It is not necessary to supply fuller argument of the text which follows, and of which, when the reader has got this length, he is not likely to let the dénoûment escape him. But the action of Corinne gets rather slowly under weigh; and I have known those who complained that they found the book hard to read because they were so long in coming to any clear notion of "what it was all about." Therefore so much argument as has been given seems allowable.
But we ought by this time to have laid sufficient foundation to make it not rash to erect a small superstructure of critical comment on the book now once more submitted to English readers. Of that book I own that I was myself a good many years ago, and for a good many years, a harsh and even a rather unfair judge. I do not know whether years have brought me the philosophic mind, or whether the book—itself, as has been said, the offspring of middle-aged emotions—appeals more directly to a middle-aged than to a young judgment. To the young of its own time and the times immediately succeeding it appealed readily enough, and scarcely Byron himself (who was not a little influenced by it) had more to do with the Italomania of Europe in the second quarter of this century than Madame de Stael.
The faults of the novel indeed are those which impress themselves (as Mackintosh, we have seen, allowed) immediately and perhaps excessively. M. Sorel observes of its companion sententiously but truly, "Si le style de Delphine semble vieilli, c'est qu'il a été jeune." If not merely the style but the sentiment, the whole properties and the whole stage management of Corinne seem out of date now, it is only because they were up to date then. It is easy to laugh—not perhaps very easy to abstain from laughing—at the "schall" twisted in Corinne's hair, where even contemporaries mocked the hideous turban with which Madame de Stael chose to bedizen her not too beautiful head; at Nelvil's inky cloak; at the putting out of the fire; at the queer stilted half-Ossianic, half-German rants put in the poetess's mouth; at the endless mingling of gallantry and pedantry; at the hesitations of Nelvil; at the agonies of Corinne. When French critics tell us that as they allow the good-humoured satire on the Count d'Erfeuil to be just, we ought to do the same in reference to the "cant Britannique" of Nelvil and of the Edgermond circle, we can only respectfully answer that we should not presume to dispute their judgment in the first case, but that they really must leave us to ours in the second. As a matter of fact, Madame de Stael's goody English characters, are rather like Miss Edgeworth's naughty French ones in Leonora and elsewhere—clever generalisations from a little observation and a great deal of preconceived idea, not studies from the life.
But this (and a great deal more that might be said if it were not something like petty treason in an introduction-writer thus to play the devil's advocate against his author) matters comparatively little, and leaves enough in Corinne to furnish forth a book almost great, interesting without any "almost," and remarkable as a not very large shelf-ful in the infinite library of modern fiction deserves remark. For the passion of its two chief characters, however oddly, and to us unfashionably, presented, however lacking in the commanding and perennial qualities which make us indifferent to fashion in the work of the greatest masters, is real. And it is perhaps only after a pretty long study of literature that one perceives how very little real passion books, even pretty good books, contain, how much of what at times seems to us passionate in them owes its appeal to accident, mode, and the personal equation. Of the highest achievement of art—that which avails itself of, but subdues, personal thought and feeling in the elaboration of a perfectly live character—Madame de Stael was indeed incapable. But in the second order—that which, availing itself of, but not subduing, the personal element, keeps enough of its veracity and lively force to enliven a composite structure of character—she has here produced very noteworthy studies. Corinne is a very fair embodiment of the beauty which her author would so fain have had; of the youthful ardour which she had once actually possessed; of the ideas and cults to which she was sincerely enough devoted; of the instruction and talent which unquestionably distinguished her. And it is not, I think, fanciful to discover in this heroine, with all her "Empire" artifice and convention, all her smack of the theatre and the salon, a certain live quiver and throb, which, as has been already hinted, may be traced to the combined working in Madame de Stael's mind and heart of the excitements of foreign travel, the zest of new studies, new scenes, new company, with the chill regret for lost or passing youth and love, and the chillier anticipation of coming old age and death. It is a commonplace of psychology that in shocks and contrasts of this kind the liveliest workings of the imagination and the emotions are to be expected. If we once establish the contact and complete the circle, and feel something of the actual thrill that animated the author, we shall, I think, feel disposed to forgive Corinne many things—from the dress and attitude which recall that admirable frontispiece of Pickersgill's to Miss Austen's Emma, where Harriet Smith poses in rapt attitude with "schall" or scarf complete, to that more terrible portrait of Madame de Stael herself which editors with remorseless ferocity will persist in prefixing to her works, and especially to Corinne. We shall consent to sweep away all the fatras and paraphernalia of the work, and to see in the heroine a real woman enough—loving, not unworthy of being loved, unfortunate, and very undeserving of her ill fortune. We shall further see that besides other excuses for the mere guide-book detail, the enthusiasm for Italy which partly prompted it was genuine enough and very interesting as a sign of the times—of the approach of a period of what we may call popularised learning, culture, sentiment. In some respects Corinne is not merely a guide-book to Italy; it is a guide-book by prophecy to the nineteenth century.
The minor characters are a very great deal less interesting than Corinne herself, but they are not despicable, and they set off the heroine and carry out what story there is well enough. Nelvil of course is a thing shreddy and patchy enough. He reminds us by turns of Chateaubriand's René and Rousseau's Bomston, both of whom Madame de Stael of course knew; of Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, with whom she was very probably acquainted; but most of no special, even bookish, progenitor, but of a combination of theoretic deductions from supposed properties of man in general and Englishman in particular. Of Englishmen in particular Madame de Stael knew little more than a residence (chiefly in émigré society) for a short time in England, and occasional meetings elsewhere, could teach her. Of men in general her experience had been a little unfortunate. Her father had probity, financial skill, and, I suppose, a certain amount of talent in other directions; but while he must have had some domestic virtues he was a wooden pedant. Her husband hardly counted for more in her life than her maître d'hôtel, and though there seems to have been no particular harm in him, had no special talents and no special virtues. Her first regular lover, Narbonne, was a handsome, dignified, heartless roué of the old régime. Her second, Benjamin Constant, was a man of genius, and capable of passionate if inconstant attachment, but also what his own generation in England called a thorough "raff"—selfish, treacherous, fickle, incapable of considering either the happiness or the reputation of women, theatrical in his ways and language, venal, insolent, ungrateful. Schlegel, though he too had some touch of genius in him, was half pedant, half coxcomb, and full of intellectual and moral faultiness. The rest of her mighty herd of male friends and hangers-on ranged from Mathieu de Montmorency—of whom, in the words of Medora Trevilian it may be said, that he was "only an excellent person"—through respectable savants like Sismondi and Dumont, down to a very low level of toady and tuft-hunter. It is rather surprising that with such models and with no supreme creative faculty she should have been able to draw such creditable walking gentlemen as the Frenchman Erfeuil, the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian Castel-Forte; and should not have produced a worse hero than Nelvil. For Nelvil, whatever faults he may have, and contemptible as his vacillating refusal to take the goods the gods provide him may be, is, after all, if not quite a live man, an excellent model of what a considerable number of the men of his time aimed at being, and would have liked to be. He is not a bit less life-like than Byron's usual hero for instance, who probably owes not a little to him.
And so we get to a fresh virtue of Corinne, or rather we reach its main virtue by a different side. It has an immense historical value as showing the temper, the aspirations, the ideas, and in a way the manners of a certain time and society. A book which does this can never wholly lose its interest; it must always retain that interest in a great measure, for those who are able to appreciate it. And it must interest them far more keenly, when, besides this secondary and, so to speak, historical merit, it exhibits such veracity in the portraiture of emotion, as, whatever be its drawbacks, whatever its little temptations to ridicule, distinguishes the hapless, and, when all is said, the noble and pathetic figure of Corinne.
George Saintsbury.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] I am creditor neither to praise nor to blame for this translation, which is the old English version brought out in the same year as the original, but corrected by another hand for the present edition in the pretty numerous points where it was lax or unintelligent in actual rendering. In the places which I have compared, it seems to me to present that original very fairly now; and I am by no means sure that an excessively artificial style like that of the French Empire is not best left to contemporaries to reproduce. At any rate, a really good new translation of Corinne would be a task unlikely to be achieved except by rather exceptional talents working in labour of love: and I cannot blame the publishers of this issue for not waiting till such a translator appeared.