Chapter 11

“O my worthy neighbor!” said she [Paul’s mother] to me [the old man who tells the whole story]: “I thought last night I beheld Virginia clothed in white, in the midst of groves and delicious gardens. She said to me: ‘I enjoy the most desirable happiness.’ Then she approached Paul with a smiling air and bore him away with her. As I endeavored to retain my son I felt that I myself was quitting the earth, and that I was following him with inexpressible pleasure. I then wished to bid my friend farewell, when I perceived her following us with Mary and Domingo. [These are negro slaves of the two mothers.] But what seems still more strange is, that Madame de la Tour [Virginia’s mother] had the same night a dream attended with similar circumstances.”I replied to her, “My friend, I believe that nothing happens in the world without the permission of God. Dreams do sometimes foretell the truth.”Madame de la Tour related to me that the same night she had also had a dream entirely similar. I had never observed in these two ladies the least propensity to superstition; I was therefore struck with the resemblance of their dreams, and I had no doubt but that they would be soon realized. This opinion, that truth sometimes presents itself to us during our sleep, is generally spread among all the nations of the earth. The most illustrious men of antiquity have entertained it, amongst others, Alexander, Cæsar, the Scipios, the two Catos, and Brutus, who were by no means inclined to superstition. The Old and the New Testament supply us with a variety of examples of dreams that have been realized....But whether this opinion concerning dreams be true or not, those of my unfortunate friends were speedily realized. Paul died two months after the death of his dear Virginia, whose name he incessantly pronounced. Margaret [Paul’s mother] beheld her end approach a week after that of her son with a joy which virtue only can feel. She bade Madame de la Tour the most tender farewell, “in the hope,” she said, “of a sweet and eternal reunion. Death is the greatest of all blessings,” added she; “we ought to desire it. If life be a punishment we ought to wish for its end; if it be a trial, we should wish it short.”The governor took care of Domingo and Mary, who were no longer able to labor, and who did not long survive their mistresses. As for poor Fidèle, he pined away about the same time as he lost his master.I conducted Madame de la Tour to my house. She bore up under these heavy afflictions with an incredible fortitude of mind. She had comforted Paul and Margaret up to their last moments, as if she had only their misfortune to support. When she no longer beheld them, she spoke of them every day as of beloved friends who were in the neighborhood. She survived them, however, but a month....The body of Paul was placed by the side of Virginia, at the foot of the same bamboos; and near the same spot the remains of their tender mothers and their faithful servants were laid. No marble was raised over their humble turf, no inscription engraved to celebrate their virtues; but their memory remains indelible in the hearts of those whom they have assisted.

I replied to her, “My friend, I believe that nothing happens in the world without the permission of God. Dreams do sometimes foretell the truth.”

Madame de la Tour related to me that the same night she had also had a dream entirely similar. I had never observed in these two ladies the least propensity to superstition; I was therefore struck with the resemblance of their dreams, and I had no doubt but that they would be soon realized. This opinion, that truth sometimes presents itself to us during our sleep, is generally spread among all the nations of the earth. The most illustrious men of antiquity have entertained it, amongst others, Alexander, Cæsar, the Scipios, the two Catos, and Brutus, who were by no means inclined to superstition. The Old and the New Testament supply us with a variety of examples of dreams that have been realized....

But whether this opinion concerning dreams be true or not, those of my unfortunate friends were speedily realized. Paul died two months after the death of his dear Virginia, whose name he incessantly pronounced. Margaret [Paul’s mother] beheld her end approach a week after that of her son with a joy which virtue only can feel. She bade Madame de la Tour the most tender farewell, “in the hope,” she said, “of a sweet and eternal reunion. Death is the greatest of all blessings,” added she; “we ought to desire it. If life be a punishment we ought to wish for its end; if it be a trial, we should wish it short.”

The governor took care of Domingo and Mary, who were no longer able to labor, and who did not long survive their mistresses. As for poor Fidèle, he pined away about the same time as he lost his master.

I conducted Madame de la Tour to my house. She bore up under these heavy afflictions with an incredible fortitude of mind. She had comforted Paul and Margaret up to their last moments, as if she had only their misfortune to support. When she no longer beheld them, she spoke of them every day as of beloved friends who were in the neighborhood. She survived them, however, but a month....

The body of Paul was placed by the side of Virginia, at the foot of the same bamboos; and near the same spot the remains of their tender mothers and their faithful servants were laid. No marble was raised over their humble turf, no inscription engraved to celebrate their virtues; but their memory remains indelible in the hearts of those whom they have assisted.

If we have treated somewhat lightly this romance of sentimentalism and of naturalism it is because of the taint of ungenuineness—that is, of unreality more or less conscious on the author’s part—that we seem to ourselves to discover in its pages. But the masterpiece of Bernardin de St. Pierre is after all a serious literary fact. For instance, if “Paul and Virginia” had never been written it is doubtful if we should ever have had that series of romantico-realistic little pieces of fiction from the pen of George Sand, out of one of which we shall presently exemplify this woman of genius to our readers. A production in literature is to be judged not only by its own inherent quality, but also, perhaps not less by its entail of influence.

“Paul and Virginia,” in becoming a school-book for the learning of French, may be said to have bought increase of celebrity at the price of some diminution in fame. In our own opinion, however, which, after all that we have said, hardly needs to be thus expressly stated, the book still remains quite as famous as its intrinsic merits entitle it to be. Its chief security of renown in the future lies, and will continue more and more to lie, in the striking fact of its renown in the past.

We formally part with Rousseau and with his first literary foster-child. But we shall trace their features still, againand again, persisting in authors to follow who could not escape a tell-tale impress, open to all to see, stamped from that singularly fecund, and singularly potent, literary paternity.

XVIII.

THE ENCYCLOPÆDISTS.

A cenotaphis a monument erected to the memory of one dead, but not marking the spot in which his remains rest. The present chapter is a cenotaph to the French Encyclopædists. It is in the nature of a memorial of their literary work, but it will be found to contain no specimen extracts from their writings.

Everybody has heard of the Encyclopædists of France. Who are they? They are a group of men who, during the eighteenth century, associated themselves together for the production of a great work to be the repository of all human knowledge,—in one word, of an encyclopædia. The project was a laudable one; and the motive to it was laudable—in part. For there was mixture of motive in the case. In part, the motive was simple desire to advance the cause of human enlightenment; in part, however, the motive was desire to undermine Christianity. This latter end the encyclopædist collaborators may have thought to be an indispensable means subsidiary to the former end. They probably did think so—with such imperfect sincerity as is possible to those who set themselves, consciously or unconsciously, against God. The fact is, that the Encyclopædists came at length to be nearly as much occupied in extinguishing Christianity as in promoting public enlightenment. They went about this their task of destroying in a way as effective as has ever been devised for accomplishing a similar work. They gave a vicious turn of insinuation against Christianity to as many articles as possible. In the most unexpected places, throughout the entire work, pitfalls were laid of anti-Christianimplication, awaiting the unwary feet of the explorer of its pages. You were nowhere sure of your ground. The world has never before seen, it has never seen since, an example of propagandism altogether so adroit and so alert. It is not too much to say further that history can supply few instances of propagandism so successful. The Encyclopædists might almost be said to have given the human mind a fresh start and a new orbit. The fresh start is, perhaps, spent; the new orbit has at length, to a great extent, returned upon the old; but it holds true, nevertheless, that the Encyclopædists of France were for a time, and that not a short time, a prodigious force of impulsion and direction to the Occidental mind. It ought to be added that the aim of the Encyclopædists was political also, not less than religious. In truth, religion and politics, Church and State, in their day, and in France, were much the same thing. The “Encyclopædia” was as revolutionary in politics as it was atheistic in religion.

The leader in this movement of insurrectionary thought was DenisDiderot. Diderot (1713-1784) was born to be an encyclopædist, and a captain of encyclopædists. Force inexhaustible, and inexhaustible willingness to give out force; unappeasable curiosity to know; irresistible impulse to impart knowledge; versatile capacity to do every thing, carried to the verge, if not carried beyond the verge, of incapacity to do anything thoroughly well; quenchless zeal and quenchless hope; levity enough of temper to keep its subject free from those depressions of spirit and those cares of conscience which weigh and wear on the overearnest man; abundant physical health—gifts such as these made up the manifold equipment of Diderot for rowing and steering the gigantic enterprise of the “Encyclopædia” triumphantly to the port of final completion, through many and many a zone of stormy adverse wind and sea, traversed on the way. Diderot produced no signal independent and original work of his own; probably he could not have produced such a work. On the other hand, it is simply just to say that hardly anybodybut Diderot could have achieved the “Encyclopædia.” That, indeed, may be considered an achievement not more to the glory than to the shame of its author; but whatever its true moral character, in whatever proportion shameful or glorious, it is inalienably and peculiarly Diderot’s achievement—at least in this sense, that without Diderot the “Encyclopædia” would never have been achieved.

We have already, in discussing Voltaire, adverted sufficiently to Mr. John Morley’s volumes in honor of Diderot and his compeers. Diderot is therein ably presented in the best possible light to the reader; and we are bound to say that, despite Mr. Morley’s friendly endeavors, Diderot therein appears very ill. He married a young woman whose simple and touching self-sacrifice on her husband’s behalf he presently requited by giving himself away, body and soul, to a rival. In his writings he is so easily insincere that not unfrequently it is a problem, even for his biographer, to decide when he is expressing his sentiments truly and when not, insomuch that, once and again, Mr. Morley himself is obliged to say, “This is probably hypocritical on Diderot’s part,” or something to that effect. As for filthy communication out of his mouth and from his pen—not, of course, habitual, but occasional—the subject will not bear more than this mention. These be thy gods, O Atheism! one, in reading Mr. Morley on Diderot, is tempted again and again to exclaim. To offset such lowness of character in the man it must in justice be added that Diderot was, notwithstanding, of a generous, uncalculating turn of mind, not grudging, especially in intellectual relations, to give of his best to others, expecting nothing again. Diderot, too, as well as Voltaire, had his royal or imperial friends, in the notorious Empress Catherine of Russia, and in King Stanislaus of Poland. He visited Catherine once in her capital, and was there munificently entertained by her. She was regally pleased to humor this gentleman of France, permitting him to bring down his fist in gesture violently on the redoubtable royal knee, according to a pleasant way Diderot had of emphasizing a point in familiarconversation. His truest claim to praise for intellectual superiority is, perhaps, that he was a prolific begetter of wit in other men.

D’Alembert(Jean le Rond, 1717-1783) was an eminent mathematician. He wrote especially, though not at first exclusively, on mathematical subjects for the “Encyclopædia.” He was, indeed, at the outset, published as mathematical editor of the work. His European reputation in science made his name a tower of strength to the “Encyclopædia,”—even after he ceased to be aneditorialcoadjutor in the enterprise. For there came a time when D’Alembert abdicated responsibility as editor and left the undertaking to fall heavily on the single shoulder, Atlantean shoulder it proved to be, of Diderot. The celebrated “Preliminary Discourse,” prefixed to the “Encyclopædia,” proceeded from the hand of D’Alembert. This has always been esteemed a masterpiece of comprehensive grasp and lucid exposition. A less creditable contribution of D’Alembert’s to the “Encyclopædia” was his article on “Geneva,” in the course of which, at the instance of Voltaire, who wanted a chance to have his plays represented in that city, he went out of his way to recommend to the Genevans that they establish for themselves a theater. This brought out Rousseau in an eloquent harangue against the theater as exerting influence to debauch public morals. D’Alembert, in the contest, did not carry off the honors of the day. D’Alembert’s “Éloges,” so called, a series of characterizations and appreciations written by the author in his old age, of members of the French Academy, enjoy deserved reputation for sagacious intellectual estimate, and for clear, though not supremely elegant, style of composition.

Diderot and D’Alembert are the only men whose names appear on the title-page of the “Encyclopædia;” but Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot, Helvétius, Duclos, Condillac, Buffon, Grimm, Holbach, with many besides whom we must not stay even to mention, contributed to the work.

The influence of the “Encyclopædia,” great during its day, is by no means yet exhausted. But it is an influence indirectlyexerted, for the “Encyclopædia” itself has long been an obsolete work.

There is a legal maxim that the laws are silent when a state of war exists. Certainly, amid the madness of a revolution such as, during the closing years of the eighteenth century, the influence of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopædists, with Beaumarchais, reacting against the accumulated political and ecclesiastical oppressions of ages, precipitated upon France, it might safely be assumed that letters would be silent. But the nation meantime was portentously preparing material for a literature which many wondering centuries to follow would occupy themselves with writing.

XIX.

MADAME DE STAEL.

1766-1817.

InMadame de Stael we encounter a truly redoubtable figure in literature.

But Madame de Stael in her day seemed more than a writer, more even than a writer of what the Germans would call world-importance; she was, or she seemed, a prodigious living personal force. For her tongue was not less formidable than her pen. In truth, the fame of Madame de Stael is due to the twofold power which, during her life-time, she exercised, and exercised in very uncertain proportions, first perhaps as a talker and second as a writer. She is generally allowed, and that upon the most incontestable authority, to have been one of the most brilliant and most effective talkers in the history of the human race.

This power in Madame de Stael of personal impression you are not free to ascribe to any charm that she owned of physical beauty; for Madame de Stael was not a beautiful woman. By her friend, Madame Récamier, that charm was exercised to the full, and that charm Madame de Stael,did not despise. So far from it, she is said once (thus at least the present writer seems to remember, but he has been unable to verify his impression) passionately to have exclaimed that she would give all her genius for one evening of Madame Récamier’s beauty. This was not the vanity on her part of wish to be admired. It was the pathos of longing to be loved. “Never, never,” she cried out in anguish, “I shall never be loved as I love.” She was true woman after all; and it would be inexpiable wrong against her not to say this also, and say it with emphasis, however sharply we may be just in pronouncing the masculine strength of her character. The contrast was so obvious between Madame de Stael and Madame Récamier in point of mere personal charm that, in a moment evil for him, a gentleman once seated between them permitted himself the awkwardness of saying, in ill-advised intention of compliment to both, but with most unhappy chief effect to the contrary, alike on this side and on that, “How fortunate! I sit between Wit and Beauty.” “Yes, and without possessing either the one or the other,” retorted Wit, amply avenging herself for being reminded that she was not also Beauty. Madame de Stael had certainly justified one half of the gentleman’s compliment; and Madame Récamier, with her serene ineffable charm, did not need to speak in order to justify the other.

It was, then, by the pure dry light of her intellect and her wit that Madame de Stael dazzled so in conversation—dazzled so, and so attracted. Wherever she was, there was the center. She made asalonanywhere, by simply being there. And Madame de Stael’ssalonwas felt by the ruler of Europe to be a formidable political power implacably hostile to himself. “Somehow,” said Napoleon, “I observe that, whatever is talked about at Madame de Stael’s, those who go there come away thinking less favorably of me.” It seems to have been in part because she said nothing, and would say nothing, of Napoleon in her “Germany,” that he finally suppressed that book. “You will speak ill of me when you get back to your academy,” said to Plato the tyrantof Syracuse. “In the academy we shall not have time to speak of you at all,” was the philosopher’s reply.

Madame de Stael was singularly fortunate in heredity on both sides of her parentage. Her father was an eminent banker and minister of finance, who enjoyed the noblest and clearest renown as a man both of talent and of character. Her mother was that beautiful and gifted daughter of a Swiss pastor whom the historian Gibbon once thought he loved, but whom he dutifully gave up at the will of his father. “I sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son,” Gibbon says in his “Autobiography.” This was after years had passed with him—“years that bring the philosophic mind!” The obese but famous English historian, still a bachelor, was a frequent guest at the house of M. Necker, where he had the opportunity gallantly to admire the brilliant daughter of the woman who might have been his wife.

We have said enough to show that, with the exception of personal beauty, Madame de Stael enjoyed every external advantage that could help to give her a shining career. Her wealth was something more than a mere accessory advantage; she needed it to sustain her in the waste of money made necessary by her wanderings through Europe to escape the tyrannous hand of Napoleon. Her exile was agony to her, for she loved France, and she loved Paris with inextinguishable affection. It is impossible to deny to the obstinacy that refused to burn even a pinch of incense to the god of her nation’s idolatry, for the sake of permission to return to every thing that she loved—it is impossible, we say, to deny to this obstinacy in Madame de Stael the title of a true and heroic virtue.

How costly-brave was the attitude that Madame de Stael steadfastly kept toward Napoleon, during the fifteen years of his unparalleled sway, may be guessed from the account that she gives of the unnerving, the prostrating effect upon her of the presence, the character, and the genius of that extraordinary man. In her “Reflections on the French Revolution” she has the following passage, almost equally striking whether taken as a description or as a confession:

Far from gaining re-assurance in meeting Buonaparte oftener, he intimidated me daily more and more. I confusedly felt that no emotion of the heart could possibly take effect upon him. He looks upon a human being as a fact or as a thing, but not as a fellow-creature. He does not hate any more than he loves; there is nothing for him but himself; all other beings are so many ciphers. The force of his will lies in the imperturbable calculation of his selfishness.... His successes are as much to be credited to the qualities which he lacks as to the talents which he possesses. Neither pity, nor attraction, nor religion, nor attachment to any idea whatsoever, could make him swerve from the main path he had chosen. Every time I heard him talk I was struck with his superiority; this, however, had no resemblance to the superiority of men trained and cultivated by study or by society, a class of which England and France can offer examples. But his courses of remark indicated a tact for seizing upon circumstances like that which the hunter has for seizing upon his prey. Sometimes he recounted the political and military incidents of his life in a manner to interest greatly; he had even, in narrations that admitted gayety, a trace of Italian imagination. Still, nothing could get the better of my revulsion for what I perceived in him. I felt, in his soul, a sword, cold and cutting, that froze while it wounded; I felt, in his mind, a fundamental irony from which nothing great, nothing beautiful, not his own glory even, could escape; for he despised the nation whose suffrages he sought; and no single spark of enthusiasm mixed with his wish to astonish mankind.It was during the interval between the return of Buonaparte (from Italy), and his setting out for Egypt toward the end of 1787, that I several times saw him in Paris; and never could I overcome the difficulty which I experienced in breathing in his presence. I was one day seated at table between him and the Abbé Sieyès; singular situation, could I have foreseen the future! [Sieyès, two years later, became one in a triumvirate of “consuls,” of whom Napoleon was another.] I scrutinized carefully the face of Napoleon; but every time he detected my observing glances he had the art to rob his eyes of all expression, as if they were changed to marble. His countenance was then immobile, save a vague smile that he brought upon his lips at a venture, in order to throw out any one who might wish to mark the external signs of his thought.

It was during the interval between the return of Buonaparte (from Italy), and his setting out for Egypt toward the end of 1787, that I several times saw him in Paris; and never could I overcome the difficulty which I experienced in breathing in his presence. I was one day seated at table between him and the Abbé Sieyès; singular situation, could I have foreseen the future! [Sieyès, two years later, became one in a triumvirate of “consuls,” of whom Napoleon was another.] I scrutinized carefully the face of Napoleon; but every time he detected my observing glances he had the art to rob his eyes of all expression, as if they were changed to marble. His countenance was then immobile, save a vague smile that he brought upon his lips at a venture, in order to throw out any one who might wish to mark the external signs of his thought.

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 passionate 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 thefirst 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, entitled “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 illustrations 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.

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 Récamier, 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 associate with those we love, to be afraid to write to them, or pronounce 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 passage 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 association 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 wroteCandide. 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 composedCandide, 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....Candidebrings 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 compassion for others by making us renounce it for ourselves.

Candidebrings 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 compassion 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, theFaustof Goethe should in propriety have been composed at that epoch.... The drama ofFaustcertainly 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 bemultiplied; 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 surpass the world and in which she surpassed her countrymen:

Thebon-motsof 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 circumstances to speak, and even under what circumstances 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 assume 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 passage 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 passing 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 bestrengthened 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 assumed 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.

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 assume 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 passage 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 passing 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 bestrengthened 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 assumed 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 noble 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 wasnotthus 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 noble, 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, assuredly, excites with his pathos quite as much admiration as sorrow.

Chateaubriand forms an essential link in the chain of literary history for France. He constitutes 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 aloneneeds 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 Encyclopædists, 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 moreuncloudedly, 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 passed 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 pronounced second greatest in the succession of the literary sentimentalists of France.

René François Augustus, Viscount de Chateaubriand, to give him now his full name and title, 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 passage 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 passage which he came to seek, but he took impressions of a strange new world, impressions that he afterward turned to various literaryaccount. His “René” was one fruit of these experiences of his. The “René” 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 “noble 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 illustrates 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 passage by musing and dreaming in the woods and by the streams of the New World. Learning that many members of his social class, 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 manuscript 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.

His family meantime were suffering in France. Some of them had actually been guillotined, and some were imprisoned, among them his wife, his sister, and his mother. The mother died praying for her son’s conversion from infidel error. The sister wrote to her brother the pathetic story,but she too had died before her letter reached that brother’s hand. “These two voices,” Chateaubriand says, “coming up from the grave, ... struck me with peculiar force.... I wept and believed.” The “Genius of Christianity” was written in the spirit of this sentimental conversion of the author.

We pass over, with mere mention of some principal titles, his other books, not previously named, as his “Itinerary,” a volume of travels; his “Moses,” his “Martyrs,” his “Essay on English Literature,” his “Translation of the Paradise Lost,” to make the brief extracts for which we have room from the “Genius of Christianity.”

This work is designed as a manual of Christian evidence, an argument for the truth of the Christian religion. It is written, of course, from a Roman Catholic point of view, but it may be described as liberal and literary, rather than strict and ecclesiastical. It is far from being closely reasoned. There is, in fact, a great deal of digression and discussion in it. The aim of the author was evidently more to make a readable book suited to the times than to produce an apologetic work that would stand four-square against all hostile attack. The author’s question with himself as he wrote seemed to have been, not, Is this valid, and necessary to the demonstration? but, Will this be interesting? The consequence is that the “Genius of Christianity” is now worthy of note rather as a book that has had a history than as a book that possesses permanent value. It contains, however, writing that will satisfactorily exhibit the style of Chateaubriand—a clear, pure, brilliant, harmonious poetic prose.

Chateaubriand raises and answers the question why the ancients failed in feeling for the beauties and sublimities of nature, thus:

It can scarcely be supposed that men endued with such sensibility as the ancients could have wanted eyes to perceive the charms of nature and talents for depicting them, had they not been blinded by some powerful cause. Now, this cause was their established mythology, which, peopling the universe with elegant phantoms, banished from the creationits solemnity, its grandeur, and its solitude. It was necessary that Christianity should expel the whole hosts of fauns, of satyrs, and of nymphs, to restore to the grottoes their silence, and to the woods their scope for uninterrupted contemplation. Under our religion the deserts have assumed a character more pensive, more vague, and more sublime; the forests have attained a loftier pitch; the rivers have broken their petty urns, that in future they may only pour the waters of the abyss from the summit of the mountains; and the true God, in returning to his work, has imparted his immensity to nature.

The foregoing, paradoxical perhaps, is certainly a sharp turning of the tables upon modern paganizers who mourn the dead Greek and Roman divinities of grove and stream.

Here is a passage in description of nature that every reader must acknowledge to be charming. It is throughout thoroughly characteristic of the author. The closing sentence is certainly French rather than Hebrew in spirit—Chateaubriand rather than David:

Penetrate into those forests of America coeval with the world. What profound silence pervades these retreats when the winds are hushed! What unknown voices when they begin to rise! Stand still, and everything is mute; take but a step, and all nature sighs. Night approaches; the shades thicken; you hear herds of wild beasts passing in the dark; the ground murmurs under your feet; the pealing thunder roars in the deserts; the forest bows; the trees fall; an unknown river rolls before you. The moon at length bursts forth in the east; as you proceed at the foot of the trees she seems to move before you at their tops and solemnly to accompany your steps. The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oak to await the return of day; he looks alternately at the nocturnal luminary, the darkness, and the river: he feels restless, agitated, and in expectation of something extraordinary. A pleasure never felt before, an unusual fear, cause his heart to throb as if he were about to be admitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depths of the forest, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all the solitudes of the earth are less vast than one single thought of his heart. Even did he reject the idea of a deity, the intellectual being, alone and unbeheld, would be more august in the midst of a solitary world than if surrounded by the ridiculous divinities of fabulous times. The barren desert itself would have some congeniality with his discursive thoughts, his melancholy feelings, and even his disgust for a life equally devoid of illusion and of hope.There is in man an instinctive melancholy which makes him harmonize with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hours seatedon the bank of a river contemplating its passing waves? Who has not found pleasure on the sea-shore in viewing the distant rock whitened by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus! It was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste the fullness of joy in the presence of its author.

There is in man an instinctive melancholy which makes him harmonize with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hours seatedon the bank of a river contemplating its passing waves? Who has not found pleasure on the sea-shore in viewing the distant rock whitened by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus! It was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste the fullness of joy in the presence of its author.

How Roman Catholic, rather than catholic, in tone, is the “Genius of Christianity,” the following deliciously written sentiment about the Virgin Mary will sufficiently show:

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