Schiller—poor man!—was quite pathetic over her amazing volubility, which left him, with his halting French, a hopeless distance behind her. It is rather comic to trace the dismay at her exhausting personality which pierces through all his admiration for, and interest in, her mind. To Goethe, who was coquetting at Jena, and wished the brilliant stranger to come there to him, Schiller later writes: “I saw the De Staël yesterday, in my house, and again to-day at the Dowager Duchess’s. One would be reminded of the sieve of the Danaïdes, if Oknos with his donkey did not then occur to one.” He fears she will have to discover that the Germans in Weimar can be fickle, as well as the French, unless it strikes her soon that it is time she went. To Körner he complained that the devil had brought the French female philosopher to torment him just in the middle of his new play.
He found her, of all mortals within his experience, “the most gesticulative, combative, and talkative,” even while admitting that she was almost the most cultivated and intellectual of women. But he declared that she destroyed all poetry in him, and waxed plaintive once again over his ineffectual struggles with French. He proclaimed that not to admire her for her fine mind and liberality of sentiment was impossible; and he breathed a sigh of the most unfeigned relief when she departed. All the Court personages felt that they had been having a severe time of it; although the bright and petulant Duchess Amelia was enchanted in the first instance, and wrote to Goethe imploring him to come and study the phenomenon. He resisted for a long while, but finally arrived—not without a previous sneer or two. Madame de Staël was charmed to know him—in fact, her days in Weimar passed in a perfect effervescence of delight. While the Germans were coldly, sometimes rather snarlingly, criticizing her, she was admiring them. Schiller she speaks of with the liveliest enthusiasm. Their acquaintance began with an animated discussion on the respective merits of French and foreign dramas. Madame de Staël maintained that Corneille and Racine were unsurpassable. Schiller, of course, differed; and managed to make her heed his reasons, in spite of his difficulty in speaking French. His quiet simplicity and earnestness, as well as his originality of mind, became instantly manifest to the illustrious stranger. With her, admiration meant always the most ungrudging friendship; and this was the sentiment with which Schiller inspired her for the rest of his days. Goethe she found cold, and she was characteristically disappointed at his no longer displaying the passionate ardor of Werther “Time has rendered him a spectator,” she says; yet she admits the universality of his mind and his prodigious information when once prevailed on to talk. It is provoking to think that she never saw the best of Goethe, and that this disappointing result was—although she was far, indeed, from guessing it—her own fault chiefly; for she informed the poet that she intended to print his conversation, and of this Goethe had a horror. He states as much in a letter to Schiller, and gives as his reason the sorry figure which Rousseau had cut in his correspondence—just then published—with Madame de la Tour Franqueville and her friend.
The Dowager Duchess Amelia was a vivacious, pleasure-loving, singularly intelligent, and liberal-minded woman, who had governed the duchy during her son’s minority admirably, and made allies for herself among the best German intellects. Thanks to her, her son Karl August had been so trained, that, in the midst of a court circle to which the light of the eighteenth century had barely penetrated, he showed a most manly contempt for the ideals of mistresses of the robes and silver sticks in waiting, and swept all such fripperies away to become the dearest friend of Goethe. His duchess (whose courage both extorted Napoleon’s admiration and saved her husband from further proofs of his ire) was a woman of grand character, and as great a contrast, except in what was really best in both of them, to her lively mother-in-law as could well be imagined. She insisted on the most uncompromising observance of etiquette, and wore to the last day of her life the costume which had prevailed in the years when she was young.
Of this remarkable trio of exalted personages it was the reigning duchess whom Madame de Staël selected for her friend. Indeed, she never mentions the Dowager Duchess in corresponding with the daughter-in-law, and in her Allemagne dismisses the Grand Duke with a few lines, in which she alludes to his military talents and speaks of his conversation as piquante and thoughtful.
From Weimar, Madame de Staël went to Berlin, with letters from their highnesses of the little court to the lovely and charming Queen Louise.
In a well-known letter to the Grand Duchess (the first of their long correspondence), she records a fête which took place immediately after her arrival. It was a masquerade representing Alexander’s return to Babylon; and the beautiful queen, of whom Madame de Staël is lost in admiration, danced in it herself. To this pageant succeeded various costume quadrilles, in which Kotzebue appeared as a priest of Mercury, poppy crowned, caduceus in hand, and so ugly and awkward, that Madame de Staël wonders why her imagination was not irretrievably ruined by the sight of him.
One likes to think of her at this court in the midst of such famous and distinguished people; the personages so outwardly brilliant, so inwardly dull, who surrounded her having vanished down the gulfs of Time, her own unique personality stands out vividly against the picturesque but confused background reconstructed by our fancy.
At Berlin she first saw and liked August Wilhelm Schlegel, destined later to be so unwelcome to Sismondi, Bonstetten, and her other friends at Coppet. She succumbed at once to the varied attractions of his colossal learning, his surprising linguistic accomplishments, and his great conversational powers. She felt that here was a foeman worthy of her steel, and she magnanimously overlooked his acerbity, his pedantry and vanity. She had indeed a royal indifference to the defects of great minds. It was only the greatness she cared for.
Berlin was destined to be associated with the greatest, perhaps the most genuine, grief of her life. She left it pleased with her reception, enriched with new friends, new experiences, and new ideas. She had been happier there than six months previously she would have admitted she could ever be again; far happier than at Coppet, which for years past had only been a place where she tarried and amused herself as she could until the moment came for returning to Paris. She had treasured up a wealth of conversation for her father—all kinds of novel and delightful impressions which she felt would be listened to by nobody so appreciatively as by him; and she started for Vienna, there to glean a little more. But she had hardly set foot in Austria when a courier brought her the news that her father was dangerously ill. He was, in truth, dead, and the messenger knew it; but the fact was withheld, to be broken to her later on. She instantly quitted Vienna, where, as she expresses it, “her happiness had ended,” and started homewards. On the road her father’s death was communicated to her. Her grief was overpowering and demonstrative to the last degree. It was not only sorrow that she felt, but an overmastering terror, for it seemed to her that with her father her last moral support had vanished. Henceforward she would bend to the storms of life like a reed.
On arriving at Coppet, she sank into a condition that temporarily resembled dementia. The idea that in losing her father her whole existence was irretrievably wrecked from its moorings, and would drift aimlessly in the future, again filled her mind, and this time with greater force. To every remonstrance she only answered, “I have lost my father.” She soon recovered—strangely soon as it seemed to many—her old elasticity and fire, but a curious secret change was wrought in her from the hour of her loss. She showed mystic yearnings, and became even a little superstitious. She invoked her father in her prayers, and nothing deeply agreeable to her ever happened without her saying, “My father has obtained this for me.”