Part 9

Constant himself thus expresses the moral of the book: "The strongest passion cannot survive the struggle with the established order of things. Society is too powerful. It makes that love too bitter which it has not recognised and stamped with the seal of its approval. Woe, then, to the woman who rests her hope of happiness upon a feeling which all things combine to poison, and against which society, when it is not obliged to respect it as legal, enlists all that is basest in the human heart, with the aim of destroying all that is good."

[1] The day came when criticism uplifted its voice against this dethronement of youth and beauty. Jules Janin in his light way prefers this complaint in the form of an attack on Balzac:--

"Formerly," he writes, "as far as the novel and the drama were concerned, the woman of thirty to forty was regarded as past all possibilities in the way of passion, but now, thanks to the discovery of this new wide and smiling domain, she reigns supreme in both drama and novel. A new world has superseded the old, the woman of forty has suppressed the girl of sixteen.

"'Who knocks?' shouts drama in its deep voice. 'Who is there?' cries the novel in gentler tones. 'It is I,' answers tremblingly the girl of sixteen, with the pearly teeth, the snowy bosom, the soft outlines, the bright smile, and the gentle glance. 'It is I! I am the same age as Racine's Julie, Shakespeare's Desdemona, Molière's Agnès, Voltaire's Zaire, Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Saint-Pierre's Virginie. It is I! I am the same charming, volatile, delightful age as the young girls in Ariosto, Lesage, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. It is I! I am innocent youth, with its hopes, with its divinely beautiful, fearless attitude towards the future. I am the age of chaste desires, of noble instincts, of pride, and of innocence. Make room for me, dear sirs!' Thus speaks the charming girl of sixteen to the novelists and the dramatists. But the novelists and the dramatists at once reply: 'We are busy with your mother, child; come again twenty years hence, and we shall see if we can make something out of you.'

"In the novel and the drama of to-day, we have no one but the woman of thirty, who will be forty to-morrow. She alone can love, she alone can suffer. She is so much more dramatic, because she cannot afford to wait. What can we make out of a little girl who can do nothing but weep, love, sigh, smile, hope, tremble? The woman of thirty does not weep, she sobs; she does not sigh, she utters anguished cries; she does not love, she is consumed with passion; she does not smile, she shrieks; she does not dream, she acts! This is drama, this is romance, this is life. Thus speak, act, and reply our great playwrights and our famous writers of fiction."

The intelligent, refined Madame Émile de Girardin defended Balzac, answering very justly: "Is it Balzac's fault that thirty is now the age of love? Balzac is obliged to paint passion where he finds it, and nowadays it is not to be found in the heart of sixteen."

VIII

MADAME DE STAËL: "DELPHINE"

In one of his letters Byron writes of _Adolphe_: "The book contains some melancholy truths, though I believe that it is too triste a work ever to have been popular. The first time I ever read it was at the desire of Mme. de Staël." Mme. de Staël herself says somewhere: "I do not believe all men resemble Adolphe, but only vain men." Simple as the observation is, we feel that it is written by a woman in self-defence; for _Adolphe_ had struck home to Necker's daughter personally, had bared her deepest heart wound.

Anne Marie Germaine Necker was born in Paris in 1766. Her father, the great Genevese financier, became First Minister of France shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution, and his name was at that time the watchword of liberal France. Her mother was a highly gifted woman, but stiff, reserved, and the slave of duty; she believed that education did everything, nature little, and she laid pedantic stress upon trifles, being of opinion that nothing is trifling from the moral point of view. To this lady Rousseau's educational theories were naturally highly antipathetic, and the consequence was that Rousseau, with his belief in nature and in innate virtues, became her daughter's ideal. This daughter, a frank, lively child, developed into a bright, intelligent brunette, whose dark eyes sparkled with wit and beamed with kind-heartedness. While Mme. Necker chiefly appreciated common sense and the habit of self-examination, the daughter, who suffered from the strict control under which she was kept, and whose great gifts roused her mother's jealousy, grew to love all the qualities and virtues which spring without cultivation from Nature's own health and wealth. In her father's house she was from childhood brought into contact with the most famous men of the day, who were amused and attracted by her quick repartee and surprising originality. The lively, marvellously intelligent child was her father's pride, and she returned his affection with a boundless love and admiration which lasted all her life and can be traced in most of her writings.

At fifteen years of age she began to write essays, novels, and tragedies. One of her tragedies, entitled _Montmorency_, marks the time when she began to feel attracted by the young Vicomte Mathieu de Montmorency, who had distinguished himself in the American War of Independence. Her parents being opposed to her marriage with a Catholic, she was obliged to refuse his hand, but to the end of their lives they remained faithful friends. Yielding to her mother's wishes, Germaine Necker married in 1786 the Swedish Ambassador in Paris, Baron Erik Magnus Staël Holstein, a favourite of Gustavus the Third. In order to assist him to this wealthy and influential connection, Gustavus confirmed the Baron in his post of ambassador in Paris for a certain number of years. The bridegroom, who was double the age of his bride, promised her parents that he would never take her to Sweden against her will. He seems to have been the ordinary northern nobleman of the period, very simple, polished in manner, but only half educated, a spendthrift and a gambler. It was said of him that he would never have found out how to boil a potato, much less have invented gunpowder. Curiously enough, he sympathised with the Revolution.

Mme. de Staël's first book, _Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau_, was published immediately before the Revolution. It is a panegyric and a defence. At the close of the third letter she seeks to interweave Rousseau's fame with that of her father, who, at the time she wrote, had just been called to the head of affairs; at the end of the fourth she hails the assembling of the States-General with youthful enthusiasm, and expresses the hope that the great French nation will attain by the path of enlightenment, reason, and peace, to the possession of those blessings which other peoples had gained by the shedding of streams of blood. She calls upon the nation to make it a matter of honour not to go beyond the point which all are united in regarding as their aim, and she closes with an apostrophe to Rousseau, in which she laments that he did not live long enough to see the approaching awe-inspiring spectacle, nor to encourage that patriot, Necker, who merited a judge, admirer, and fellow-citizen such as he.

The Revolution broke out, and would not be stayed in its career at what was the limit of her hopes and wishes, i.e. the acquisition of a constitution after the English pattern. Necker was soon compelled to flee, but his daughter remained in Paris, and, protected by her husband's position, rescued many an innocent victim of the Reign of Terror. With the assistance of the courageous German, Justus Erich Bollmann, she saved the life of the man who was her lover at that time, Narbonne, the former Minister of War. Bollmann got him safely to London in 1792.[1] She had even laid a plan for the flight of the royal family. The hatred of the revolutionary leaders was roused by her behaviour; and it was with difficulty she escaped the mob's thirst for revenge. She fled to Coppet, accompanied by her friend Montmorency, who, as an aristocrat, was also in danger, and who disguised himself as her lackey. Afterwards she went to England, where she published a pamphlet in defence of Marie Antoinette, whom she did not know personally, but by whose fate she had been deeply affected. This pamphlet was soon followed by another, also called forth by current events, entitled _De l'Influence des Passions sur le Bonheur des Individus et des Nations_, a piece of declamatory writing, in which the authoress exhibits no knowledge of life except when she treats of love, and no political acumen except when she is writing of the Revolution. There is a hollow, insincere ring in what she says on the subject of ambition.

Though not formally banished by the Directory, Mme. de Staël was placed under the surveillance of the police, and would have been arrested if she had entered France without permission. As soon, however, as Sweden had acknowledged the French Republic, she returned to Paris and busied herself actively with politics. Her aim was a Parliamentary constitution and peace with Europe. It was through her influence that Talleyrand was made Foreign Minister. Her house was a great political rendezvous, more especially of the Moderates, and it was not long before Benjamin Constant played the leading part among the politicians who assembled there, as well as occupied the first place in the good graces of the mistress of the house.

When Bonaparte came to Paris as a conqueror towards the end of 1797, after the campaign in Italy, he made an extraordinary impression upon Madame de Staël. She sought every opportunity of approaching him, felt herself alike attracted and overpowered by him. Whenever she tried to interest him, it seemed as if she were struck dumb, she, the incessant talker. The feeling of his unapproachableness tortured her. There is no doubt that for a short time she nourished the hope of becoming the friend of this Caesar, and it was a grievous disappointment to have to relinquish the idea. From the moment she did so, she joined the ranks of his political adversaries, continuing, however, for a time to display a sort of coquetry as far as he was personally concerned. Not till she was definitely repulsed, did her feeling change to pure hatred. In the book which she published in the intermediate stage, we have satirical allusions to Bonaparte's government along with flattering allusions to himself personally. In conversation she openly and constantly expressed her desire that he (and consequently the army of her country under his command) might suffer defeat, in order that a stop might be put to his tyranny.

It was in the year 1800 that she published her first large book, _De la Littérature, considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales_, a work which, from its general purport, must be classified as belonging to that great body of writings in which, ever since the days of the Renaissance, the relative merits of ancient and modern literature have been discussed. Chateaubriand dealt with the same problem very soon afterwards in his _Génie du Christianisme_. Mme. de Staël and he both declare themselves in favour of the modern literatures, but upon different grounds. He bases their superiority upon the fact that they deal with Christian themes, of which the ancient authors had no knowledge; Mme. de Staël bases it upon progressing civilisation. She believes in the capacity of humanity to improve, and in the gradual perfecting of social institutions, and on this belief grounds her assurance that literature will contain a steadily increasing treasure of experience and insight. At this stage of her development there is no question of any profound and systematic literary psychology; she calmly, for instance, excludes imagination from the list of faculties which are capable of development--why?--because in spite of all her enthusiasm for Ossian, she cannot deny that Homer's is the fuller, richer, poetry. The merit of her book, however, does not depend upon what it proves, but upon what it proclaims and urges, namely the necessity for a new literature, new science, and a new religion. She draws attention to the literatures of England and Germany, to the Icelandic sagas, and the old Scandinavian epics; but Ossian is to her the great type of all that is splendid in the poetry of the North. She loves his seriousness and melancholy, for, she says, "melancholy poetry is the poetry which accords best with philosophy."[2] Writing of the Germans, she remarks: "The most important book the Germans possess, and the only one that can compare with the masterpieces of other languages, is _Werther_. Because it calls itself a novel, many do not realise that it is a truly great work.... The author of _Werther_ has been reproached for making his hero suffer from other sorrows besides those of love, for allowing him to be made so unhappy by a humiliation, and so resentful by the social inequalities which were the cause of the humiliation; but to my mind the author shows his genius in this quite as much as in anything else in the book."

The fundamental idea of her book is, that free social conditions must inevitably lead to a new development of literature, that it would be absurd if a society which had won political liberty for itself were to own only a literature shackled by rules. "Oh, if we could but find," she cries with youthful ardour, "a system of philosophy, an enthusiasm for all that is good, a strong and righteous code of laws, which should be to us what the Christian religion has been to the past!"

Jealous of her growing fame, and on the alert as the champion of religion, Chateaubriand reviewed her book. Other critics had twitted her with her enthusiasm for everything melancholy, and had inquired what she thought of the Greeks, who were certainly not melancholy. Chateaubriand seized the opportunity to strike a blow on behalf of revealed religion. "Mme. de Staël," he says, "attributes that to philosophy which I attribute to religion "; and addressing her, he continues: "Your talent is but half developed; it is smothered by philosophy. You seem to be unhappy, and how, indeed, should philosophy heal the sorrow of your soul? Is it possible to fertilise one desert by means of another desert?" He exhausts himself in mere phrases.

It was about this time that antagonism to Bonaparte, who was soon to banish her again, this time for ten years, became the ruling idea in Mme. de Staël's life. After the Italian campaign she had seen in him the champion of freedom, had written him enthusiastic letters, and had prevailed upon him to erase her father's name from the list of exiles. But in the First Consul she saw only "a Robespierre on horseback," and Bonaparte complained with reason that she inflamed men's minds against him.

Her former enthusiasm had turned into passionate hatred. From her salon she carried on a regular war against him. She and Constant were unwearied in their satire of his associates, his person, his behaviour. She scoffed at his little body and big head, at his arrogance and his awkwardness. He was the _bourgeois gentilhomme_ on the throne, annoyed by the wit of cultivated women, incapable of expressing himself coherently, eloquent only when abusive. His genius was mere charlatanism. He was not even a great general, for at Marengo he had lost his head, and might have lost the battle if Desaix had not come to his aid. There was something essentially vulgar about the man, which even his tremendous power of imagination could not always conceal.

She entered into all sorts of intrigues with the generals who were opposed to Bonaparte, either from principle, like Moreau, or from pure envy, like Bernadotte. So far did she carry her hatred, that she was beside herself with rage when she heard of the humiliation of England by the Peace of Amiens, and kept away from Paris at the time of the festivities held in honour of this peace.

The foreign diplomatists in Paris, to use Madame de Staël's own words, "spent their lives with her." She conversed every day with numbers of influential people, conversation being her greatest pleasure; and Bonaparte is reported to have said that every one thought less of him after having talked with her. He sent to inquire what it was she really wanted, and if she would be satisfied if he paid her the two millions which Necker had given in trust to the Treasury, and which were being wrongfully kept back; she only answered that it was not a question of what she wanted, but of what she thought. From the day when Benjamin Constant first raised his voice in the Tribunate against one of Bonaparte's proposals, her house in Paris was deserted, and all her invitations were declined; and immediately after the publication of her father's book, _Les dernières Vues de Politique et de Finances_, she was banished from Paris by express command of the First Consul.

No heavier blow could have fallen upon Mme. de Staël. She herself likened the sentence to one of death; for to her, who only really lived when she was in the capital, and who could so ill dispense with friends, intellectual intercourse, and a certain participation in the great events of the day, it was misery to be thus torn from home and country. "Every step the post-horses took caused me suffering, and when the postillions inquired if they had not done well, I could not refrain from bursting into tears at the thought of the sorry service they had rendered me."[3] She was accompanied by Benjamin Constant; but when she heard of her husband's illness she went to him, and nursed him till he died.

In the following year, 1803, she published Delphine, a tale written in five parts and in the form of letters, after the pattern of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_. It is easy to trace the personal impressions and reminiscences which form the groundwork of this novel. The story is the story of a woman's dutiful renunciation of a happy marriage, and for this the authoress's own refusal of Montmorency supplied a background of fact. But the real theme of the book is the loving woman's conflict with society, and the cruel, cold destruction by society of the happiness of the individual. Looking at it in this light, we feel that it was the fresh impressions of her later years, her relations with her husband and Benjamin Constant, that gave the book its tone. Her reputation had been injured by her separation from her husband, her relations with Constant were no secret, and he was undoubtedly the father of her daughter Albertine, born in 1797, the future Duchesse de Broglie. When Mme. de Staël wrote _Delphine_ it had never occurred to her to doubt that Constant would legitimise this daughter by a speedy marriage; but, in spite of the great allowance always made by public opinion for people of wealth and position, and her consequent comparative independence of action, she bitterly felt both the covert persecution of slander and the deliberate attempts at defamation made by the pharisaical.

The spiritless, resigned motto of _Delphine_: "A man should be able to defy public opinion, a woman to submit to it," almost betrays its authoress, Madame de Staël's mother. The actual story harmonises with the motto, but the spirit of the book and the very fact of its publication contradict it. For the book is a justification of divorce, and it appeared in the same year that Napoleon concluded the Concordat with the Pope; it attacked indissoluble wedlock and the religious sacrament of marriage, at the very moment when the marriage laws were being made more stringent, and a portion of its old power was being restored to the Church.

The book answers to its motto in so far that it teaches, through the fate of its heroine, that if a woman, even after a generous and prolonged sacrifice of her own well-being, transgress the rules of society, though it may be only to prevent the ruin of her lover, she is lost. It contradicts its motto in so far that the crying injustice of such a fate speaks more powerfully than any declamation, of the imperfection of the social organism and of the preposterousness of that power to coerce and make unhappy, which man's short-sightedness and pusillanimity have entrusted to the antiquated institutions under the pressure of which Delphine is crushed. She is depicted from the very first as a superior being, pure, benevolent, spirited, elevated by the very fact of her purity above the pharisaical morality of society. Her character is nowhere more charmingly suggested than in the scene where an unfortunate and maligned woman enters the salon of the Tuileries, and the other ladies immediately rise from their seats and move away, leaving a great open space round the poor, marked creature; upon which Delphine walks across the room and seats herself by her at whom all the other women have vied in casting the first stone.

By a series of astoundingly base devices and intrigues, one of the principal characters of the book, a female Talleyrand, succeeds in separating Delphine from her lover, and uniting him to her antipodes, the cold, orthodoxly pious Mathilde, who privately accepts from the deserted Delphine the enormous dowry without which the marriage cannot be arranged. By the time all the various deceptions are detected, the totally unsuitable, unnatural pair, Mathilde and Léonce, are united. Other equally odious marriages and equally unhappy love affairs are grouped round this central couple, in order that the main idea of the book may be made sufficiently clear. Henri de Lebensei, who is an embellished edition of Constant, cannot be united to the woman he loves until she has obtained a divorce from her husband, with whom she cannot live, she declares, without destroying all that is good and noble in her nature. M. de Serbeliane stands in the same hopeless position to Thérèse d'Ervins as Delphine does to Mathilde's husband.

Delphine is represented as of so pure and self-sacrificing a nature that she not only peremptorily rejects the idea of a union with Léonce, which would necessarily destroy his wife's happiness, but will not permit him to dwell upon the thought. She calms him; she points him to a profounder morality and religion than that in which he, as a child of the eighteenth century, has been brought up: "Léonce, I did not expect to find such an indifference to religious ideas in you. I take it upon me to reproach you for it. Your morality is only based upon honour; you would have been much happier if you had given your homage to those simple and true principles which teach us to submit our actions to the dictates of our conscience, and free us from all other yokes. You know that my education, far from enslaving my mind, has made it if anything too independent. It is possible that superstition is as yet more suitable for a woman than freedom of thought; weak and wavering beings that we are, we need support on every side, and love is a kind of credulity which is perhaps apt to ally itself with all the other kinds of credulity and superstition. But the noble guardian of my youth esteemed my character sufficiently to wish to develop my reason, and never did he require of me to accept any opinion without examining into it. I can therefore speak to you of the religion I love, as I can speak on any other subject which my heart and mind have freely tested, and you cannot attribute what I say to you to inculcated habit or the unweighed impressions of childhood.... Do not, Léonce, refuse the comfort which is offered to us by natural religion." We distinguish an echo of Rousseau, and the influence of the reaction against Voltaire, in this sermon which Necker's daughter places in the mouth of her second self.