Here is the full Nemesis of the sentiment that, to use Constant's own words, is "neither passion nor duty," and has the strength of neither, when it finds itself in presence of a stronger than itself. There were none of these unpleasant meetings in Sensibility proper. There sentiment met sentiment, and "exchanged itself," in Chamfort's famous phrase. When the rate of exchange became unsatisfactory it sought some other customer—a facile and agreeable process, which was quite consistent in practice with all the sighs and flames. Adolphe is not to be quit so easily of his conquest. He is recalled by his father, and his correspondence with Ellénore is described in one of the astonishingly true passages which make the book so remarkable.
During my absence I wrote regularly to Ellénore. I was divided between the desire of not hurting her feelings and the desire of truthfully representing my own. I should have liked her to guess what I felt, but to guess it without being hurt by it. I felt a certain satisfaction when I had substituted the words "affection," "friendship," "devotion," for the word "love." Then suddenly I saw poor Ellénore sitting sad and solitary, with nothing but my letters for consolation: and at the end of two cold and artificial pages I added in a hurry a few phrases of ardour or of tenderness suited to deceive her afresh. In this way, never saying enough to satisfy her, I always said enough to mislead her, a species of double-dealing the very success of which was against my wishes and prolonged my misery.
This situation, however, does not last. Unable to bear his absence, and half puzzled, half pained by his letters, Ellénore follows him, and his father for the first time expresses displeasure at this compromising step. Ellénore being threatened with police measures, Adolphe is once more perforce thrown on her side, and elopes with her to neutral territory. Then events march quickly. Her father's Polish property, long confiscated, is restored to him and left to her. She takes Adolphe (still struggling between his obligations to her and his desire to be free) to Warsaw, rejects an offer of semi-reconciliation from the Count de P——, grows fonder and more exacting the more weary of her yoke her lover becomes; and at last, discovering his real sentiments from a correspondence of his with an artful old diplomatic friend of his father's, falls desperately ill and dies in his arms. A prologue and epilogue, which hint that Adolphe, far from taking his place in the world (from which he had thought his liaison debarred him), wandered about in aimless remorse, might perhaps be cut away with advantage, though they are defensible, not merely on the old theory of political justice, but on sound critical grounds.
Mme. de Duras's "postscript."
Sensibilité and engouement.
This was the end of sensibility in more senses than one. It is true that, five years later than Adolphe, appeared Madame de Duras's agreeable novelettes of Ourika and Édouard, in which something of the old tone revives. But they were written late in their author's life, and avowedly as a reminiscence of a past state of sentiment and of society. "Le ton de cette société," says Madame de Duras herself, "était l'engouement." As happy a sentence, perhaps, as can be anywhere found to describe what has been much written about, and, perhaps it may be said without presumption, much miswritten about. Engouement itself is a nearly untranslatable word.[413] It may be clumsily but not inaccurately defined as a state of fanciful interest in persons and things which is rather more serious than mere caprice, and a good deal less serious than genuine enthusiasm. The word expresses exactly the attitude of French polite society in the eighteenth century to a vast number of subjects, and, what is more, it helps to explain the sensibilité which dominated that society. The two terms mutually involve each other, and sensibilité stands to mere flirtation on the one hand, and genuine passion on the other, exactly as engouement does to caprice and enthusiasm. People flirted admirably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the art was, I fancy, recovered in the nineteenth with some success, but I do not think they flirted, properly speaking, in the eighteenth.[414] Sensibility (and its companion "sensuality") prevented that. Yet, on the other hand, they did not, till the society itself and its sentiments with it were breaking up, indulge in anything that can be called real passion. Sensibility prevented that also. The kind of love-making which was popular may be compared without much fancifulness to the favourite card-game of the period, quadrille. You changed partners pretty often, and the stakes were not very serious; but the rules of the game were elaborate and precise, and it did not admit of being treated with levity.
Some final words on the matter.
Only a small part, though the most original and not the least remarkable part, of the representation of this curious phenomenon in literature has been attempted in this discussion. The English and German developments of it are interesting and famous, and, merely as literature, contain perhaps better work than the French, but they are not so original, and they are out of our province. Marivaux[415] served directly as model to both English and German novelists, though the peculiarity of the national temperament quickly made itself felt in both cases. In England the great and healthy genius of Fielding applied the humour cure to Sensibility at a very early period; in Germany the literature of Sensibility rapidly became the literature of suicide—a consummation than which nothing could be more alien from the original conception. It is true that there is a good deal of dying in the works of Madame de la Fayette and her imitators. But it is quite transparent stage-dying, and the virtuous Prince of Clèves and the penitent Adelaide in the Comte de Comminge do not disturb the mind at all. We know that, as soon as the curtain has dropped, they will get up again and go home to supper quite comfortably. It is otherwise with Werther and Adolphe. With all the first-named young man's extravagance, four generations have known perfectly well that there is something besides absurdity in him, while in Adolphe there is no extravagance at all. The wind of Sensibility had been sown, in literature and in life, for many a long year, and the whirlwind had begun to be reaped.[416]