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

by Georg Brandes

By means of this typical character of D'Erfeuil, Mme. de Staël shows how in France all good feelings are held in check by one vice, that fear of society which has its origin in vanity. It seems to her as if all feeling, the whole of life, indeed, were ruled by esprit, by the desire to appear to advantage, and by a fear which may be expressed in the words, "What will people say?" An author who writes not long after Mme. de Staël, the acute and original Henri Beyle, is of the same opinion. His name for Frenchmen is les vainvifs and he asserts that all their actions are dictated by the consideration, Qu'en dira-t-on? the fear, that is to say, of the unbecoming or ridiculous. The French were then, what the Danes are still, very proud of their keen sense of the comical; it was this which led them to describe themselves modestly as the wittiest nation in the world. Corinne maintains that this sense of the ridiculous, with the corresponding fear of being ridiculous, destroys all originality in manners, in dress, and in speech, prevents all free play of imagination, and stifles natural expression of feeling. She maintains that feeling, that every kind of intellectuality, is obliged to take the form of wit instead of the form of poetry, in a country where the fear of becoming the victim of wit or mockery makes each man try to be the first to seize those weapons. "Are we," she asks D'Erfeuil, "only to live for what society may say of us? Is what others think and feel always to be our guiding star? If this be so, if we are intended to imitate each other for ever and ever, why has each one of us been given a soul? Providence might have spared itself this unnecessary outlay."

The national prejudices of France are typified in D'Erfeuil; in Oswald we have a personification of all the prejudices which have been part of England's strength and England's weakness throughout the centuries. Powerful nations are always unjust, and their injustice both adds to their power and limits it. It was upon this injustice that Mme. de Staël considered it her mission to throw a very strong light.

The story of the book turns upon the attempt of a woman to regain, by means of a man's love, that place in English society which she has forfeited by too great independence, by entering the arena of public life; consequently what the authoress chiefly dwells upon in her delineation of English character is the narrowness of the English conception of ideal womanhood. From this conception, with which he has been brought up, Oswald makes sincere but fruitless efforts to free himself. When, in Italy, he sees Corinne admired and loved for her great gifts, without a thought being given to her sex or her enigmatical past, he is greatly perplexed. There is something repulsive to him in a woman's leading this public life. He is accustomed to look upon woman as a sort of higher domestic animal, and for long cannot reconcile himself to the idea of society forgiving her the crime of having talent. He feels himself as it were humiliated and exasperated by the thought; he regards it as impossible that a woman with such a well-developed, independent mind should be capable of binding herself faithfully to one man and living contentedly for him alone. And though, in spite of everything, Corinne loves him, loves him with a passion beside which all that he has seen or heard of pales, and which is so unselfish that it leads her to risk her reputation for his sake without demanding anything whatever in return, he forgets her, her great gifts, her nobility of mind and soul, the moment he stands once again upon English soil, inhales English mists and prejudices, and meets a fresh young girl of sixteen, the very perfection of a wife after the English recipe, reserved, ignorant, innocent, silent, a fair-haired, blue-eyed incarnation of domestic duty.

The authoress tracks the prejudice which explains Oswald's conduct to its source, which she finds to be the English conception of home. Oswald's principal difficulty in coming to a decision about Corinne is expressed in the words: "Of what use would all that be at home?" "And home is everything to us—to the women, at least," remarks an Englishman to Oswald; and the authoress herself remarks elsewhere: "Though it is possible for an Englishman to find pleasure for a time in foreign ways and customs, his heart invariably returns to the impressions of his childhood. If you ask the Englishman you meet on board ship in foreign climes whither he is bound, he answers, if he is upon the return journey: 'Home.'"[1] It is to this English love of home that she attributes both the superstition that the independent intellectual development of woman is absolutely incompatible with the domestic virtues, and the English idolatry of these virtues. And, strange as it may seem to us to see the Italian woman, nowadays so indifferent to everything intellectual, set up as a model of independence, there is no doubt that Mme. de Staël is right. The ideal of well-being conveyed by the word home, is a genuine Northern, Teutonic conception, originally so foreign to the Latin races that the English word home has passed into the Latin languages, because these possess no equivalent. To this conception of home corresponds the word "cosiness" (untranslatable into any Latin language), which was created to express the pleasure of being able to sit warm and comfortable within four walls. We have not far to seek for the origin of this ideal. The inhabitant of Northern Europe, living in a raw climate, amidst cold, harsh natural surroundings, finds the same pleasure in the thought of sitting by a warm hearth whilst snow and rain beat impotently on the window pane, which a Neapolitan feels in the thought of sleeping under the warm, glorious, starry sky, or passing the cool night in dance, play, and song, in the open air. But to each of these different ideals of well-being and happiness corresponds a different conception of virtues and duties, which the nation that possesses or enforces them regards as the universal conception. It considers itself the first among nations because it exacts the fulfilment of these particular duties and possesses these particular virtues (which is not surprising, seeing that both are naturally entailed by the national character), and it moreover censures all the nations whose conceptions differ from its own.

Speaking of England, Oswald asks Corinne: "How could you leave the home of chastity and morality and make fallen Italy the country of your adoption?" "In this country," Corinne replies, "we are modest; neither proud of ourselves like the English, nor pleased with ourselves like the French." It gratifies her to put both the Puritanic arrogance of the Northerner and the vain Frenchman's fear of ridicule to shame, by comparing them with the frank naturalness which the people of Italy even in their humiliation have preserved. She describes, delicately and truthfully, the touching naïveté with which the latter display their emotions. There is no stiff reserve, as in England, no coquetry, as in France; here the woman simply desires to please the man she loves, and cares not who knows it. One of Corinne's friends, returning to Rome after an absence of some duration, calls upon a distinguished lady. He is informed by the servant that "the Princess does not receive to-day; she is out of spirits, she is innamorata." Corinne tells how indulgently a woman is judged in Italy, and how frankly she owns her feelings. A poor girl dictates a love-letter to a writer in the open streets, and the man writes it with the utmost seriousness, never omitting to add all the polite forms which it is his business to know; hence some poor soldier or labourer receives a letter in which many tender assurances occupy the space between "Most honoured contemporary!" and "Yours with reverential respect." Corinne is perfectly correct. I have myself seen such letters. And, on the other hand, it seems as if learning had not been at all unusual among the Italian women of those days. A Frenchman in Corinne who calls a learned woman a pedant, receives the reply: "What harm is there in a woman's knowing Greek?"

Neither does Corinne fail to perceive that the official recognition and support of duty and morality in the North is accompanied by the greatest brutality in all cases in which the laws of society have once been transgressed. She shows how the Englishman respects no promise or relation which has not been legally registered, and how in strict England the sanctity of marriage and an irreproachable home life exist side by side with the most shameless and bestial prostitution, just as the personal devil exists side by side with the personal God. She remarks, with womanly circumspection and modesty, but yet quite plainly: "In England it is the domestic virtues which constitute woman's glory and happiness; but, granted that there are countries in which love is to be met with outside the bonds of holy matrimony, then undoubtedly among all these countries Italy is the one in which most regard is shown to woman's happiness. The men of that country have a code of morality for the regulation of those relations which are without the pale of morality—a tribunal of the heart." It is the same tribunal as that of the mediæval Courts of Love. Byron is greatly impressed when he comes to Italy and finds this complete moral code, exactly the opposite of the English. Mme. de Staël as usual tries to explain the milder morality by the milder climatic conditions; she says: "The aberrations of the heart inspire a more indulgent compassion here than in any other country. Jesus said of the Magdalen: 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.' Those words were spoken under a sky as beautiful as ours. The same sky invokes for us the same Divine mercy."

Corinne, who is herself a Catholic, teaches the Scottish Protestant who loves her, to understand Italian Catholicism. "In this country, Catholicism, having had no other religion to combat, has become milder and more indulgent than it is anywhere else; in England, on the other hand, Protestantism, in order to annihilate Catholicism, has been obliged to arm itself with the utmost severity of principle and morality. Our religion, like the religion of the ancients, inspires the artist and the poet; is a part, so to speak, of all the pleasures of our life; while yours, which has had to adapt itself to a country where reason plays a much more important part than imagination, has received an imprint of moral severity which it will always retain. Ours speaks in the name of love, yours in the name of duty. Although our dogmas are absolute, our principles are liberal, and our orthodox despotism adapts itself to the circumstances of life, while your religious heresy insists upon obedience to its laws without making any allowance for exceptional cases."

She shows how, in consequence of this, there is always a certain dread of genius, of intellectual superiority, in Protestant countries. "It is a mistaken fear," she says; "for it is very moral, this superiority of mind and soul. He who understands everything becomes very compassionate, and he who feels deeply becomes good."

"Why are great powers a misfortune? Why have they prevented my being loved? Will he find in another woman more mind, more soul, more tenderness than in me? No, he will find less; but he will be content, because he will feel himself more in harmony with society. What fictitious pleasures, what fictitious sorrows are those we owe to society! Under the sun and the starry heavens all that human beings need is to love and to feel worthy of each other; but society! society! how hard it makes the heart, how frivolous the mind! how it leads us to live only for what others will say of us! If human beings could but meet freed from that influence which all collectively exercise upon each, how pure the air that would penetrate into the soul! how many new ideas, how many genuine emotions would refresh it!"—"Receive my last salutation, O land of my birth!" cries Corinne in her swan song in praise of Rome—and one feels the bitterness of the exile and the thrust at Napoleon in the words that follow: "You have not grudged me fame, O liberal-minded people that do not banish women from your temples, that do not sacrifice immortal talent to passing jealousies! You welcome genius wherever you recognise it; for you know that it is a victor without victims, a conqueror that does not plunder, but takes from eternity wherewith to enrich time."

This sketch of the contrast between the emotional life of Catholicism and that of Protestantism prepares for a digression on the contrast between their respective views of art. On this latter point the book makes a decided attack on Protestant arrogance and want of all understanding of art, as exhibited by Oswald, who represents the narrowest English ideas.