Part 7

"The more one thinks it over, the less is one able to imagine any possible good reason for the existence of this foolish thing we call the world. I understand neither the intention, nor the master-builder, nor the artist, nor the figures in this _Laterna Magica_ of which I have the honour to form a part. Shall I understand any better when I have disappeared from the small, dark globe on which it amuses I know not what unseen power to have me dance, whether I will or no? I cannot say. But I fear the secret will prove, like that of the Freemasons, to be a thing of no value except in the estimation of the uninitiated."

Having read these extracts, it does not surprise us to know that the book _On Religion_, planned at the close of the century to effect the same object from a Protestant standpoint that Chateaubriand aimed at from a Catholic, namely, the revival of the religious spirit in France, had originally a very different character from that which it finally acquired. If the first part were published as it was originally written, entirely in the eighteenth-century manner, it would indicate in its author exactly the stage of mental development indicated in Chateaubriand by his book on the Revolutions. In the form in which it has taken its place in French literature the work is remarkable for its calm, passionless style, its unprejudiced views, and an erudition not common at that period. Its weaknesses are its total lack of warmth and the general indecision of its principles.

The main idea is as follows: All the earlier conceptions of the nature of religion have been imperfect. One school of writers, who regard religion as inaccessible by the path of reason, and who believe it to have been imparted to man once for all by divine revelation, seek to restore it to its original form. Another school, rightly appalled by the evils resulting from intolerance and fanaticism, have rejected religion as a delusion, and have sought to base an ethical system upon a purely earthly foundation. A third have believed themselves able to steer a middle course; they accept something which they call natural religion, or the religion of reason, and which consists only of the purest dogmas and the simplest fundamental principles. But the adherents of this school, like those of the first two, believe that mankind can attain to absolute truth--that truth, therefore, is one and unchangeable; they stigmatise all who believe less than themselves as ungodly, and all who believe more as priest-ridden and superstitious. In opposition to all these three schools, Constant regards religion as progressive; he starts from the premise that the religious feeling is a fundamental element of the human soul, that it is only the forms it assumes which differ, and that these are capable of ever-increasing perfection. He has obviously read Lessing's _Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts_; but he is more in sympathy with his own contemporaries, Kreuzer and Görres, than with Lessing. He either does not understand or does not appreciate the latter's delicate and yet profound irony; he is captivated by the Romantic-Protestant revival ideas, and assimilates as much of them as a French Liberal politician and converted Voltairean can. He strongly objects to the spirit of intolerance and persecution which makes itself felt so strongly in Lamennais' book on "Indifference in Matters of Religion" unlike Chateaubriand and De Maistre, he objects to the temporal power of the Papacy, or to any other combination of spiritual and temporal power; but he imagines that in his _sentiment religieux_ he has discovered a kind of spiritual primary element, incapable of further resolution, an element which is unalterable and universal, i.e. diffused over the whole earth and unaffected by time; and upon this theory, which is incompatible with the data of psychology, he bases his whole conservative system. As far as possible he evades troublesome questions: he refuses, for example, to decide whether mankind came into being in a savage or in a paradisaically perfect condition; and he expressly states that he begins with a delineation of the lowest fetish worship only for the sake of order, that he by no means denies that this pitiable stage may have been the result of a fall, this hypothesis, indeed, seeming to him a very probable one.--Few books have more rapidly grown old-fashioned than this of Constant's, which is now merely of historical interest as typical of the half-heartedness and indecision of the period in which it was written.

In the early years of the French Revolution, Constant was appointed gentleman-in-waiting to the Duchess of Brunswick. In this position he heard the Revolution spoken of with that mixture of fear and abhorrence of which we have an example in the dialogue of Goethe's play, _Der Bürgergeneral_; but he had no difficulty in forming an independent and unprejudiced estimate of the significance of the great movement. In Brunswick, as elsewhere, much of his time seems to have been spent in amours, one following on the other in rapid succession. He himself jestingly assumed _Sola inconstantia constans_ as his motto. He married, solely out of ennui, it would appear, divorced his wife after the honeymoon, and presently fell in love with a lady who was at the time sueing for a divorce from her husband. For this lady's sake he returned at a later period to Brunswick. Her maiden name was Charlotte von Hardenberg, and many years afterwards she became his second wife. In the letters of this Brunswick period to Mme. de Charrière, Constant appears as aimless and bored as he is sagacious and witty. He makes merry over his stupid, little-minded associates, and for a time even over his feeling for the lady of his heart, until it suddenly occurs to him that jesting on this latter subject is scarcely seemly, and he decides to forego it. So far there was neither a centre nor an object in his life.

Towards the close of 1774, however, a decisive change took place. He met Mme. de Staël, and it became apparent that neither of these two minds could produce the best of which it was capable without the assistance of the other. Constant was then twenty-seven years of age, Mme. de Staël twenty-eight. He had just arrived in Paris, the city to which his ambition had long attracted him, but which he now saw for the first time. He was introduced into the best society, frequented the houses of Mme. Tallien, Mme. Beauharnais, and Mme. de Staël, and made an impression both by his personal beauty and his intellectual gifts. With his fresh complexion and fair hair he resembled a young Northerner, but in mind he was the acute Frenchman, and in culture the cosmopolitan. He made an impression on the most gifted Frenchwoman of the day that was never effaced, even when the circumstances of life estranged and separated them, and it was soon no secret that Mme. de Staël's admiration had become passionate love. She imparted to the rising states man her faith in political liberty, her enthusiasm for the rights of the individual, and for a government which should assure them; and her fiery ardour inspired him with her spirit of enterprise and with her confidence in the power of words and of deeds to influence, to re-mould life in spite of destiny. In return for this, her relation to him seems, by setting her at variance with society, to have supplied her with the greater part of the passions, emotions, and rebellious thoughts which form the kernel of her imaginative writings.

At Mme. de Staël's house Constant met a whole host of foreign diplomatists, disaffected journalists, and plotting women, who for the moment influenced him against the Convention. He soon, however, arrived at convictions of his own, refuted his first newspaper articles, and, more radical than his friend, joined the "Patriot" party in opposing the so-called Moderates, in whom he perceived no moderation. The year 1795 he spent, on the invitation of Mme. de Staël, at her country-house of Coppet, in Switzerland; the following year she was separated from her husband.

When, as First Consul, in 1799, Napoleon gave France a constitution, in which autocracy was veiled by a slight pretence of freedom, he nominated-Constant, formerly his ardent admirer, a member of the Tribunate. In this capacity Constant, supported by some few sympathisers, carried on an honourable struggle against the Napoleonic absolutism, a struggle which attracted the attention of all Europe, and highly exasperated the First Consul. In 1802 the latter made the famous remark about the five or six metaphysicians among the Tribunes who deserved to be drowned, and not long after, these five or six, namely Constant and his friends, were expelled by the votes of a servile majority. Mme. de Staël and her father, the famous Necker, showing themselves actively antagonistic to Napoleon's autocratic policy, were both banished from France. Constant, who followed Mme. de Staël to Coppet, was forbidden to return. In May 1802, Mme. de Staël became a widow. In 1803-4 she and Constant travelled together in Germany. She, loving him devotedly, evidently seems to have expected that he would marry her; but it is plain that he did not reciprocate her feeling; it was only out of weakness and compassion that he concealed from her his constant correspondence with Charlotte von Hardenberg. Having probably invented some pretext for leaving her, he went to Weimar alone. There, in 1804, he translated Schiller's _Wallenstein_ into French. It was not Constant but A. W. Schlegel who accompanied Mme. de Staël to Italy in 1805 (as tutor to her children), on the journey immortalised in _Corinne_. Constant was privately married to his Charlotte in the summer of 1808, and so little was Madame de Staël resigned to his defection, that terrible scenes occurred when she unexpectedly met the newly married pair in the neighbourhood of Geneva. Charlotte, driven to despair by her rival's furious jealousy, made an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. So great was Madame de Staël's influence over Constant, that she actually persuaded him to leave his wife and return for a time with her to Coppet.

For some years after this episode Benjamin Constant lived in quiet retirement at Göttingen, occupied with collecting material for his work on the origin and development of religion. The defeat of Napoleon in 1813 brought him and his friend Madame de Staël once more into the political arena. Her influence at the courts of Russia, Germany, and Sweden gave him a voice in the proceedings against the defeated autocrat. He went to Paris in Bernadotte's train, and, although he was in favour of the restoration of the monarchy, he strove ardently to save all that could be saved of constitutional liberty. He published masterly pamphlets on the liberty of the press, on ministerial responsibility, &c. It is well known that immediately after this, his blind infatuation for Mme. Récamier caused him to take such violent action against Napoleon on the latter's return from Elba, that there seems something traitorous in his acceptance of a post in the Council of State during the Hundred Days, and his collaboration in the Emperor's attempt to give France a species of constitution.

We must not judge Constant as a politician by this unfortunate episode. Under the Bourbons, and even during the first years of the reign of Louis Philippe, he was the determined and eloquent leader of the Liberal Opposition. Though never remarkable for purity of character, he had noble impulses. When in 1830 he received a letter from one of his friends in Paris saying, "A terrible game is being played here; our heads are in danger; come and add yours!" he did not hesitate for a moment, but came and undauntedly sided with the revolutionists. A few months later, however, although he was at the time leader of the Opposition, he accepted 100,000 francs from Louis Philippe for the purpose of paying his gambling debts. Constant was an accomplished dialectician. No truth, he was accustomed to observe, is complete unless it includes its antithesis. He succeeded in completing many truths. The imprint set upon him by the period in which his youth had fallen was never effaced. The doubleness which in the other notable men of the same generation is only a secondary quality, is in Constant's character the essential, distinguishing, and, at the same time, disturbing trait.

_Adolphe_, the chief work of this man's youth, deserves some study. In it we find the following utterance: "What surprises me is, not that humanity should feel the need of a religion, but that it should in any age fancy itself strong enough, and sufficiently secure from disaster, to venture to reject anyone religion. It seems to me as if in its weakness it should rather be prone to invoke the aid of them all. Is there, in the dense darkness which surrounds us, any ray of light that we can afford to reject? Does there float on the whirling torrent which carries us along with it any branch to which we dare refuse to cling?" We feel that the author is more certain of the existence of the whirling torrent than of the branch. His manner of recommending religion reveals his own lack of it, and a profound depth of melancholy.

The explanation is simple. There was a reaction against Voltaire in the air at that time, a reaction practically inaugurated by Rousseau--the rebound of repressed, unconsulted, ignored feeling. A half-unconscious effort was going on in men's minds to restore the balance between the demands and the possibilities of the human soul which had been disturbed during the autocratic reign of critical intellect; and this half-conscious tendency was plainly perceptible even in men whose natures were really akin to Voltaire's, and who, had they been born thirty years earlier, would have been his eager sympathisers and fellow-workers. Voltaire had not only criticised, he had been forced by the evils of the times and by his unruly wit into an attitude of aggression. With all available weapons, even poisoned ones, he had attacked those purely external, palpable forms of authority, which in his time stood in the way of honourable human conditions, nay, made them impossible. Now all these powers had fallen, and the times once more craved authority. There are inner, spiritual authorities. The Right, the Good, the True are such. But the enthusiastic attempts to introduce and establish a free form of government which should realise these ideals without the invocation of any authority unexplainable by reason, had resulted in the savage excesses of lawlessness. What wonder, then, that not only many ordinary individuals began to grope after planks from the wreck of the once powerful political and religious systems, but that also a majority of the most highly gifted came forward as the champions of some authority, either temporal or spiritual, which they supported for the sake of the principle, but with no real belief or confidence in it.

They had no real confidence, for the simple reason that for them, as genuine and intelligent sons of the young nineteenth century, it was impossible to believe in the strength of a stem which their fathers had sawn through. Chateaubriand's faith in legitimacy was as faint-hearted as Constant's in religion in general. Men were uneasy in their minds. The old house was burned down. The new was not even begun. And, instead of boldly beginning to erect a new building, events led them to seek refuge among the ruins of the old, the half-burned materials of which they built up as best they could. During this performance they were perpetually tempted to try experiments not planned from the first. After some vain attempts to give solidity to the building by the addition of new material, they would in despair give a kick at the shaky, newly built walls, which brought them down again. No group of writers whose aim was to preserve society ever brought such passionate accusations against it as the authors of the Emigrant Literature. It is one of these accusations of society which forms the basis of Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_.

Adolphe is a love story which, in its presentment of the relations of the individual to society, takes a quite different point of view from _Werther_. In _Werther_ outward, and, by reason of these, also inward, obstacles prevent the union of a couple obviously made for each other. In _Adolphe_ outward, and because of them, also inward, reasons part two beings who are united. _Werther_ represents the power of society, and of once-accepted social responsibilities, to hinder a love match. _Adolphe_ describes the power of society and of public opinion to absolve from accepted personal responsibilities and to sever a long-united pair. The books, taken together, form a double picture of the pope-like power of society to bind and loose. But whereas _Werther_ depicts the feelings of the pre-revolutionary, enthusiastic, energetic generation to which its author belonged, the feelings described in _Adolphe_ are those of the first French generation of the new century.

Unlike former love stories, _Adolphe_ does not delineate love only in its first awakening in the dawn of delusive hopes, but follows it through its whole existence, depicts its growth, its strength, its decay, its death, and even pursues it to the other side of the grave and shows the feelings into which it is transformed. Hence _Adolphe_, even more than _René_, is the story of the individual's rude awakening from delusion, the representation of the anguish of disappointment. It is the flower of life which is here stripped of its petals one by one and carefully dissected. In this point, too, the book is a great contrast to _Werther, Werther_ is naïve in comparison. It is the same flower, the perfume of which is a deadly poison to Werther, that is calmly dissected by Adolphe. The change is expressed in the very costume; the blue coat and yellow waistcoat have made way for our dull, funereal black.

But the flame which is extinguished in the man's breast now burns in the woman's. _Adolphe_ is woman's _Werther_. The passion and melancholy of the new age have advanced another step; they have spread to the other sex. In _Werther_ it was the man who loved, suffered, stormed, and despaired; in comparison with him the woman was sound, strong, and unharmed--perhaps a trifle cold and insignificant. But now it is her turn, now it is she who loves and despairs. In _Werther_ it was the woman who submitted to the laws of society, in _Adolphe_ it is the man who does so. The selfsame war waged by Werther in the name of his love is now waged by Eléonore, and with equally tragic result.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to call this romance the prototype of a whole new species of fiction, namely that which occupies itself with psychical analysis. It is its treatment of love that is new. Far behind us now lies the time when Amor was represented as the charming child we all know from Thorwaldsen's bas-reliefs. To Voltaire Amor was the god of pleasure. "Les ris, les jeux et les plaisirs" were his attendants. To Rousseau he is the god of passion. With Goethe he has ceased to be a beneficent spirit; we understand when we read Goethe what Schopenhauer meant when he wrote that Amor pursues his way, indifferent to the misery of the individual. In Faust, the first poem of the new era, he is transformed from a roguish boy into a criminal. Faust seduces Gretchen and deserts her; Gretchen's love-story means the death of her mother, her brother, her infant, and herself. She, the innocent, loving girl, kills her mother with the sleeping-draught she administers in order that Faust may visit her by night; Faust and Mephistopheles together slay the brother who attempts to avenge his sister's disgrace; from fear of shame Gretchen kills her new-born child, for which she is thrown into prison and finally executed. Goethe's passion for truth impelled him to paint a very different picture of Amor from that which represents him as the rose-crowned boy. And in Goethe it is not only in its consequences but in its very nature that love is fraught with fate. In _Elective Affinities_ he has made a study of the mysterious and irresistible attraction and repulsion by which the mutual relations of souls are determined, as if they were chemical substances. The book is a kind of study of passion from the point of view of natural philosophy; Goethe shows us its rise, its magic power as a mysterious natural force, its foundation in the unfathomed depths of our soul.

An attempt had thus been made to explain the attraction to which we give the name of love by instituting a parallel between it and the attraction with which we are familiar in inanimate nature. But there was yet another step to be taken, namely, to dissociate love from everything with which it had hitherto been connected, and analyse it. This task fell to the lot of the unsettled, unsatisfied generation to which Constant belongs. However much men had differed in their conception of love, its causes and its consequences, they had all agreed in accepting the emotion itself as something understood, something simple. They now for the first time began to treat it as something composite, and to attempt to resolve it into its elements. In _Adolphe_, and the fiction which follows in its steps, an accurate calculation is made of how many parts, how many grains, of friendship, how many of devotion, of vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, hope, imagination, disappointment, hatred, weariness, enthusiasm, calculation, &c. on the part of each, go to make up the compound which the two concerned call their love. With all this analysis the emotion lost its supernatural character, and the worship of it ceased. Instead of its poetry, its psychology was offered to the reader. What happened resembled that which happens when we look at a star through a telescope; its bright rays disappear, only the astronomical body remains: before, in the bright full moon we saw only a clear, shining disc with an unchanging face; now, we distinguish a multitude of mountains and valleys.

From the moment when men began to desire really to understand, they necessarily fixed their attention less upon that first awakening of the emotion, which poets had sung and celebrated from time immemorial, than upon its later development, its duration and its cessation. In those tragedies which are to be found in the literature of all races, which are, as it were, their hymns to love, the death of the lovers follows close upon the blossoming time of their love. Romeo sees Juliet; they adore one another; after a few days and nights passed in the seventh heaven, both lie dead. The question of constancy does not occur. Our Danish love-tragedy, _Axel and Valborg_, seems, indeed, to deal with nothing but constancy; the whole plot turns on the prolonged engagement of the lovers, a characteristically national pivot--but _in Axel and Valborg_ constancy is glorified as a virtue, not explained as a product, for the play is a lyrical tragedy, not a psychological analysis.

It is the question of the conditions of constancy which is treated of in _Adolphe_--under what conditions is passion lasting or otherwise? And it is the answer to this question which is really an impeachment of society. For it is maintained that while society, in this case represented by public opinion, upholds those unions which are of its own institution, it at the same time basely strives to destroy all possibilities of faithfulness in any union it has not sanctioned, even if that union be to the full as honourable, to the full as unselfish, as any of those which it fences round and supports.