The next day she leaves with him the narrative of her youth. She is the daughter of Lord Edgermond by an Italian wife, consequently the half-sister of Lucile. At the age of fifteen she had gone to England, and fallen under the rule of her stepmother, Lady Edgermond, a cold and rigid Englishwoman, who cared for nothing outside her small provincial town, and regarded genius as a dangerous eccentricity. In the narrow monotony of the life imposed upon her Corinne nearly died. At the age of twenty-one she finally escaped and returned to Italy, having dropped her family name out of respect for Lady Edgermond’s feelings. Until her meeting with Oswald she had led the life of a muse, singing, dancing, playing, improvising for the whole of Roman society to admire, and had conceived no idea of greater felicity until learning to love. This love had been a source of peculiar torment to her from the fact of her divining how much the unconventionality of her conduct, when fully known to him, must shock Oswald’s English notions of propriety. In the first moment, however, his love triumphs over these considerations, and he resolves to marry Corinne. Only he wishes first—in order that no reproach may attach to her—to force Lady Edgermond once again to acknowledge her as her husband’s daughter. He goes to England, partly for this purpose, partly because his regiment has been ordered on active service.
In England he again meets Lucile, a cold-mannered, correct, pure-minded, but secretly ardent English girl, with an odd resemblance in many ways to a French jeune fille. He mentions the subject of her step-daughter to the upright but selfish Lady Edgermond, who has set her heart on seeing Oswald the husband of Lucile. She is too honorable to try and detach him from Corinne by any underhand means, but does what she knows will be far more effectual; that is, she makes him acquainted with the fact that his father had seen Corinne in her early girlhood, had admired her, but had strongly pronounced against the marriage proposed by Lord Edgermond between her and Oswald. In the view of the late Lord Nelvil, she was too brilliant and distinguished for domestic life. This is a terrible blow to Oswald. He begins to think he must give up Corinne, and is strengthened in the idea by perceiving that the beautiful and virtuous Lucile is in love with him. Finally he marries her, decided at the last by Corinne’s inexplicable silence. She has not answered his letters for a month, and he concludes that she has forgotten him. But her silence is owing to her having left Venice and come to England. She loses a whole month in London, for very insufficient reasons—necessary, however, to the story—and at last follows Oswald to Scotland just in time to learn that he is married, to fall senseless on the road-side, and to be picked up by the Count D’Erfeuil. She returns heart-broken to Italy, and dies slowly through four long years of unbroken misery.
When she is near her end Oswald comes to Florence, accompanied by his wife and child. He had begun to regret Corinne as soon as he had married Lucile, who, on her side, being naturally resentful, takes refuge in coldness and reserve. As soon as Lord Nelvil learns that his old love is in Florence and dying he wishes ardently to see her, but she refuses to receive him. He sends the child to her, and she teaches it some of her accomplishments. Lucile visits her secretly, and is converted by her eloquence to the necessity of rendering herself more attractive to her husband by displaying some graces of mind.
At last Corinne consents to see Oswald once again, but it shall be, she determines, in public. This is one of the most unnatural scenes in the book. Corinne invites all her friends to assemble in a lecture hall. Thither she has herself transported and placed in an arm-chair. A young girl clad in white and crowned with flowers recites the Song of the Swan, or adieu to life, which Corinne has composed, while Oswald, listening to it and gazing on the dying poetess from his place in the crowd, is suffocated with emotion and finally faints. A few days later Corinne dies, her last act being to point with her diaphanous hand to the moon, which is partially obscured by a band of cloud such as she and Lord Nelvil had once seen when in Naples.
Even as a picture of Italy, Corinne leaves much to be desired. Madame de Staël’s ideas of art were acquired. She had no spontaneous admiration even for the things she most warmly praised, and her judgments were conventional and essentially cold. Some of the descriptions are good in the sense of being accurate and forcibly expressed. But even in the best of them—that of Vesuvius—one feels the effort. Madame de Staël is wide-eyed and conscientious, but has no flashes of inspired vision. She can catalogue but not paint. A certain difficulty in saying enough on æsthetic subjects is rendered evident by her vice of moralizing. Instead of admiring a marble column as a column, or a picture as a picture, she finds in it food for reflection on the nature of man and the destiny of the world. Some of her remarks on Italian character are extremely clever, and show her usual surprising power of observation; but they are generally superficial.
This was due, in part, to her system of explaining everything by race and political institutions, in part to her passion for generalization. Because Italians had produced the finest art and some of the finest music; because they had no salons and wrote sonnets; because they had developed a curiously systematic form of conjugal infidelity; finally, because they had no political liberty, Madame de Staël constructed a theory which represented them as simply passionate, romantic, imaginative and indulgent. This theory has cropped up now and again in literature from her days to our own, and if partially correct, overlooks the subtler shades and complex contradictions of the Italian mind.
Roman society in the beginning of this century was far from being the transfigured and exotic thing represented in Corinne. The modern Sibyl’s prototype, poor Maddalena Maria Morelli, was mercilessly pasquinaded, and on her road to the Capitol pelted with rotten eggs. This gives a very good idea of the sort of impression that would have been produced on a real Prince of Castel-Forte and his fellows by the presence in their midst of a young and beautiful woman, unmarried, nameless, and rich. Corinne’s lavish exhibition of her accomplishments is another “false note,” as singing and dancing were but rarely, if ever, performed by amateurs in Italy. What redeems the book are the detached sentences of thought that gem almost every page of it. Madame de Staël had gradually shaken off the vices of style which her warmest admirers deplore in her, and in her Allemagne she was presently to reveal herself as singularly lucid, brilliant, and acute. This work of hers on Germany is, perhaps, the most satisfactory of her many productions. As a review of society, art, literature, and philosophy, it naturally lends itself to the form best suited to her essentially analytical mind.
Madame de Staël was always obliged to generalize, that being a law of her intelligence, and this disposition is accentuated in the Allemagne, through her desire to establish such contrasts between Germany and France, as would inspire the latter with a sense of its defects. She saw Germany on the eve of a great awakening, and was not perhaps as fully conscious of this as she might have been. As Saint Beuve happily says, she was not a poet, and it is only poets who, like birds of passage, feel a coming change of season. Germany appealed to her, however, through everything in herself that was least French; her earnestness, her vague but ardent religious tendencies, her spiritualism, her excessive admiration of intellectual pursuits. She was, therefore, exceptionally well-qualified to reveal to her own countrymen the hitherto unknown or unappreciated beauties of the German mind.
She was, on the other hand, extremely alive to the dullness of German, and especially of Viennese, society, and portrays it in a series of delightfully witty phrases. The Allemagne is indeed the wittiest of all her works, and abounds in the happiest touches.