CHAPTER X.
MADAME DE STAËL VISITS GERMANY.
At Metz Madame de Staël was received in triumph. The Prefect of the Moselle entertained her, parties were given in her honor, and all the literary big-wigs of the place hastened to do her homage. She there, for the first time, came into personal contact with Charles de Villers, with whom she had previously corresponded on the subject of Kant. Of course she was charmed with him, her first impulse invariably being to find every clever or distinguished person delightful. Her friendship with him resembled all her friendships. She began by expecting to have inspired as much enthusiasm as she felt, possibly a little more, seeing that she was a woman, and such a woman, and exiled to boot. Villers, a cross-grained kind of Teuton, had no idea of allowing his theories, which were extremely sturdy on all subjects, to be spirited away by any of Madame de Staël’s conversational conjuring tricks. They discussed philosophy, and he railed sourly at French taste; and, perhaps by way of proving his final emancipation from all such fetters, he had obtained the companionship of a certain Madame de Rodde, whom Madame de Staël described, with some asperity, as a “fat German.”
But she separated from the philosopher still quite charmed with his appreciation of the good and true, and not in the least repulsed by his ways. On the contrary, she wrote to him shortly afterwards, reproaching him passionately with his silence. One can imagine how absurd such exactions must have seemed to the good Villers, with his head full of Kant and Madame de Rodde to attend to his comforts; but the truth was that Madame de Staël’s mood just then caused her to make herself needlessly miserable about everything. To Mathieu de Montmorency she wrote that she was filled with terror, and fancied that death must shortly overtake her father, children, friends, everybody dear to her.
She seemed to forget entirely that it was her own choice which had taken her to Germany; Napoleon had banished her merely from Paris; and there was nothing to prevent her returning to Coppet to soothe the last years and enjoy the conversation of her venerated father. But this did not suit her; she required a wider intellectual horizon and more varied society.
For many reasons, some of them dependent on the political bias of monarchical writers, it has been the fashion to proclaim Madame de Staël’s opposition to Napoleon as inspired by pure hatred of despotism. To us this does not seem quite a correct version. If it were, Madame de Staël would have been a totally different person; colder, less impulsively benevolent, less thoroughly womanly. All through her life her conduct was determined by her feeling towards individuals. While professing republicanism she counted, as we have seen, hosts of reactionary friends; the claims to consideration of noble names and social distinctions weighed powerfully with her; and all her love of liberty could not save her from being torn by sympathy for every Royalist head that fell during the Revolution. Such a catholicity of feeling constitutes a charming woman, but not a great politician; and Madame de Staël’s liberal instincts and penetrating insight only lent force to her hatred of Napoleon, they did not originate it. There was a natural antagonism between their natures—circumstances increased this, and obstinacy on both sides confirmed it—and Madame de Staël made the most of a persecution which, while condemning her to inaction, added enormously to her fame.
That Napoleon in his most transcendent moments was great simply by stupendous intellect and amazing will; that in his baser moments he was inconceivably callous, cynical, arrogant and mean, perhaps few persons in these days will be found to deny. But it is overstating the case to assert, as has been done, that he persecuted Madame de Staël from unmitigated envy of her superiority. Much as he resented intellectual power in a woman, it is nevertheless most likely that what really inspired his action against Madame de Staël was her turbulent disposition and the restless mind which made her the centre of Parisian opposition. As to this opposition itself, without any wish to detract from its sublimity, it may fairly be asked whether—at the time Constant began his denunciations, and Madame de Staël encouraged them—it was altogether well-timed. To declaim against Napoleon’s growing despotism was perhaps irresistible to independent spirits; but such declamation necessarily remained sterile of results in the state in which France then was. What would these orators have substituted for the strong will of a Dictator? The greed for place of a Talleyrand? The mystic fervor of a Montmorency? The dissolute ambition of a Barras? Between the sanguinary excesses of the Terreur Rouge, the lust for revenge of the Terreur Blanche, the incorrigible short-sightedness and criminal frivolity of the “Coblentz” faction, the diseased logic of the Jacobins, and the frightful collapse of intelligence, morality, decency, and humanity that extended from end to end of France, it is difficult to understand what ruler could have governed it for other ends than personal ones. Napoleon sprang armed from the ruin of France, as a kind of fatal embodiment of all the evil under which she groaned and all the crime that stained her. And yet who shall say that his career of conquest, desolating as it was, could have been spared from European history? It enters as a factor into almost all that this closing century has brought us—the unity of Italy, the power of Germany, France’s own awakening to the limitations of her destiny. It was not given to any mortal, eighty years ago, to foresee all this; and Madame de Staël, who was in most things of a preternatural acuteness, only foresaw the coming despotism and its immediate, not its ultimate, results. Nevertheless, had her bias against Napoleon not been a personal one, she might have submitted more quietly to his first acts of tyranny, and only protested when his insatiable ambition had prostrated France at the feet of the nations. She might have done this, because she was constantly led away by her feelings, and could be blind on occasion. That she was not more dazzled by Napoleon must be considered a lucky accident.
In Germany the feeling in regard to her was not generally favorable. The mightiest minds, indeed, admired her great intellect; and Goethe’s unwilling homage is the brightest jewel in her crown. But it was as a woman that she excited a somewhat sour antipathy. Her plaintive little friend Madame de Beaumont had called her a tourbillon, and Heine has only added a doubtful picturesqueness to this description when designating her a “whirlwind in petticoats.” But as a most disturbing element she certainly did introduce herself into German society. Rahel Varnhagen acidly—it is difficult to help thinking ungenerously—echoes the usual complaint of her obstreperousness, saying, with striking lack of originality, by the way, “She is nothing to me but an inconvenient hurricane.”
Schiller, as is well known, was infinitely more magnanimous. He had made up his mind as to her kind of intellect before she came. In 1798 he had already pronounced her to be of an “exalted, reasoning, entirely unpoetical nature”; and, although he clung, after seeing her, to his conviction that “of poetry she had no conception,” he was obviously surprised and enchanted at her native goodness, her healthy simplicity of mind, and unaffectedness. To her penetration, brilliancy and vivacity, he does full justice. And if, as her book on Germany afterwards showed, his statement that “nothing existed for her unless her torch could illuminate it,” was as misleading as are most metaphors, still its descriptiveness enables one exactly to understand the particular sort of splendor with which Madame de Staël flashed through the windings of the German mind.