Madame de Staël

by Bella Duffy

This is a very good example both of the clearness of Madame de Staël’s thought and the careless confusion of her style. She introduced metaphors just as they occurred to her, without any preparatory gradations of thought.

The second section of the work is devoted to the examination of natural affections such as family love, friendship, and pity. Here, again, the analysis is delicate and true, but the mind, fatigued by the futility of the theme, recoils from such minute dissection of emotion. Passion, being comparatively rare, is always interesting, but sentiment does not bear prolonged contemplation.

Finally come the remedies to be applied to the evils worked by passion. They consist in philosophy, in study, and the practice of benevolence, joined, if possible, to a child-like faculty of extracting from each hour just the amount of happiness that it contains. With this lame and impotent conclusion the book practically ends, for all the remaining reflections do not avail to place in any clearer light the uncertain and colorless thought of the writer.

Her next work was that on Literature Considered in Relation to Social Institutions. Its object was to establish the continuous progress and ultimate perfectibility of the human mind, and the happy influence exercised by liberty upon literature.

The theory of the authoress was that the progress of philosophy, i. e. thought, had been gradual, while that of poetry had been spasmodic.

Art, indeed, offering, by its early maturity, an awkward contradiction to her system, she proceeded to get rid of it by describing it as the product of imagination rather than of thought, and by adding that its plastic and sensuous qualities rendered it capable of flourishing under systems of government which necessarily crush every other form of intellectual activity. To prove the perfectibility of the human mind, she then had but poetry and philosophy. To the latter she assigned the really glorious future, while the former she regarded as finished. She was the first of the Romanticists, in the sense that she preferred the poetry of the north to that of the south; and her predilections in this line carried her so far, that she placed Ossian above Homer. She considered that the early forms of poetry—in other words, mere transcripts of material impressions—were superior to those later creations in which sentiment enters as an element. And this idea, which seems at first a contradiction to her theory of perfectibility, was really intended to confirm it. For, in her view, the value of literature consisting exclusively in the amount of thought that it contained, introspective poetry became a mere bridge which the mind traversed on its way to wider horizons.

Madame de Staël was not only not a poet herself, but she was incapable of appreciating the higher forms of poetry. In her excursions through the regions of literature, she was always in pursuit of some theory which would reconcile the contradictions of human destiny. Man, regarded as socially perfectible, being her ideal, she was in haste to classify and relegate to some convenient limbo the portions of a subject which did not directly contribute to her hypotheses. Having disposed, therefore, of poetry and art, she undertook to consider literature from the point of view of psychology. She was only pleased with it when self-conscious and analytical. Dante probably perplexed her, and she evoked to condemn him the perruqued shade of “Le Goût.” Shakespeare she applauded, as might be expected, chiefly in consideration of Hamlet; while Petrarch pleased her principally because he was harmonious; and Ariosto because he was fanciful. The true significance of the Renaissance escaped her. She sought for the origin of each literature in the political and religious institutions of the country where it arose, instead of regarding both literature and social conditions as simultaneous products of the national mind. Her erudition was inadequate to her task, and the purpose of her works, by warping her judgments, contributed to make them superficial. While pronouncing the English and French drama to be essentially superior to the Greek, she characteristically preferred Euripides to his two mighty predecessors. The grandeur of the dominant idea of Greek tragedy—that of an inevitable destiny, against which man struggles in vain—appears to have escaped her altogether. This is not surprising, since such a conception was entirely opposed to her own order of mind and to the age in which she lived. The root of all the social theories then prevailing was the value of the individual. Man was not a puppet of the gods, but the architect of his own fate. To lose hold of ideal virtue was to become incapable of governing or being governed; and ideal virtue was a definite entity which anybody might possess who chose. This—rather crudely stated—was Madame de Staël’s point of view. Her enthusiasm rejected all idea of limited responsibilities. The ethical value of the Æschylean trilogy—the awful sense of overhanging doom which pervades it—did not appeal to her, because it tended to the annihilation of the struggling soul. In other words, she liked self-conscious drama, and was attracted to Euripides by his creation of artificial situations, in which interesting personages had room and leisure to explain themselves.

With Aristophanes she was frankly disgusted; from her didactic standpoint, because of his pronounced indecency; and on artistic grounds, because he attacked living individuals instead of creating characters like Tartufe and Falstaff. To his beauties she remained entirely blind, and this, perhaps, is to be explained by her deficiency in the æsthetic faculty. It is said that Châteaubriand first taught her to appreciate nature, and Schlegel to perceive the loveliness of art. Chênedollé complained that she had lived for years opposite Lake Leman “without finding an image” in regard to it; and she herself once frankly admitted that of her own accord she would hardly open her window to gaze on the bay of Naples, while she would go a hundred miles to converse with a new mind.

Its defects admitted, we may own that Madame de Staël’s work contains many charming chapters. If, true to her theory, she provokes her reader by preferring the Latin poets to the Greek ones, and Quintilian to Cicero, simply because of their later date; if she persists, rather than modify her views, that the sterile scholasticism of the Middle Ages was not a real retrogression, and strangely overlooks, in her admiration for Christianity, the intellectual benefits which man owes to the Arabs; on the other hand, she has flashes of admirable insight. The chapter on the invasion of Italy by the barbarians, and the part played by Christianity in fusing the two races, is very suggestive. But, unfortunately, it is suggestive only, and sins by a sketchiness which, more or less, mars the whole book. This was one of Madame de Staël’s defects. She abounded in ideas, but failed either in the power or the patience to work them out.

Two other interesting chapters are those on the “Grace, Gaiety, and Taste of the French Nation,” and on “Literature in the Reign of Louis XIV.” The peculiar social influences which, among successive generations of courtiers, produced the best writers of France, are very happily described; but here again the conclusions are indicated rather than developed. Madame de Staël stated her conviction that the palmy days of French wit were over, and that the literature of the future, if it wished to flourish, must invest itself with greater gravity.