Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

by Georg Brandes

It stood in her power even now, after years of exile, persecution, and practical imprisonment, to obtain liberty, and permission once more to write and publish; it was privately intimated to her that a slight change of opinion or attitude would procure her the right to return to France; but she would not purchase liberty at this price. And when it was said to her later in more definite terms: "Speak or write one little word about the King of Rome, and all the capitals of Europe will be open to you;" all she replied was: "I wish him a good nurse."

Isolated and closely confined, she came to the decision to make a determined attempt to escape from Coppet. It was her desire to go to America, but that was impossible without a passport, and how was she to procure one? She feared, besides, that she might be arrested on her way to the port she must sail from, on the pretext that she intended to go to England, which was forbidden her under penalty of imprisonment. And she was well aware that when the first scandal had blown over, there would be nothing to prevent the Government quietly leaving her in prison; she would soon be completely forgotten. She contemplated the possibility of reaching Sweden by way of Russia, the whole of North Germany being under the control of the French. She believed she could manage to escape through the Tyrol without being delivered up by Austria, but a passport to Russia must be procured from St. Petersburg, and she feared that if she wrote for this from Coppet, she might be denounced to the French Ambassador; she must get to Vienna first and write from there. For six months she pored over the map of Europe, studying it to find a way of escape as eagerly as Napoleon studied it to find the paths by which he was to proceed on his conquest of the world. When, after a month's delay, a last petition for a passport to America was refused (although Mme. de Staël had pledged herself, if it were granted, to publish nothing there), the weak, brave woman determined upon a decisive attempt to escape. One day in 1812, she and her daughter drove away from Coppet, with their fans in their hands, and not a single box or package in the carriage. They arrived safely at Vienna, and wrote to St. Petersburg for Russian passports. But the Austrian Government was so anxious to avoid complications with France that Mme. de Staël was detained upon the frontier of Galicia, and was followed by spies through the whole of Austrian Poland. When she stopped on her journey to spend a single day at Prince Lubomirski's, the Prince was obliged to give an Austrian detective a seat at his table, and it was only by threats that Mme. de Staël's son prevented the man taking up his position at night in her bedroom. Not till she had passed the Russian frontier did she breathe freely again. But the feeling of freedom did not last long, for she had barely reached Moscow before rumours that the French army was approaching the city compelled her to take flight again, and it was not until she reached St. Petersburg that she could consider herself in safety.

The year before her flight from Coppet, Mme. de Staël, then forty-five years of age, had been privately married to a young French officer of twenty-three, Albert de Rocca, who had been severely wounded, and had come to Switzerland a complete invalid, exhausted by loss of blood. The sympathy which Mme. de Staël showed him roused a passionate devotion in the young soldier, and this led to a secret union. Rocca joined Mme. de Staël upon the Russian frontier.

Her intention was to travel to Constantinople and Greece, in search of the correct local colouring for a poem she was planning on Richard Coeur de Lion. Reading Byron seems to have inspired her with the idea of this poem, which was, she said, to be a Lara, though not a reflection of Byron's. The fear, however, that the fatigues of the journey might be too great for her young daughter and De Rocca, decided her to go to Stockholm instead. There she renewed her friendship with Bernadotte and met her old friend, Schlegel, whom Bernadotte had made a Swedish noble and his own private secretary. Through Schlegel, Bernadotte also made the acquaintance of Constant, whom he created a Knight of the Northern Star, and whom he vainly attempted to persuade into concurrence in his ambitious designs on the French throne. As far as Bernadotte's character was concerned, Mme. de Staël was less keen-sighted than Constant; she always speaks of him with warmth; their common hatred of Napoleon was, doubtless, a bond of union. In her case it became a dumb hatred from the moment that the allied armies marched against France. She laments the necessity of wishing Napoleon success, but she can no longer separate his interests from those of France. Possessed of more strength of character than Constant, she rejected the overtures made to her by Napoleon during the Hundred Days. She survived his final downfall, and saw with sorrow the return of the Bourbons, more virulent enemies of freedom than the autocrat they displaced. She foregathered once more with Constant in Paris in 1816; and in the following year she died.

This brief summary of the life of a remarkable woman and of the life-conflict of her maturer years, is a sufficient groundwork for the elaboration of a complete picture of her character as a woman and a writer. Innate warmth of heart and intelligence were her original gifts; her warm-heartedness developed into broad-minded philanthropy, and her intelligence into a power of receptivity and reproduction which was akin to genius.

She possessed in a marked degree several of the characteristics of the eighteenth century—sociability, for instance, and love of conversation accompanied by remarkable conversational powers. Whereas George Sand, the great authoress of the nineteenth century, was reserved and silent in company, and only revealed her inner self when she wrote, Mme. de Staël was a lively improvisatrice. She possessed the gift of electrifying; her words shed a stream of light upon the subject of which she spoke. All who knew her personally said that her books were as nothing in comparison with her conversation. One of her critics ends a review thus: "When one listens to her, it is impossible not to agree with her; if she had said all this instead of writing it, I should not have been able to criticise;" and a great lady said jestingly: "If I were Queen I should command Mme. de Staël to talk to me constantly." The countless sayings which have been preserved give us, in spite of the chilling influence of print, some idea of the sparkle and originality of her conversation. One day when she was discoursing on the unnaturalness of parents arranging marriages instead of doing the only right thing, allowing the young girl to choose for herself, she cried laughingly: "I shall compel my daughter to marry for love." One of Napoleon's friends having informed her that the Emperor would pay her the two millions her father had entrusted to the Bank of France if he were certain of her attachment, she replied: "I knew that a certificate of birth would be required before I could obtain my money, but I did not expect to be asked for a declaration of love."

But behind the ready wit and the facility of expression which are the qualities developed by a social age, lay much of the fervour and the soul which the nineteenth century has not failed to appreciate. The much admired châtelaine of Coppet, the fêted, fascinating leader of society, was a genuine, natural woman. The want of sympathy between her and her mother had, as already noted, early strengthened her tendency to believe in and love human nature. The idea of duty as conflicting with nature rather than guiding it was repulsive to her. In her work De l'Influence des Passions, she considers the passions in their relation, not to the idea of duty, but to the idea of happiness, investigating into the proportionate infringement of each upon our happiness. In Corinne she says: "Nothing is easier than to make a grand pretence of morality while condemning all that is noble and great. The idea of duty ... can be turned into a weapon of offence, which the mediocre, perfectly satisfied with their mediocrity and narrow-mindedness, employ to impose silence upon the gifted, and to rid themselves of enthusiasm, of genius, in short, of all their enemies."

The temperamental foundation upon which Mme. de Staël built was genuinely feminine. The final ideal of this undeniably ambitious woman was a purely personal, purely idyllic one—happiness in love. It is upon this that her two great novels, Delphine and Corinne, turn; the improbability of finding it in marriage as ordained by society, and the impossibility of finding it outside marriage, are her fundamental ideas; and the perpetual conflict between domestic happiness and noble ambitions or free love, is merely the expression of her constant complaint, that neither genius nor passion is compatible with that domestic happiness which is her heart's eternal desire. In her books the woman only seeks the path of fame when she has been disappointed in all her dearest hopes. To Mme. de Staël the heart is everything; even fame was to her only a means of conquering hearts. Corinne says: "When I sought glory, I always had the hope that it would make people love me," and Mme. de Staël herself exclaims: "Do not let us give our unjust enemies and our ungrateful friends the triumph of crushing, of suppressing our powers. It is they who force those who would so willingly have been content with feeling, to seek fame."

It is this warm-heartedness, one might almost say motherliness, which, in her case, gives the melancholy of the age a peculiar imprint. Hers is not only that universal human melancholy that arises from the certainty with which two human beings who love one another can say: "The day is coming when I shall lay you in the grave, or you me." Still less is it the egotistical despondency to be found in so many of the male writers of the day. It is a depression connected with the struggle for ideal equality and liberty of those revolutionary times, it is the sadness of the enthusiastic reformer.

From her youth she had been such an enthusiast on the subject of equality that even in the matter of ability she regarded all men as essentially equal, assuming only the most trifling difference between the genius and the ordinary man. From the time she sat upon her father's knee she had cherished the strongest faith in the power of liberty to make men happy and to call forth all that is good in them, and her faith did not waver even on the September day when she was compelled to flee from that Reign of Terror which was the result of an experiment in equality, or when, under the Consulate, she was banished by the dictatorship into which liberty had resolved itself. But it is small wonder that a veil woven of sadness and despondency early dimmed the brightness of her spirit. At the close of a letter to Talleyrand, whom in the days of her power she had saved from banishment, but who was not sufficiently grateful to attempt to make her any return, she writes: "Farewell! Are you happy? with so superior an intellect do you not penetrate to what is at the core of everything—unhappiness?" And in Corinne the heroine repeats what Mme. de Staël herself often said: "Of all the capacities with which nature endowed me, the capacity of suffering is the only one I have developed to its full extent."