Chapter XIX: Madame De Stael

1766-1817.

In Madame de Stael we encounter a truly redoubtable figure in literature.

But Madame de Stael in her day seemed more than a writer, more even than a writer of what the Germans would call world-importance; she was, or she seemed, a prodigious living personal force. For her tongue was not less formidable than her pen. In truth, the fame of Madame de Stael is due to the twofold power which, during her life-time, she exercised, and exercised in very uncertain proportions, first perhaps as a talker and second as a writer. She is generally allowed, and that upon the most incontestable authority, to have been one of the most brilliant and most effective talkers in the history of the human race.

This power in Madame de Stael of personal impression you are not free to ascribe to any charm that she owned of physical beauty; for Madame de Stael was not a beautiful woman. By her friend, Madame Recamier, that charm was exercised to the full, and that charm Madame de Stael, did not despise. So far from it, she is said once (thus at least the present writer seems to remember, but he has been unable to verify his impression) passionately to have exclaimed that she would give all her genius for one evening of Madame Recamier's beauty. This was not the vanity on her part of wish to be admired. It was the pathos of longing to be loved. "Never, never," she cried out in anguish, "I shall never be loved as I love." She was true woman after all; and it would be inexpiable wrong against her not to say this also, and say it with emphasis, however sharply we may be just in pronouncing the masculine strength of her character. The contrast was so obvious between Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier in point of mere personal charm that, in a moment evil for him, a gentleman once seated between them permitted himself the awkwardness of saying, in ill-advised intention of compliment to both, but with most unhappy chief effect to the contrary, alike on this side and on that, "How fortunate! I sit between Wit and Beauty." "Yes, and without possessing either the one or the other," retorted Wit, amply avenging herself for being reminded that she was not also Beauty. Madame de Stael had certainly justified one half of the gentleman's compliment; and Madame Recamier, with her serene ineffable charm, did not need to speak in order to justify the other.

It was, then, by the pure dry light of her intellect and her wit that Madame de Stael dazzled so in conversation--dazzled so, and so attracted. Wherever she was, there was the center. She made a _salon_ anywhere, by simply being there. And Madame de Stael's _salon_ was felt by the ruler of Europe to be a formidable political power implacably hostile to himself. "Somehow," said Napoleon, "I observe that, whatever is talked about at Madame de Stael's, those who go there come away thinking less favorably of me." It seems to have been in part because she said nothing, and would say nothing, of Napoleon in her "Germany," that he finally suppressed that book. "You will speak ill of me when you get back to your academy," said to Plato the tyrant of Syracuse. "In the academy we shall not have time to speak of you at all," was the philosopher's reply.

Madame de Stael was singularly fortunate in heredity on both sides of her parentage. Her father was an eminent banker and minister of finance, who enjoyed the noblest and clearest renown as a man both of talent and of character. Her mother was that beautiful and gifted daughter of a Swiss pastor whom the historian Gibbon once thought he loved, but whom he dutifully gave up at the will of his father. "I sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son," Gibbon says in his "Autobiography." This was after years had passed with him--"years that bring the philosophic mind!" The obese but famous English historian, still a bachelor, was a frequent guest at the house of M. Necker, where he had the opportunity gallantly to admire the brilliant daughter of the woman who might have been his wife.

We have said enough to show that, with the exception of personal beauty, Madame de Stael enjoyed every external advantage that could help to give her a shining career. Her wealth was something more than a mere accessory advantage; she needed it to sustain her in the waste of money made necessary by her wanderings through Europe to escape the tyrannous hand of Napoleon. Her exile was agony to her, for she loved France, and she loved Paris with inextinguishable affection. It is impossible to deny to the obstinacy that refused to burn even a pinch of incense to the god of her nation's idolatry, for the sake of permission to return to every thing that she loved--it is impossible, we say, to deny to this obstinacy in Madame de Stael the title of a true and heroic virtue.

How costly-brave was the attitude that Madame de Stael steadfastly kept toward Napoleon, during the fifteen years of his unparalleled sway, may be guessed from the account that she gives of the unnerving, the prostrating effect upon her of the presence, the character, and the genius of that extraordinary man. In her "Reflections on the French Revolution" she has the following passage, almost equally striking whether taken as a description or as a confession:

Far from gaining re-assurance in meeting Buonaparte oftener, he
intimidated me daily more and more. I confusedly felt that no emotion
of the heart could possibly take effect upon him. He looks upon a
human being as a fact or as a thing, but not as a fellow-creature. He
does not hate any more than he loves; there is nothing for him but
himself; all other beings are so many ciphers. The force of his will
lies in the imperturbable calculation of his selfishness.... His
successes are as much to be credited to the qualities which he lacks
as to the talents which he possesses. Neither pity, nor attraction,
nor religion, nor attachment to any idea whatsoever, could make him
swerve from the main path he had chosen. Every time I heard him talk I
was struck with his superiority; this, however, had no resemblance to
the superiority of men trained and cultivated by study or by society,
a class of which England and France can offer examples. But his
courses of remark indicated a tact for seizing upon circumstances like
that which the hunter has for seizing upon his prey. Sometimes he
recounted the political and military incidents of his life in a manner
to interest greatly; he had even, in narrations that admitted gayety,
a trace of Italian imagination. Still, nothing could get the better of
my revulsion for what I perceived in him. I felt, in his soul, a
sword, cold and cutting, that froze while it wounded; I felt, in his
mind, a fundamental irony from which nothing great, nothing beautiful,
not his own glory even, could escape; for he despised the nation whose
suffrages he sought; and no single spark of enthusiasm mixed with his
wish to astonish mankind.

It was during the interval between the return of Buonaparte (from
Italy), and his setting out for Egypt toward the end of 1787, that I
several times saw him in Paris; and never could I overcome the
difficulty which I experienced in breathing in his presence. I was one
day seated at table between him and the Abbe Sieyes; singular
situation, could I have foreseen the future! [Sieyes, two years later,
became one in a triumvirate of "consuls," of whom Napoleon was
another.] I scrutinized carefully the face of Napoleon; but every time
he detected my observing glances he had the art to rob his eyes of all
expression, as if they were changed to marble. His countenance was
then immobile, save a vague smile that he brought upon his lips at a
venture, in order to throw out any one who might wish to mark the
external signs of his thought.

It was not a light thing, and Madame de Stael did not feel it a light thing, to hold out as she did, never once dipping her colors, against the will and the power of the man whom she thus describes.

This passionate woman of genius, twice linked by marriage in a union marked by violent and opposite disparities of age--for the second husband was as much younger as the first was older than she--sought satisfaction for her hungry desire of love in "relations," if not ambiguous, at least apparently ambiguous, with men other than her husbands. One of these men was Benjamin Constant, whose conversational powers, exercised in partnership, never in rivalship, with Madame de Stael, helped make the society in which they shone as twin stars together, the admiration, the envy, the despair, of cultivated Europe. Benjamin Constant, as Madame de Stael's companion of travel in Germany, was no doubt part, though August Wilhelm Schlegel was part still greater, of the vitalizing intellectual influence that helped her produce her work on that country. Schlegel, by the way, had previously accompanied Madame de Stael in that Italian tour and sojourn of hers, the fruit of which was the novel, or the book of travels, or both in one, entitled "Corinne." This book was the first of her books to give its author a European fame. Besides being studied as a text-book in the schools, "Corinne" is still read as a production important in literary history.

The "De l'Allemagne" (literally "Concerning Germany") is generally esteemed the masterpiece of its author. From this we draw our illustrations by specimen of the literary quality of Madame de Stael. The "Germany" may be said to have first introduced that country to France, almost to Europe in general. Its scope is comprehensive. It describes Germany in a great variety of aspects; but it is on the literature of Germany that it expends its strength.

Madame de Stael's "Preface" to her "Germany," written in England, where, after its arbitrary suppression in France, the volume was finally published, is an interesting bit of reading. Witness one or two extracts:

My bookseller took upon himself the responsibility of the publication
of my book, after submitting it to the censors....

At the moment when the work was about to appear, and when the 10,000
copies of the first edition had been actually printed off, the
minister of the police, known under the name of General Savary, sent
his officers to the bookseller's, with orders to tear the whole
edition in pieces, and to place sentinels at the different entrances
to the warehouse, for fear a single copy of this dangerous writing
should escape.

What a glimpse is there incidentally afforded of the intolerable despotism of Napoleon!

Madame de Stael thinks silently of her lovely and beloved friend Madame Recamier, who had suffered from Napoleon by her relation with the exiled woman of letters, when still in her preface she writes:

Some of my friends were banished, because they had had the generosity
to come and see me; this was too much: to carry with us the contagion
of misfortune, not to dare to associate with those we love, to be
afraid to write to them, or pronounce their names, to be the object by
turns, either of affectionate attentions which make us tremble for
those who show them, or of those refinements of baseness which terror
inspires, is a situation from which every one, who still values life,
would withdraw!

We advance into the body of the work.

The German Lessing had himself found in his literary countrymen the same fault that Madame de Stael, near the beginning of her book, points out as follows:

In literature, as in politics, the Germans have too much respect for
foreigners, and not enough of national prejudices. In individuals it
is a virtue, this denial of self, and this esteem of others; but the
patriotism of nations ought to be selfish.

Bismarck and Moltke in politics and in war, Herman Grimm, for example, in literature, with his appalling claim for Goethe's "Faust," as the "greatest work of the greatest poet of all nations and times," have lately "changed all that." The fault of Germany now is not over-modesty.

The boundless freedom, nay, audacity, of speculative thought indulged by the Germans is stimulantly contrasted with their strangely contented subserviency (which then was) in more material matters. The sentence we italicize below was canceled by Napoleon's censors, before their master took the shorter method of canceling the book:

The enlightened men of Germany dispute vehemently among themselves the
dominion of speculations, and will suffer no shackles in this
department; but they give up, without difficulty, all that is real in
life to the powerful of the earth. _This real in life, so disdained by
them, finds, however, those who make themselves possessors of it, and
these, in the end, carry trouble and constraint even into the empire
of the imagination._

The following passage concerning Voltaire and a particular production of his pen is one of the most trenchantly critical expressions that the reader would find in the whole course of the "Germany." The German name of Leibnitz occurring in it will suggest the association of contrast by which such a criticism of a Frenchman found its way into a book treating of things German. Leibnitz had propounded a metaphysical theory of universal optimism, which--like all philosophic hypotheses, even those apparently least practical, let them once become widely entertained--was having its influence on national thought and national character. With Voltaire's "Candide" the readers of this volume will already have acquired sufficient acquaintance to make Madame de Stael's remarks upon it here presented additionally interesting:

Voltaire so well perceived the influence that metaphysics exercise
over the general bias of men's minds that to combat Leibnitz he wrote
_Candide_. He took up a curious whim against final causes, optimism,
free will, in short, against all the philosophical opinions that exalt
the dignity of man; and he composed _Candide_, that work of a
diabolical gayety, for it appears to be written by a being of a
different nature from ourselves, insensible to our condition, well
pleased with our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or an ape at
the miseries of that human species with which he has nothing in
common....

_Candide_ brings into action that scoffing philosophy, so indulgent in
appearance, in reality so ferocious; it presents human nature under
the most lamentable point of view, and offers us, in the room of every
consolation, the sardonic grin which frees us from all compassion for
others by making us renounce it for ourselves.

When Madame de Stael comes in due course to speak of the masterpiece of Goethe, his "Faust," she prepares her French readers to be shocked with a first disappointment. She says:

Certainly we must not expect to find in it either taste, or measure,
or the art that selects and terminates, but if the imagination could
figure to itself an intellectual chaos, such as the material chaos has
often been described, the _Faust_ of Goethe should in propriety have
been composed at that epoch.... The drama of _Faust_ certainly is not
a good model. Whether it be considered as an offspring of the delirium
of the mind, or of the satiety of reason, it is to be wished that such
productions may not be multiplied; but when such a genius as that of
Goethe sets itself free from all restrictions the crowd of thoughts is
so great that on every side they break through and trample down the
barriers of art.

We close our series of extracts by giving what this most brilliant among the French women that have been at the same time great talkers and great writers found to say of that high art of conversation in which her countrymen surpass the world and in which she surpassed her countrymen:

The _bon-mots_ of the French have been quoted from one end of Europe
to the other. Always they have displayed the brilliancy of their merit
and solaced their griefs in a lively and agreeable manner; always they
have stood in need of one another, as listeners taking turns in mutual
encouragement; always they have excelled in the art of knowing under
what circumstances to speak, and even under what circumstances to keep
still, when any commanding interest triumphs over their natural
liveliness; always they have possessed the talent of living a quick
life, of cutting short long discourses, of giving way to their
successors who are desirous of speaking in their turn; always, in
short, they have known how to take from thought and feeling no more
than is necessary to animate conversation without overstaking the
feeble interest which men generally feel for one another.

The French are in the habit of treating their own misfortunes lightly
from the fear of fatiguing their friends; they guess the weariness
which they would occasion by that which they would experience.... The
desire of appearing amiable induces men to assume an expression of
gayety, whatever may be the inward disposition of the soul; the
physiognomy by degrees influences the feelings, and that which we do
for the purpose of pleasing others soon takes off the edge of our own
individual sufferings.

_A sensible woman has said that Paris is, of all the world, the place
where men can most easily dispense with being happy._ [The foregoing
italicized passage was, Madame de Stael says, "suppressed by the
literary censorship under the pretext that there was so much happiness
in Paris now that there was no need of doing without it."] ... But
nothing can metamorphose a city of Germany into Paris.

... To succeed in conversation one must be able clearly to observe the
impression produced at each moment on people, that which they wish to
conceal, that which they seek to exaggerate, the inward satisfaction
of some, the forced smile of others; one may see passing over the
countenances of those who listen half formed censures which may be
evaded by hastening to dissipate them before self-love is engaged on
their side. One may also behold there the first birth of approbation,
which may be strengthened without, however, exacting from it more
than it is willing to bestow. There is no arena in which vanity
displays itself in such a variety of forms as in conversation.

I once knew a man who was agitated by praise to such a degree that
whenever it was bestowed upon him he exaggerated what he had just said
and took such pains to add to his success that he always ended in
losing it. I never dared to applaud him from the fear of leading him
to affectation and of his making himself ridiculous by the heartiness
of his self-love. Another was so afraid of the appearance of wishing
to display himself that he let fall words negligently and
contemptuously; his assumed indolence only betrayed one more
affectation, that of pretending to have none. When vanity displays
herself, she is good-natured; when she hides herself, the fear of
being discovered renders her sour, and she affects indifference,
satiety, in short, whatever may persuade other men that she has no
need of them. These different combinations are amusing for the
observers, and one is always astonished that self-love does not take
the course, which is so simple, of naturally avowing its desire to
please, and making the utmost possible use of grace and truth to
attain the object.

There is something in the foregoing strain of ascription from Madame de Stael to the social virtues of the French which recalls that remarkable character given by Pericles, in his noble funeral oration reported by Thucydides, to the national spirit and habit of the Athenians in contrast with those of their Spartan neighbors and enemies.

If of Madame de Stael the woman we shall in any respect have failed to give a just idea, it will be by not having adequately represented the generosity of her character. Her desire and her ability to shine should not be permitted, in any one's conception of her, to obscure her fondness and her fitness for loving and for being loved. Those who knew her intimately bear touching testimony to this quality of womanliness in the personal character of Madame de Stael. She was fundamentally an amiable, as she was conspicuously a strenuous, spirit, and no mutations in fashion or in taste will ever reduce her to less than a great tradition in literature.