Part 12

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.

It began to grow dark; Venus shone brilliantly, and the great flanks 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.