers of
Johnson, Burke, Mackintosh, Coleridge, Wilkes, Garrick, Walpole, Sydney
Smith, were most remarkable in their later years, after they had read
everything and seen everybody. But Madame de Staël was brilliant in
conversation from her youth. She was the delight of every circle, the
admiration of the most gifted men,--not for her beauty, for she was not
considered beautiful, but for her wit, her vivacity, her repartee, her
animated and sympathetic face, her electrical power; for she could
kindle, inspire, instruct, or bewitch. She played, she sang, she
discoursed on everything,--a priestess, a sibyl, full of inspiration,
listened to as an oracle or an idol. "To hear her," says Sismondi, "one
would have said that she was the experience of many souls mingled into
one, I looked and listened with transport. I discovered in her features
a charm superior to beauty; and if I do not hear her words, yet her
tones, her gestures, and her looks convey to me her meaning." It is said
that though her features were not beautiful her eyes were
remarkable,--large, dark, lustrous, animated, flashing, confiding, and
bathed in light. They were truly the windows of her soul; and it was her
soul, even more than her intellect, which made her so interesting and so
great. I think that intellect without soul is rather repulsive than
otherwise, is cold, critical, arrogant, cynical,--something from which
we flee, since we find no sympathy and sometimes no toleration from it.
The soul of Madame de Staël immeasurably towered above her intellect,
great as that was, and gave her eloquence, fervor, sincerity,
poetry,--intensified her genius, and made her irresistible.
It was this combination of wit, sympathy, and conversational talent
which made Madame de Staël so inordinately fond of society,--to satisfy
longings and cravings that neither Nature nor books nor home could fully
meet. With all her genius and learning she was a restless woman; and
even friendship, for which she had a great capacity, could not bind her,
or confine her long to any one place but Paris, which was to her the
world,--not for its shops, or fashions, or churches, or museums and
picture-galleries, or historical monuments and memories, but for those
coteries where blazed the great wits of the age, among whom she too
would shine and dazzle and inspire. She was not without heart, as her
warm and lasting friendships attest; but the animating passion of her
life was love of admiration, which was only equalled by a craving for
sympathy that no friendship could satisfy,--a want of her nature that
reveals an ardent soul rather than a great heart; for many a
warm-hearted woman can live contentedly in retirement, whether in city
or country,--which Madame de Staël could not, not even when surrounded
with every luxury and all the charms of nature.
Such a young lady as Mademoiselle Necker--so gifted, so accomplished, so
rich, so elevated in social position--could aspire very high. And both
her father and mother were ambitious for so remarkable a daughter. But
the mother would not consent to her marriage with a Catholic, and she
herself insisted on a permanent residence in Paris. It was hard to meet
such conditions and yet make a brilliant match; for, after all, her
father, though minister, was only a clever and rich Swiss
financier,--not a nobleman, or a man of great family influence. The
Baron de Staël-Holstein, then secretary to the Swedish embassy,
afterwards ambassador from Sweden, was the most available suitor, since
he was a nobleman, a Protestant, and a diplomatist; and Mademoiselle
Necker became his wife, in 1786, at twenty years of age, with a dowry of
two millions of francs. Her social position was raised by this marriage,
since her husband was a favorite at court, and she saw much of the Queen
and of the great ladies who surrounded her.
But the marriage was not happy. The husband was extravagant and
self-indulgent; the wife panted for beatitudes it was not in his nature
to give. So they separated after a while, but were not divorced. Both
before and after that event, however, her house was the resort of the
best society of the city, and she was its brightest ornament. Thither
came Grimm, Talleyrand, Barnave, Lafayette, Narbonne, Sieyès,--all
friends. She was an eye-witness to the terrible scenes of the
Revolution, and escaped judicial assassination almost by miracle. At
last she succeeded in making her escape to Switzerland, and lived a
while in her magnificent country-seat near Geneva, surrounded with
illustrious exiles. Soon after, she made her first visit to England, but
returned to Paris when the violence of the Revolution was over.
She returned the very day that Napoleon, as First Consul, had seized the
reins of government, 1799. She had hailed the Revolution with transport,
although she was so nearly its victim. She had faith in its ideas. She
believed that the people were the ultimate source of power. She condoned
the excesses of the Revolution in view of its aspirations. Napoleon
gained his first great victories in defence of its ideas. So at first,
in common with the friends of liberty, she was prepared to worship this
rising sun, dazzled by his deeds and deceived by his lying words. But
she no sooner saw him than she was repelled, especially when she knew he
had trampled on the liberties which he had professed to defend. Her
instincts penetrated through all the plaudits of his idolaters. She felt
that he was a traitor to a great cause,--was heartless, unboundedly
ambitious, insufferably egotistic, a self-worshipper, who would brush
away everything and everybody that stood in his way; and she hated him,
and she defied him, and her house became the centre of opposition, the
headquarters of enmity and wrath. What was his glory, as a conqueror,
compared with the cause she loved, trodden under foot by an iron, rigid,
jealous, irresistible despotism? Nor did Napoleon like her any better
than she liked him,--not that he was envious, but because she stood in
his way. He expected universal homage and devotion, neither of which
would she give him. He was exceedingly irritated at the reports of her
bitter sayings, blended with ridicule and sarcasm. He was not merely
annoyed, he was afraid. "Her arrows," said he, "would hit a man if he
were seated on a rainbow." And when he found he could not silence her,
he banished her to within forty leagues of Paris. He was not naturally
cruel, but he was not the man to allow so bright a woman to say her
sharp things about him to his generals and courtiers. It was not the
worst thing he ever did to banish his greatest enemy; but it was mean
and cruel to persecute her as he did after she was banished.
So from Paris--to her the "hub of the universe"--Madame de Staël, "with
wandering steps and slow, took her solitary way." Expelled from the Eden
she loved, she sought to find some place where she could enjoy
society,--which was the passion of her life. Weimar, in Germany, then
contained a constellation of illustrious men, over whom Goethe reigned,
as Dr. Johnson once did in London. Thither she resolved to go, after a
brief stay at Coppet, her place in Switzerland; and her ten years' exile
began with a sojourn among the brightest intellects of Germany. She was
cordially received at Weimar, especially by the Court, although the
dictator of German literature did not like her much. She was too
impetuous, impulsive, and masculine for him. Schiller and Wieland and
Schlegel liked her better, and understood her better. Her great works
had not then been written, and she had reputation chiefly for her high
social position and social qualities. Possibly her exceeding vivacity
and wit seemed superficial,--as witty French people then seemed to both
Germans and English. Doubtless there were critics and philosophers in
Germany who were not capable of appreciating a person who aspired to
penetrate all the secrets of art, philosophy, religion, and science then
known who tried to master everything, and who talked eloquently on
everything,--and that person a woman, and a Frenchwoman. Goethe was
indeed an exception to most German critics, for he was an artist, as few
Germans have been in the use of language, and he, like Humboldt, had
universal knowledge; yet he did not like Madame de Staël,--not from
envy: he had too much self-consciousness to be envious of any man, still
less a woman. Envy does not exist between the sexes: a musician may be
jealous of a musician; a poet, of a poet; a theologian, of a theologian;
and it is said, a physician has been known to be jealous of a physician.
I think it is probable that the gifted Frenchwoman overwhelmed the great
German with her prodigality of wit, sarcasm, and sentiment, for he was
inclined to coldness and taciturnity.