Somewhat later in the nineteenth century each of the three principal countries of Europe sent its greatest author into exile; England sent Byron; Germany, Heinrich Heine; and France, Victor Hugo; and not one of these men lost any of his literary influence from the fact of his exile. But with the beginning of the century the time had gone by when men of letters were a great power. Even a genius of Voltaire's calibre would hardly have exercised the powerful, tangible influence in this century which he did in his own. And Mme. de Staël was far from being Voltaire's equal in genius. Moreover, her task was of an entirely different nature. The outward power of the Church was temporarily broken, and in any case her mind was far too religious ever to have permitted her following in Voltaire's steps. The political despotism was so pronounced, that merely to omit the French Emperor's name from a work on Germany was regarded as a political demonstration and punished accordingly. But there was a task left undone by the Revolution with all its great outward reforms, a task the doing of which could not be forbidden by Imperial edict, and that was, the undermining of the mountain of religious, moral, social, national, and artistic prejudices which weighed upon Europe with an even heavier pressure than did the dominion of Napoleon, and which indeed had alone made that dominion possible. Voltaire himself had been entangled in many of these prejudices, especially the artistic and national. From Coppet, Mme. de Staël waged war upon them all. And none the less she, like Voltaire, found time to fulfil all social duties; she too had her own theatre, and she both wrote plays for it, and acted in them. The châtelaine of Coppet was as untrammelled intellectually and as noble in her aims as was the philosopher of Ferney; she was less fortunate and less powerful, but on account of her sex and her sufferings she is even more interesting. Voltaire succeeded in doing much for others. Mme. de Staël barely succeeded in defending herself.
[1] Mme. Necker de Saussure: Notice sur le Caractère et les Écrits de Mme. de Staël, p. 358.
[X]
"CORINNE"
In her book, Essai sur les Fictions, Mme. de Staël makes the first attempt to define her literary ideal. Her motto is: Avoid legend and symbol, avoid the fantastic and the supernatural; it is nature, it is reality, that must reign in poetry. She does not as yet seem to have apprehended the fundamental difference between poetry as psychical delineation, and poetry as the free play of the imagination, the difference which later became so clear to her that we may call the apprehension of it one of her most important deserts as an authoress; for it was by means of this clear apprehension that she assisted her countrymen to an understanding of the relative position of their national poetic art. The French are, namely, accustomed to regard knowledge of human nature founded upon observation as the substance, the essence of poetry—such knowledge as is displayed in Molière's Tartuffe and Misanthrope. And just as Frenchmen as a rule seek the essence of poetry in observation, Germans seek it in intensity of feeling, and Englishmen in an exuberance of imagination which refuses to be restricted by rules, and leaps at a bound from the horrible to the ideal, and from the serious to the comic, not limiting itself to the natural, but also not employing the supernatural otherwise than as a profound symbol.
The poetry which radiates from the Italian soil and the Italian people is something different again from all these. In Corinne, the improvisatrice, Mme. de Staël seeks to personify poetical poetry as opposed to psychological poetry, i.e. poetry as understood by Ariosto, as opposed to the poetry of Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe. In spite of her intention, however, she unconsciously makes Corinne half northern. No one who has not laboured painfully to attain to a real, thorough understanding of the point of view of an entirely foreign race can know how difficult it is to shake off one's innate national prejudices. To do so it is necessary to breathe the same air, to live for some time in the same natural environments, as the foreign race. But for the foreign travel made obligatory by her banishment, Mme. de Staël could not have expanded her power of apprehension as she did.
In all modesty I lay claim to be able to speak on this matter from experience. It was during lonely walks in the neighbourhood of Sorrento that I first succeeded in seeing Shakespeare at such a distance that I could get a full view of him and really understand him and, consequently, his antithesis. I remember one day in particular which was in this respect to me very momentous.—I had been spending three days in Pompeii. Of all its temples, that of Isis had interested me most. Here, thought I, stood that goddess whose head (now in the National Museum) has open lips and a hole in the back of the neck. I went down to the underground passage behind the altar, from which the priests, by means of a neatly adjusted reed, enabled the goddess to deliver oracles. The reflection involuntarily occurred to me that, in spite of the craft of the priests and the credulity of the people, it must have been extremely difficult to produce any effect of mystery in this climate. The temple is a pretty little house standing in the bright sunshine; there is no abyss, no darkness, no horror; even at night its outlines must have stood clearly defined in the moonlight or the starlight. The landscape, in combination with the sober sense of the Roman people, prevented any development of mysticism or romance.
I went on to Sorrento. The road, hewn in the mountain side, follows the sea, now projecting into it, now receding from it; where it recedes one looks down upon a great ravine, filled with olive trees. The aspect of the country is at once grand and smiling, wild and peaceful. The bare rocks lose their austerity, illuminated by such a brilliant sun, and in every ravine lie white cottages, or villas, or whole villages, framed in the shining green foliage of the orange trees or the soft velvety grey of the olives. Upon the other side the white towns lie strewn, as if scattered by a sugar-sifter, on the wooded sides of the mountains, right up to the topmost ridge. The sea was indigo blue, in some places steel blue, the sky without a cloud; and in the distance lay the enchantingly beautiful rocky island of Capri. Nowhere else is to be found such a glorious harmony of line and colour. Elsewhere, even in the most beautiful spots, there is always something to take exception to—the lines of Vesuvius, for example, melt almost too softly into the air. But Capri! The contours of its jagged rocks are like rhythmic music. What balance in all its lines! How grand and yet how delicate, how bold and yet how charming it all is! This is Greek beauty—nothing gigantic, nothing that appeals to the vulgar, but absolute harmony within clearly defined bounds. From Capri one sees the islands of the sirens, past which Ulysses sailed. Homer's Ithaca was like this, only perhaps less beautiful; for Greek-peopled Southern Italy is the only living evidence of what the climate of Greece was in ancient days; the land of Greece itself is now but the corpse of what it was.
It began to grow dark; Venus shone brilliantly, and the great flanks and clefts of the mountains gradually assumed the fantastic appearances which darkness imparts. But the general impression was not what a Northerner calls romantic. The sea still glimmered through the delicate foliage of the olives, its deep blue broken by branch and leaf. Then it was I realised that there is a world, the world of which the Bay of Naples is an image, of which Shakespeare knew nothing; because it is great without being terrible, and enchanting without the aid of romantic mists and fairy glamour. I now for the first time rightly understood such painters as Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin; I comprehended that their classic art is the expression of classic nature; and by force of contrast I understood better than ever before such a work as Rembrandt's etching of "The Three Trees"—which stand like sentient beings, like types of northern humanity, on the swampy field in the pouring rain. I understood how natural it is that a land such as this should not have produced a Shakespeare, or needed a Shakespeare, because here Nature has taken upon herself the task which falls to the lot of the poet in the North. Poetry of the profound, psychological species is, like artificial heat, a necessity of life where nature is ungentle. Here in the South, from the days of Homer to the days of Ariosto, poetry has been able to rest content with mirroring, clearly and simply, the clearness and simplicity of nature. It has not sought to probe the depths of the human heart, has not plunged into caverns and abysses in search of the precious stones which Aladdin sought, which Shakespeare found, but which the sun-god here scatters in lavish profusion over the surface of the earth.