CHAPTER XV.
HER WORKS.
Any notice of Madame de Staël would be imperfect without a review of her works. She did not begin, like so many famous authors, to write at an abnormally early age—it is true, she composed Portraits, which were read aloud in her mother’s salon, but everybody did as much in those days, and her attempts were not sufficiently remarkable to stamp her at once as a literary genius. It has been said how much her father discouraged her writing. This may account in part for the tardy development of the taste, although more was doubtless due to the peerless conversations in which, before the Revolution, her young intellect found all that it could need of ideas. However this may be, she was twenty before she wrote Sophie, ou les Sentiments Secrets, that elegiac “comedy” which drew down on its authoress’s youthful head the animadversions of her austere mother. Madame Necker was shocked at the subject, which represented a young girl of seventeen struggling against a secret passion for her guardian, a married man, who is in love with her. Sophie (who, by the bye, is English) behaves in the noblest manner as soon as she discovers that her feelings are reciprocated, and leaves the home of which she has unwittingly destroyed the peace. Her guardian and his wife are no less equal to the occasion, and Milord Henri Bedford, Sophie’s slighted swain, is inspired by their example. Everybody expresses his or her sentiments in polished and prolix verse, and the curtain finally falls on four loftily eloquent and magnanimously miserable people. The style is not inflated, but the piece is very dull, and, while betraying little of the writer’s future talent, reveals two of her defects, exaggeration of sentiment and a want of humor.
To the same date as Sophie belong Jane Grey, a tragedy in five acts, also in verse, of no real merit; another tragedy, Montmorency, and three tales—all romantic and tiresome.
Finally, in 1788, when she was nearly twenty-two, Madame de Staël published her Letters on Rousseau, and thus established her position as an aspirant to literary fame. The book, coming from a woman, made a great sensation. Indeed, this fact of her sex must never be lost sight of in judging the reception accorded to Madame de Staël’s works. She attempted subjects of historical and philosophical interest which no woman in her country or age had approached before her.
As might be expected, she was an ardent admirer of Rousseau. Her sympathy with the philosophy of Helvetius was naturally slight. She required something declamatory, earnest, and didactic. In a glorification of natural sentiments to result in some future apotheosis of humanity lay the key to her creed. “Virtue” and still “virtue” and more “virtue” was her cry, as though “virtue” were a tangible and definitely constituted thing to be extracted en bloc out of the materials composing humanity. To such a mind it was inevitable that Emile and the Contrat Social should appeal more strongly than any number of witty epigrams at the expense of penitents and priests.
She sympathised with the philosophy of the eighteenth century in so far as it tended, by uprooting abuses, to promote the progress of culture and the emancipation of the oppressed, but she required some system that would reconstruct as well as destroy; and being a fervid believer in theories, disliked nothing so much as the idea of leaving the human race to take care of itself. Rousseau, as embodying a protest against the spirit of frivolous negation, appeared to her in the light of a prophet of perfection; and she saw in the approaching meeting of the States General a first step towards the realization of his views. These radiant ideals were destined to be suddenly and painfully obscured by the events of the Terror. Her only contribution to literature during that time was her celebrated and impassioned defence of the unhappy Queen. Public events so fascinated her attention that she had no leisure for any other thought. Two sentences in her Réflexions sur la Paix, published in 1794, reveal this preoccupation.
“During the reign of Robespierre,” she says, “when each day brought a list of devoted victims, I could only desire death, and long for the end of the world and of the human race which was witness to, or accomplice in, such horrors. I should have made a reproach to myself even of thought, because it was separate from sorrow.” In another passage she exclaims: “Oh appalling time, of which centuries will barely dim the trace; time which will never belong to the past!”
Nevertheless, Robespierre had hardly fallen, before her ever vivid faith in humanity revived in full force. She looked for safety to the faction which divided extreme revolutionaries from extreme reactionaries, and refused to believe that it could only act as a buffer. Its moderation was partly caused by exhaustion; yet Madame de Staël, always optimistic, maintained that having no passions it must have convictions, and that the trumpet-call of liberty would summon it to the front. In this she was mistaken; but in the course of her observations on public events she uttered one remarkable prophecy. “France,” she wrote, “may remain a republic; but to become a monarchy it must first submit to a military government.”
In 1790 she published her work on The Influence of the Passions upon Human Happiness. This was originally to have been divided into two parts. The first portion was to be devoted to reflections on man’s peculiar destiny; the second, to the constitutional fate of nations. We have to concern ourselves with the first alone, as the second, which would have required an immense and minute knowledge of ancient and modern governments, was never even begun.
In Madame de Staël’s view the true obstacle to individual and political happiness lay in the force of passion. Neutralize this, and the problem of government would be solved. Happiness, as she conceived it, was to consist in having hope without fear, activity without anxiety, glory without calumny, love without inconstancy—in a word, ideal good with no admixture of evil. The happiness of nations would consist in the combination of Republican liberty with monarchical calm, of emulation among talents unaccompanied by factious clamor, of military spirit in foreign affairs, and a law-abiding tendency in domestic matters. She concluded by saying that such an ideal is impossible of attainment, and the only achievable happiness is to be acquired by studying the true means of avoiding moral pain. To the discovery of this spiritual Nirvana her work was directed. The subject, as is evident, was a sterile one, since it dealt with abstractions that have no corresponding realities. To say that men and nations would be prosperous and contented without some particular institution or defect, is the same as to say that a human face would be beautiful without features. A blank surface is conceivable as a blank surface, but not as a physiognomy; and to speculate concerning ideal humanity divorced from social systems, imposes on thought the most futile exercise that ever occurred to an enlightened mind. Such being the case, it is not surprising that Madame de Staël should eventually have abandoned her self-imposed task. Even as much of it as she accomplished landed her on a moving morass of conclusions of which the essential nullity must have been evident to herself before anybody. For the rest, her analysis of the various passions is admirable. One wonders as one reads how a young woman could have reached so perfect a comprehension of the springs of human action. The penetration displayed is unerring, and only equalled by the masculine vigor of touch. A good example is the following: “Truly great men are such as have rendered a greatness like their own less necessary to successive generations.” And here is another striking passage: “A revolution suspends every action but that of force. Social order establishes the ascendancy of esteem and virtue, but a revolution limits men’s choice to their physical capacities. The only sort of moral influence that it does not exclude is the fanaticism of such ideas as, not being susceptible of any restraint, are weapons of war and not exercises of the mind. To aspire to distinction in times of revolution one must always outstrip the actual momentum of events, and the consequence of this is a rapid descent which one has no power of staying. In vain one perceives the abyss in front. To throw oneself from the chariot is to be killed by the fall, so that to avoid the danger is more perilous than to face it. One must of one’s own accord tread the path that leads to ruin, since the least step backwards overturns the individual but does not hinder the event.”