French Classics Part 27

It was not a light thing, and Madame de Stael did not feel it a light thing, to hold out as she did, never once dipping her colors, against the will and the power of the man whom she thus describes.

This pa.s.sionate woman of genius, twice linked by marriage in a union marked by violent and opposite disparities of age--for the second husband was as much younger as the first was older than she--sought satisfaction for her hungry desire of love in "relations," if not ambiguous, at least apparently ambiguous, with men other than her husbands. One of these men was Benjamin Constant, whose conversational powers, exercised in partnership, never in rivalship, with Madame de Stael, helped make the society in which they shone as twin stars together, the admiration, the envy, the despair, of cultivated Europe.

Benjamin Constant, as Madame de Stael's companion of travel in Germany, was no doubt part, though August Wilhelm Schlegel was part still greater, of the vitalizing intellectual influence that helped her produce her work on that country. Schlegel, by the way, had previously accompanied Madame de Stael in that Italian tour and sojourn of hers, the fruit of which was the novel, or the book of travels, or both in one, ent.i.tled "Corinne." This book was the first of her books to give its author a European fame. Besides being studied as a text-book in the schools, "Corinne" is still read as a production important in literary history.

The "De l'Allemagne" (literally "Concerning Germany") is generally esteemed the masterpiece of its author. From this we draw our ill.u.s.trations by specimen of the literary quality of Madame de Stael.

The "Germany" may be said to have first introduced that country to France, almost to Europe in general. Its scope is comprehensive. It describes Germany in a great variety of aspects; but it is on the literature of Germany that it expends its strength.

Madame de Stael's "Preface" to her "Germany," written in England, where, after its arbitrary suppression in France, the volume was finally published, is an interesting bit of reading. Witness one or two extracts:

My bookseller took upon himself the responsibility of the publication of my book, after submitting it to the censors....

At the moment when the work was about to appear, and when the 10,000 copies of the first edition had been actually printed off, the minister of the police, known under the name of General Savary, sent his officers to the bookseller's, with orders to tear the whole edition in pieces, and to place sentinels at the different entrances to the warehouse, for fear a single copy of this dangerous writing should escape.

What a glimpse is there incidentally afforded of the intolerable despotism of Napoleon!

Madame de Stael thinks silently of her lovely and beloved friend Madame Recamier, who had suffered from Napoleon by her relation with the exiled woman of letters, when still in her preface she writes:

Some of my friends were banished, because they had had the generosity to come and see me; this was too much: to carry with us the contagion of misfortune, not to dare to a.s.sociate with those we love, to be afraid to write to them, or p.r.o.nounce their names, to be the object by turns, either of affectionate attentions which make us tremble for those who show them, or of those refinements of baseness which terror inspires, is a situation from which every one, who still values life, would withdraw!

We advance into the body of the work.

The German Lessing had himself found in his literary countrymen the same fault that Madame de Stael, near the beginning of her book, points out as follows:

In literature, as in politics, the Germans have too much respect for foreigners, and not enough of national prejudices. In individuals it is a virtue, this denial of self, and this esteem of others; but the patriotism of nations ought to be selfish.

Bismarck and Moltke in politics and in war, Herman Grimm, for example, in literature, with his appalling claim for Goethe's "Faust," as the "greatest work of the greatest poet of all nations and times," have lately "changed all that." The fault of Germany now is not over-modesty.

The boundless freedom, nay, audacity, of speculative thought indulged by the Germans is stimulantly contrasted with their strangely contented subserviency (which then was) in more material matters. The sentence we italicize below was canceled by Napoleon's censors, before their master took the shorter method of canceling the book:

The enlightened men of Germany dispute vehemently among themselves the dominion of speculations, and will suffer no shackles in this department; but they give up, without difficulty, all that is real in life to the powerful of the earth. _This real in life, so disdained by them, finds, however, those who make themselves possessors of it, and these, in the end, carry trouble and constraint even into the empire of the imagination._

The following pa.s.sage concerning Voltaire and a particular production of his pen is one of the most trenchantly critical expressions that the reader would find in the whole course of the "Germany." The German name of Leibnitz occurring in it will suggest the a.s.sociation of contrast by which such a criticism of a Frenchman found its way into a book treating of things German. Leibnitz had propounded a metaphysical theory of universal optimism, which--like all philosophic hypotheses, even those apparently least practical, let them once become widely entertained--was having its influence on national thought and national character. With Voltaire's "Candide" the readers of this volume will already have acquired sufficient acquaintance to make Madame de Stael's remarks upon it here presented additionally interesting:

Voltaire so well perceived the influence that metaphysics exercise over the general bias of men's minds that to combat Leibnitz he wrote _Candide_. He took up a curious whim against final causes, optimism, free will, in short, against all the philosophical opinions that exalt the dignity of man; and he composed _Candide_, that work of a diabolical gayety, for it appears to be written by a being of a different nature from ourselves, insensible to our condition, well pleased with our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or an ape at the miseries of that human species with which he has nothing in common....

_Candide_ brings into action that scoffing philosophy, so indulgent in appearance, in reality so ferocious; it presents human nature under the most lamentable point of view, and offers us, in the room of every consolation, the sardonic grin which frees us from all compa.s.sion for others by making us renounce it for ourselves.

When Madame de Stael comes in due course to speak of the masterpiece of Goethe, his "Faust," she prepares her French readers to be shocked with a first disappointment. She says:

Certainly we must not expect to find in it either taste, or measure, or the art that selects and terminates, but if the imagination could figure to itself an intellectual chaos, such as the material chaos has often been described, the _Faust_ of Goethe should in propriety have been composed at that epoch.... The drama of _Faust_ certainly is not a good model. Whether it be considered as an offspring of the delirium of the mind, or of the satiety of reason, it is to be wished that such productions may not be multiplied; but when such a genius as that of Goethe sets itself free from all restrictions the crowd of thoughts is so great that on every side they break through and trample down the barriers of art.

We close our series of extracts by giving what this most brilliant among the French women that have been at the same time great talkers and great writers found to say of that high art of conversation in which her countrymen surpa.s.s the world and in which she surpa.s.sed her countrymen:

The _bon-mots_ of the French have been quoted from one end of Europe to the other. Always they have displayed the brilliancy of their merit and solaced their griefs in a lively and agreeable manner; always they have stood in need of one another, as listeners taking turns in mutual encouragement; always they have excelled in the art of knowing under what circ.u.mstances to speak, and even under what circ.u.mstances to keep still, when any commanding interest triumphs over their natural liveliness; always they have possessed the talent of living a quick life, of cutting short long discourses, of giving way to their successors who are desirous of speaking in their turn; always, in short, they have known how to take from thought and feeling no more than is necessary to animate conversation without overstaking the feeble interest which men generally feel for one another.

The French are in the habit of treating their own misfortunes lightly from the fear of fatiguing their friends; they guess the weariness which they would occasion by that which they would experience.... The desire of appearing amiable induces men to a.s.sume an expression of gayety, whatever may be the inward disposition of the soul; the physiognomy by degrees influences the feelings, and that which we do for the purpose of pleasing others soon takes off the edge of our own individual sufferings.

_A sensible woman has said that Paris is, of all the world, the place where men can most easily dispense with being happy._ [The foregoing italicized pa.s.sage was, Madame de Stael says, "suppressed by the literary censorship under the pretext that there was so much happiness in Paris now that there was no need of doing without it."] ... But nothing can metamorphose a city of Germany into Paris.

... To succeed in conversation one must be able clearly to observe the impression produced at each moment on people, that which they wish to conceal, that which they seek to exaggerate, the inward satisfaction of some, the forced smile of others; one may see pa.s.sing over the countenances of those who listen half formed censures which may be evaded by hastening to dissipate them before self-love is engaged on their side. One may also behold there the first birth of approbation, which may be strengthened without, however, exacting from it more than it is willing to bestow. There is no arena in which vanity displays itself in such a variety of forms as in conversation.

I once knew a man who was agitated by praise to such a degree that whenever it was bestowed upon him he exaggerated what he had just said and took such pains to add to his success that he always ended in losing it. I never dared to applaud him from the fear of leading him to affectation and of his making himself ridiculous by the heartiness of his self-love. Another was so afraid of the appearance of wishing to display himself that he let fall words negligently and contemptuously; his a.s.sumed indolence only betrayed one more affectation, that of pretending to have none. When vanity displays herself, she is good-natured; when she hides herself, the fear of being discovered renders her sour, and she affects indifference, satiety, in short, whatever may persuade other men that she has no need of them. These different combinations are amusing for the observers, and one is always astonished that self-love does not take the course, which is so simple, of naturally avowing its desire to please, and making the utmost possible use of grace and truth to attain the object.

There is something in the foregoing strain of ascription from Madame de Stael to the social virtues of the French which recalls that remarkable character given by Pericles, in his n.o.ble funeral oration reported by Thucydides, to the national spirit and habit of the Athenians in contrast with those of their Spartan neighbors and enemies.

If of Madame de Stael the woman we shall in any respect have failed to give a just idea, it will be by not having adequately represented the generosity of her character. Her desire and her ability to shine should not be permitted, in any one's conception of her, to obscure her fondness and her fitness for loving and for being loved. Those who knew her intimately bear touching testimony to this quality of womanliness in the personal character of Madame de Stael. She was fundamentally an amiable, as she was conspicuously a strenuous, spirit, and no mutations in fashion or in taste will ever reduce her to less than a great tradition in literature.

XX.

CHATEAUBRIAND.

1768-1848.

Chateaubriand--his is a faded fame. He was a false brilliant from the first, but he glittered during his time like a veritable Mountain of Light. Men hardly found out till he died that instead of being precious stone he was nothing but paste.

Our figure misrepresents the fact. Chateaubriand was _not_ thus spurious through and through. He had streaks of genuine in him. His true symbol perhaps would be a common rubble-stone flawed splendidly with diamond.

The reaction of disparagement, which is now the critical vogue as to Chateaubriand's personal and literary value, meets occasional stout challenge from redoubtable voices. Mr. Matthew Arnold, for instance, protests against it, triumphantly citing out of the author for whom he stands up what certainly would read like the utterance of a mind both large and n.o.ble, could one rid one's self of the feeling that Chateaubriand in writing it had his own case chiefly in view, as follows:

It is a dangerous mistake, sanctioned, like so many other dangerous mistakes, by Voltaire, to suppose that the best works of imagination are those which draw the most tears.... The true tears are those which are called forth by the beauty of poetry; there must be as much admiration in them as sorrow.

The author of the foregoing, a.s.suredly, excites with his pathos quite as much admiration as sorrow.

Chateaubriand forms an essential link in the chain of literary history for France. He const.i.tutes almost the sole representative of French literature for the period of the First Empire, so-called--that is, the time of the supreme ascendency of Napoleon Bonaparte. Madame de Stael alone needs to be named as his rival and peer. Chateaubriand, in his day--and his day was a long one, for he outlived the empire, the restoration, and the reign of Louis Philippe--was well-nigh an equal power with Napoleon himself. In his own opinion, he was fully such; for his self-complacency was unbounded.

Never in the history of letters did it twice happen to an author to be better served by opportunity than in two cases was Chateaubriand. The Encyclopaedists, with Voltaire and Rousseau, had had their hour, and a reaction had set in, when Chateaubriand's "Genius of Christianity"

appeared. It was the exact moment for such a book. It seemed to create the reactionary movement with which it coincided, and it rendered its author not merely famous, but powerful. Napoleon saw his account in making use of a writer who had the secret of such popularity. Besides, the Napoleonic sagacity was equal to perceiving that return to religious belief was needful for France. Napoleon made overtures to Chateaubriand, which Chateaubriand accepted. The author took office at the gift of the dictator.

But Chateaubriand was himself too supremely an egotist to be securely attached to another egotist's interest by any flattery that could be bestowed upon him. When, at the word of Napoleon, the Duke d'Enghien was murdered, Chateaubriand--let him have the credit of his high spirit--resigned his office and separated himself from the tyrant who had conferred it. Chateaubriand's first happy synchronism with the course of events was his publishing the "Genius of Christianity" when he did. His second was his publishing the pamphlet "Bonaparte and the Bourbons" at the very moment when that restoration impended which raised Louis XVIII. to the throne of France. The new monarch acknowledged that Chateaubriand's book had been worth an army to his cause.

Chateaubriand prolonged his literary career to a great age, enjoying almost to the end an undisputed supremacy among the authors of France.

There has seldom been a more uncloudedly, more dazzlingly, brilliant contemporary success achieved by any writer of any age or any nation.

The renown continues, but the splendor of the renown has pa.s.sed away.

Why? Our answer is, Chateaubriand's writing is vitiated by a vein of unreality, of falseness, running through it. This character in his writing but reflected, we fear, a character in the writer. There is ground for suspecting that Chateaubriand was at heart lacking in genuineness. It was inseparable defect in the man that gave that hollow ring to the words. It is but a just reprisal upon Chateaubriand that his literary fame should suffer by the fault detected in his personal character. A man's words are seldom in the long run more weighty than the man.

Chateaubriand was a kind of continuer and modifier of a celebrated French writer that preceded him. He was a better-bred, a much purified, an aristocratic Rousseau. He may be p.r.o.nounced second greatest in the succession of the literary sentimentalists of France.

Rene Francois Augustus, Viscount de Chateaubriand, to give him now his full name and t.i.tle, lived a life replete with adventure and vicissitude. At twenty-three years of age he fled from the horrors of the French Revolution to travel in America and to find a north-west pa.s.sage to the Polar Sea. He called, with a letter of introduction, on President Washington, to whose prudent dissuasion of the young man from his project of arctic exploration, founded on the difficulty of the task, Chateaubriand had the French readiness, together with the necessary egotism, to make the complimentary reply: "But, sir, my task is not so difficult as yours was, that of creating a state." In his posthumous biography, the "_Memoirs d'Outre Tombe_" [Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb], Chateaubriand, alluding to this interview of his with Washington, said, sententiously and loftily, "There is a virtue in the look of a great man."

Our adventurer never found that north-west pa.s.sage which he came to seek, but he took impressions of a strange new world, impressions that he afterward turned to various literary account. His "Rene" was one fruit of these experiences of his. The "Rene" is a romantic and sentimental tale, the main interest of which, where it possessed interest, lay in the seductive style of the composition, the idealizing descriptions occurring in it of American landscape, and the tone of melancholy reflection that pervaded it. The "n.o.ble red man" is made in it to talk like a Socrates come again, or like a French Christian philosopher born "the heir of all the ages." Such absurd inconsistency with the truth of things well ill.u.s.trates that taint of lurking falseness which to such a degree vitiates all Chateaubriand's work.

The French Revolution had made great strides while Chateaubriand was discovering the north-west pa.s.sage by musing and dreaming in the woods and by the streams of the New World. Learning that many members of his social cla.s.s, the aristocracy of France, had fled from their homes and were rallying in other lands to make a stand against their enemies, Chateaubriand resolved to join them. He was nigh to shipwreck on his way. In a siege, after his arrival, he was saved from death by the chance of his having the ma.n.u.script of his "Atala" in the right spot on his person to intercept a ball from the enemy. But he was severely wounded nevertheless, and, worse still, was attacked with the small-pox.

Thus disabled, he started on foot to make a journey of hundreds of miles. He, of course, suffered many hardships, and one night gave up to die in a ditch in which he lay down to rest. He was picked up and carried to Namur. Here, as he crawled on hands and knees through the streets, he was befriended by some women who saw his condition. After many adventures, he found himself in London, where he lived squalidly on what he could earn by hack-work with his pen.