The De l’Allemagne.
That this book is, as far as criticism goes, her masterpiece, there can be no doubt, and it would be surprising if it were not so. She was older; she had read more; and she had enjoyed very distinguished “coaching.” This kept her fairly straight in matters of fact within the comparatively limited range which she here allowed herself as far as literature is concerned. German literature had taken itself by this time pretty seriously for a couple of generations: and the German men of letters whom she interrogated or “led about,” were perfectly competent and apparently not unwilling[[185]] to keep her from such absurdities as we have just been noticing. Very much of the book is plain, straightforward compte rendu, and generally très bien rendu, whatever minor faults one may find here and there. Above all, the expressed and very fairly carried out purpose of comparative study which made Napoleon so angry, and with such good reason,[[186]] gives the book an honourable place as a precursor, if not, indeed, an absolute origin, in a new way which had to be trodden. If Napoleon’s innate and colossal vulgarity had not been constantly tripping up his immense cleverness, he might have perceived that here was a new feather of some consequence to stick in his sham crown-imperial. The analyses and précis of such short things as Lenore and the Braut von Korinth are rather excessive for a book: but neither piece is easily translatable into French, and Madame de Staël probably knew very well that few of her dear quasi-countrymen were likely to learn German, in order to read them.
The old leaven of French and philosophe taste and culture shows itself at intervals interestingly. She cites[[187]] (a little generously perhaps in any case) the line in Raynouard’s Les Templiers, when the reprieve arrives too late to save the knights who have been chanting hymns on the pyre
“Mais il n'était plus temps; les chants avaient cessés,”
in connection with the yoke of the unities. But, strangely enough, she does not seem to notice the weakening and watering down of what she calls l’un des mots les plus sublimes qu’on puisse entendre au théâtre, by its being made part of the speech of a messenger. The voices of the warrior-priests ceasing one by one in agony, and the reprieve coming on the silence of the last, would be, though a rather melo-dramatic, a really dramatic moment. The recital of the situation is a little less ordinary than talk “of the rain and the fine time,” and that is all.
This, however, is succeeded by some really acute, and in French quite novel, criticism of Shakespeare as too subtle, too impartial, &c., for the stage—criticism which she had probably learnt from Schlegel,—and the whole chapter[[188]] is important; as is that on “Comedy,” though the definition[[189]] from Schlegel himself, with which it starts, is very nearly galimatias.
There is much good sense in the criticism of German romance, though the old leaven once more appears in the statement that “verse is required for the marvellous; prose will not do.”[[190]] Always on Goethe she is good, and, “philosophess” as she is, she has some very sensible remarks on the over-dose of metaphysic in Schiller’s criticism. On most of her subjects, indeed, from Wieland to Jean Paul, she is still worth reading.
Her critical achievement—Imputed.