VI

[1]Obermann, 1833, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p. 90.

Simultaneously withObermannthere appeared in the French book market a little romance which was a product of intellectual tendencies akin to those of Sénancour. Though its author too is a forerunner of greater men than himself, his remarkable and versatile talent, his sense of the fantastic (exceptionally strong for a French author), and his courage in striking out new paths, make of him not a mere precursor but a pioneeer. This writer was Charles Nodier, and the name of his book,Le Peintre de Saltzbourg.

Charles Nodier, who belongs only by virtue of a couple of early works to the period with which we are dealing, and who, except for these, must be classed as a French Romanticist prior to the existence of the French Romantic School, was born at Besançon in 1780. His father was a magistrate, a gifted and honourable man, severe in his public capacity and amiable in his home; he was a declared adherent of the eighteenth-century philosophy, and educated his son according to the principles laid down in Rousseau'sÉmile. Charles early showed an astonishing aptitude for learning, and much talent in various directions. At seventeen years of age he was so capable a philologist as to have compiled a dictionary of French onomatopoeic words, a work which the Minister of Education considered worthy of a place in the school libraries. By the time he was eighteen he was so accomplished a naturalist that he brought out a work on the antennae of insects and their organs of hearing. His first romance was given to the press about the same time.

NODIER

Nodier's was a stirring childhood and early youth. At the age of thirteen he had some experience of the horrors of the Reign of Terror, for his father was head of the revolutionary tribunal at Besançon. In 1793 the warmhearted and determined little boy saved a woman's life. A lady of the town was accused of sending money to an émigré relation in the Royalist army of the Rhine. The charge was proved beyond a doubt, and the provisions of the law in such a case being unmistakable, the lady's fate was apparently sealed. A mutual friend of his family and the lady told the whole story to young Nodier, who first vainly attempted to move his father by entreaties, and then declared that he would kill himself if the death sentence were passed. He was so much in earnest, and seemed so resolved to carry out his threat, that at the last moment the father, in dread of losing his son, did violence to his Roman virtue, and acquitted the offender. In the same year, Besançon not offering sufficient educational advantages, young Nodier was sent to Strasburg. It so happened that he was boarded there in the house of the notorious Eulogius Schneider, the cruel governor of Alsace, who shortly afterwards perished on the scaffold in Paris. The scenes he saw in Strasburg were well adapted to quicken the imagination of a future writer of romance. As a youth in Paris he was a witness of the frivolity and pleasure-seeking that prevailed under the Directory, and after his return to Besançon in 1799 he interested himself in the cause of the state prisoners and suspected persons in that town. This led to his being denounced as dangerous to society; one night his door was broken open and his papers were examined, but nothing more incriminating was found than his works on the antennae of insects and the roots of words. The excitement of the situation satisfied his romantic love of adventure; it pleased him to be at war with the authorities, to run risks, to know he was spied upon, &c. He had no political convictions then or later, but he was an enthusiast in the cause of liberty, and always belonged to the Opposition, whatever the Government of the moment might be; he was religious under the Republic, a freethinker under the Empire, &c., &c. The despotism of the First Consul so exasperated him that at the age of twenty he wrote an ode against him entitledLa Napoléone. Arrests were made right and left in the hope of finding the author, and when at last the printer was imprisoned, Nodier gave himself up. After several months' imprisonment in Paris he was sent back to his native town, where he was placed under the surveillance of the police.

This was the beginning of a long series of persecutions and annoyances on the part of the Government, which, although certainly exaggerated by the young poet's lively and always active imagination, must have been anything but pleasant to him. He went from one hiding-place to another in the Jura Mountains, living and writing in unfrequented spots, and never staying long enough in any one place to complete the work begun there. Thus, in addition to all the impressions of the period already received, he had experience, at a very early age, of the emotions of the exile and the mood of theémigré. It is these moods and emotions which form the background of his first literary attempt.Le Peintre de Saltzbourgwas written during his incessant changes of abode among the Jura Mountains.

Le Peintre de Saltzbourg, journal des émotions d'un coeur souffrant, suivi des Méditations du Cloître, is the title of the first edition, published in Paris, 1803. TheMéditations du Cloître, a sort of appendix to this edition of the romance, possesses a certain interest as the expression of one of the ideas prevailing among the young generation. It is written with the same intention asRené, being, namely, a plea for the restoration of monasteries. It is a monologue, spoken by a being peculiarly unhappy in his own estimation, who bewails the absence of any monastery wherein to take refuge, and naïvely seeks to prove his vocation for the life of a Trappist by a perfect torrent of complaint. "I, who am still so young and yet so unhappy, who have too early gauged life and society, and am completely estranged from the fellow-men who have wounded my heart, I, bereft of every hope which has hitherto deluded me, have sought a haven in my misery and found none." Hereon follows a long panegyric on monks and nuns, those "angels of peace, who did nought but pray, console the wretched, educate the young, tend the sick, help the needy, follow the condemned to the scaffold, and bind up the wounds of heroes." How explain the fact that these devout men and women have brought down on themselves a fury of persecution unequalled in the annals of fanaticism? How can the legislators of the eighteenth century have had so little knowledge of the human heart as not to understand, not to divine the existence of those needs, to supply which religion founded monasteries?

"To the present generation political circumstances have given the education that fell to the lot of Achilles. We have been fed on the blood and the marrow of lions; and now that a government which leaves nothing to chance and which determines the future has set limits to the dangerous development of the powers of youth, saying to them: 'Thus far and no farther!'—do they understand now what melancholy occurrences result from so much suppressed passion and unemployed strength, how many temptations to crime exist in a passionate, melancholy, world-weary heart? With bitterness, with horror, I set it down: Werther's pistol and the executioner's axe have already made a clearing amongst us. The present generation rises up and demands the cloisters of old."

Assuredly a humble and sentimental desire for a generation nourished on the marrow of lions! But we discern defiance behind the meekness, and the demand is not to be taken literally. It is impatient despondency grasping at random at any means of alleviating its woe.

In a preface which Nodier added to his book in 1840, he speaks of the circumstances which produced it. Under the Directory, he says, emotionalism was very much out of fashion; the language of reverie and passion, to which thirty years before Rousseau had lent a passing vogue, was considered ridiculous at the close of the century. But it was quite otherwise in Germany, "that wonderful Germany, the final refuge of poetry in Europe, the cradle of the society of the future (if a society can still come into being in Europe). And we were beginning to feel the influence of Germany.... We readWerther, Goetz von Berlichingen, andDie Räuber."

The hero of Nodier's book is fashioned after the pattern of Werther; he is twenty years of age, a painter, a poet, and, above all, a German. But he is a weak imitation, decidedly inferior to the original. Charles (Nodier's own name) is an exile, banished from Bavaria for political offences. For two years he has roamed through Europe, a restless fugitive, for two years has lived Nodier's own life. One feeling alone has sustained him, his love for a young girl who bears the poetical name of Eulalia. He returns to Bavaria, and learns—hear it, ye heavens!—that Eulalia is faithless! Eulalia is wedded to another! The betrayed lover cannot resist his desire to haunt the place of her abode. One day they meet, and—O Destiny!—Eulalia tells him that, never hearing from him, and being told he was dead, she had sorrowfully, and solely out of obedience to her mother, at last consented to marry a young Herr Spronck, whose fancied resemblance to Charles touched her, and who is, it appears, the noblest of men. On this follow lamentations and descriptions of feeling of the Werther type, but all in a much more dejected key. Charles abandons himself to melancholy retrospect. Here it was that he saw her for the first time; there that he had the first dark forebodings of the future; in this other place, in his ecstasy at beholding her, he forgot his paper, his pencils, and his "Ossian"; yonder, where the trees are now hewn down, he had determined to bury his dear Werther; now it is his own grave that he would fain dig. Werther has been Charles's friend, the friend on whom he has obviously formed himself. On one occasion only is Charles more energetic and manly than Werther, namely in his outburst of indignation at the obstacles which interpose themselves between him and his beloved.

"Why did I not take her in my arms, seize her like a prey, carry her far from the abodes of man, and proclaim her my wife in the sight of heaven! Oh, if even this desire be a crime, why is it so intimately entwined with every fibre of my being that I cannot renounce it and live? A crime, did I say I In uncivilised times, in the days of ignorance and of slavery, some one or other of the barbarous horde took it into his head to write down his personal prejudices and say: 'There are laws for you!' How easily deluded men are! What a contemptible comedy to see so many generations ruled by the prejudices and whims of a dead past!"

Immediately upon this follows, quaintly enough, a long, solemn panegyric on Klopstock'sMessiah, obviously inspired by other, but very dissimilar, reminiscences of Werther. "O divine Klopstock!" cries Charles, "how magnificently you present the assembled miracles of poetry to our eyes, whether you introduce us into the presence-chamber of the Most High, where the first-born among the angels hymn the mysteries of heaven, or show us the cherubims in holy adoration covering their faces with their golden wings!" The transition from revolutionary sentiments to pious ecstasy is somewhat abrupt, but the mixture of revolutionary with romantic tendencies which would seem extraordinary in any other age, does not surprise in the Emigrant Literature. It is to be found in all its authors. We have it in Chateaubriand as Satanic Catholicism; in Sénancour as sentimental and romantic atheism; here it is revolt against social laws in combination with enthusiasm for theMessiah—different developments of the same phenomenon.

It presently appears that Eulalia's husband is no happier than her unfortunate lover. He has been deprived by death of the love of his youth and cannot forget his bereavement even by the side of Eulalia. He observes the attachment existing between his wife and Charles, and, not wishing to stand in their way, takes poison and dies, after begging them to forgive the suffering he has involuntarily caused them "by his hapless existence." It would be impossible to imagine a more considerate husband. The lovers, however, are not a whit less noble. Eulalia especially is too high-minded to profit by so melancholy a death. She retires to a convent, and Charles drowns himself in the Danube. Two suicides and a retreat to a nunnery was the regulation ending in those days.

To us, nowadays, this romance is a very insignificant intellectual production, but a very interesting piece of historical evidence. Its author soon passed into another phase of development. We shall find Nodier again upon a higher plane of the evolution of French literature; no one changed form more frequently than he—and the butterfly is more beautiful than the grub.

The literary critic passing from one variety to another of the type of a certain period in a manner resembles the scientist tracking some structure through its metamorphoses in the different zoological species. The next variant of our main type who seems to me worthy of study, is Benjamin Constant'sAdolphe, the hero of the only romance written by that famous political author. Adolphe is less brilliant than René, less melancholy than Obermann, but he is a representative of the same restless and unsatisfied generation. He too is related to Werther, but, like René, he is the child of the age of disillusionment. It was not until after the fall of the Empire that the book appeared, but it was written, or at any rate projected, in the first years of the century. Like those other books which on their emotional side are in touch with Rousseau, and which perpetuate his tradition, it conflicted sharply with the prevailing sentiments of the day. In Paris figures and the sword held sway, in literature the classic ode and science were in vogue, whereas in Constant's book emotions and psychical analysis predominated.

Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was born at Lausanne in 1767, of Protestant parents. His mother died in childbirth; his father, a cold-hearted, worldly-wise man, was much such another as the father inAdolphe. Constant was an exceptionally gifted being. If, in readingAdolphe, we find it a little difficult to understand the extraordinary fascination exercised by the hero, the explanation is, that, having employed so many reminiscences of his own life in the making of the book, Constant seems to have shrunk from dwelling too strongly on his hero's attractive qualities. Adolphe is so distinctly Constant himself, that we can only, so to speak, understand how the type originated, by studying the author's youth.

Constant was refined and charming, early addicted to a sort of sportive self-mockery, excitably impressionable, and, curiously enough, at the same time slightly blasé. To a craving for strong emotions was added a gift of putting himself entirely outside his own emotions. Even as a youth he was able to halve himself, to double himself, and to mock at himself. He could say: "I am as amused by the embarrassments in which I find myself as though they were another's," and his favourite expressions when angry were such as this: "I storm, I am beside myself with fury, and yet at the bottom of it all I am indifferent."

No pains were spared to give this brilliant, intellectual youth an education suited to his gifts. He was first sent to the University of Edinburgh, where he formed friendships with several distinguished young Englishmen and Scotchmen, almost all of whom were destined to become famous. From Edinburgh he went to the small, peaceful University of Erlangen, where the foundation was laid of his acquaintance with German literature and German affairs in general. Here, as in Edinburgh, he displayed more interest in the politics of the old Greek republics than in their poetry.

We gain the most trustworthy information on the subject of Constant's youthful character and development from his letters to Mme. de Charrière, a gifted, free-thinking Swiss authoress, Dutch by birth but completely Gallicised, who was over forty years of age when Constant, then in his twentieth year, first made her acquaintance. It was in this lady's house, sitting beside her while she wrote, that, at the age of nineteen, he began the great book on religion at which he was to work almost all his life, making perpetual alterations as his views changed and took more definite form. He finished it thirty years later, in the hours which he could spare from the Chamber and the Paris gambling-tables. But it was begun at Mme. de Charrière's; and there was a curious significance in the fact that the first instalment was written on the backs of a pack of playing cards, each card, as it was filled, being handed to his mentor. Constant expresses himself with absolute frankness in his letters to this faithful and devoted friend; from them we learn how he felt and thought as a youth. The feelings and thoughts are those of the eighteenth century, minus its enthusiasm for certain ideas, and plus a good deal of doubt. He writes:—

BENJAMIN CONSTANT

"I feel the emptiness of everything more than ever; it is all promise and no fulfilment. I feel how superior our powers are to our circumstances, and how wretched this incongruity must inevitably make us. I wonder if God, who created us and our environment, did not die before He finished His work, if the world is not anopus posthumum? He had the grandest and most beautiful intentions, and all the means for carrying them out. He had begun to use these means, the scaffolding for the building was erected, but in the midst of His work He died. Everything is constructed with an aim which has ceased to exist; we, in particular, feel ourselves destined for something of which we can form no conception. We are like clocks without dials or hands, whose wheels, which are not without understanding, revolve until they are worn out, without knowing why, but saying, 'I revolve, therefore I have an aim.'—Farewell, you dear, clever wheel, who have the misfortune to be so superior to the clock-work of which you are a part and which you disturb! Without too much self-praise I may say that I am in the same predicament."

In another place he writes: "Oh, how generous, how magnanimous are our princes! They have again issued a pardon from which none are excluded save those who have rebelled against them. It reminds me of a psalm in praise of the exploits of the Hebrew God. He has slain this one and that, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has drowned Pharaoh and all his hosts, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has smitten the first-born of Egypt with death, for His mercy endureth for ever, &c. &c."

"You do not appear to be democratic. Like you, I believe fraud and frenzy to be at the bottom of the Revolutionist's heart. But I prefer the fraud and frenzy which pulls down prisons, abolishes titles and such like imbecilities, and places all religious day-dreams upon the same footing, to the fraud and madness which would maintain and consecrate that monstrosity produced by grafting the barbaric stupidity of the Hebrew upon the barbaric ignorance of the Vandal."

"The more one thinks it over, the less is one able to imagine any possible good reason for the existence of this foolish thing we call the world. I understand neither the intention, nor the master-builder, nor the artist, nor the figures in thisLaterna Magicaof which I have the honour to form a part. Shall I understand any better when I have disappeared from the small, dark globe on which it amuses I know not what unseen power to have me dance, whether I will or no? I cannot say. But I fear the secret will prove, like that of the Freemasons, to be a thing of no value except in the estimation of the uninitiated."

Having read these extracts, it does not surprise us to know that the bookOn Religion, planned at the close of the century to effect the same object from a Protestant standpoint that Chateaubriand aimed at from a Catholic, namely, the revival of the religious spirit in France, had originally a very different character from that which it finally acquired. If the first part were published as it was originally written, entirely in the eighteenth-century manner, it would indicate in its author exactly the stage of mental development indicated in Chateaubriand by his book on the Revolutions. In the form in which it has taken its place in French literature the work is remarkable for its calm, passionless style, its unprejudiced views, and an erudition not common at that period. Its weaknesses are its total lack of warmth and the general indecision of its principles.

The main idea is as follows: All the earlier conceptions of the nature of religion have been imperfect. One school of writers, who regard religion as inaccessible by the path of reason, and who believe it to have been imparted to man once for all by divine revelation, seek to restore it to its original form. Another school, rightly appalled by the evils resulting from intolerance and fanaticism, have rejected religion as a delusion, and have sought to base an ethical system upon a purely earthly foundation. A third have believed themselves able to steer a middle course; they accept something which they call natural religion, or the religion of reason, and which consists only of the purest dogmas and the simplest fundamental principles. But the adherents of this school, like those of the first two, believe that mankind can attain to absolute truth—that truth, therefore, is one and unchangeable; they stigmatise all who believe less than themselves as ungodly, and all who believe more as priest-ridden and superstitious. In opposition to all these three schools, Constant regards religion as progressive; he starts from the premise that the religious feeling is a fundamental element of the human soul, that it is only the forms it assumes which differ, and that these are capable of ever-increasing perfection. He has obviously read Lessing'sErziehung des Menschengeschlechts; but he is more in sympathy with his own contemporaries, Kreuzer and Görres, than with Lessing. He either does not understand or does not appreciate the latter's delicate and yet profound irony; he is captivated by the Romantic-Protestant revival ideas, and assimilates as much of them as a French Liberal politician and converted Voltairean can. He strongly objects to the spirit of intolerance and persecution which makes itself felt so strongly in Lamennais' book on "Indifference in Matters of Religion" unlike Chateaubriand and De Maistre, he objects to the temporal power of the Papacy, or to any other combination of spiritual and temporal power; but he imagines that in hissentiment religieuxhe has discovered a kind of spiritual primary element, incapable of further resolution, an element which is unalterable and universal, i.e. diffused over the whole earth and unaffected by time; and upon this theory, which is incompatible with the data of psychology, he bases his whole conservative system. As far as possible he evades troublesome questions: he refuses, for example, to decide whether mankind came into being in a savage or in a paradisaically perfect condition; and he expressly states that he begins with a delineation of the lowest fetish worship only for the sake of order, that he by no means denies that this pitiable stage may have been the result of a fall, this hypothesis, indeed, seeming to him a very probable one.—Few books have more rapidly grown old-fashioned than this of Constant's, which is now merely of historical interest as typical of the half-heartedness and indecision of the period in which it was written.

In the early years of the French Revolution, Constant was appointed gentleman-in-waiting to the Duchess of Brunswick. In this position he heard the Revolution spoken of with that mixture of fear and abhorrence of which we have an example in the dialogue of Goethe's play,Der Bürgergeneral; but he had no difficulty in forming an independent and unprejudiced estimate of the significance of the great movement. In Brunswick, as elsewhere, much of his time seems to have been spent in amours, one following on the other in rapid succession. He himself jestingly assumedSola inconstantia constansas his motto. He married, solely out of ennui, it would appear, divorced his wife after the honeymoon, and presently fell in love with a lady who was at the time sueing for a divorce from her husband. For this lady's sake he returned at a later period to Brunswick. Her maiden name was Charlotte von Hardenberg, and many years afterwards she became his second wife. In the letters of this Brunswick period to Mme. de Charrière, Constant appears as aimless and bored as he is sagacious and witty. He makes merry over his stupid, little-minded associates, and for a time even over his feeling for the lady of his heart, until it suddenly occurs to him that jesting on this latter subject is scarcely seemly, and he decides to forego it. So far there was neither a centre nor an object in his life.

Towards the close of 1774, however, a decisive change took place. He met Mme. de Staël, and it became apparent that neither of these two minds could produce the best of which it was capable without the assistance of the other. Constant was then twenty-seven years of age, Mme. de Staël twenty-eight. He had just arrived in Paris, the city to which his ambition had long attracted him, but which he now saw for the first time. He was introduced into the best society, frequented the houses of Mme. Tallien, Mme. Beauharnais, and Mme. de Staël, and made an impression both by his personal beauty and his intellectual gifts. With his fresh complexion and fair hair he resembled a young Northerner, but in mind he was the acute Frenchman, and in culture the cosmopolitan. He made an impression on the most gifted Frenchwoman of the day that was never effaced, even when the circumstances of life estranged and separated them, and it was soon no secret that Mme. de Staël's admiration had become passionate love. She imparted to the rising states man her faith in political liberty, her enthusiasm for the rights of the individual, and for a government which should assure them; and her fiery ardour inspired him with her spirit of enterprise and with her confidence in the power of words and of deeds to influence, to re-mould life in spite of destiny. In return for this, her relation to him seems, by setting her at variance with society, to have supplied her with the greater part of the passions, emotions, and rebellious thoughts which form the kernel of her imaginative writings.

At Mme. de Staël's house Constant met a whole host of foreign diplomatists, disaffected journalists, and plotting women, who for the moment influenced him against the Convention. He soon, however, arrived at convictions of his own, refuted his first newspaper articles, and, more radical than his friend, joined the "Patriot" party in opposing the so-called Moderates, in whom he perceived no moderation. The year 1795 he spent, on the invitation of Mme. de Staël, at her country-house of Coppet, in Switzerland; the following year she was separated from her husband.

When, as First Consul, in 1799, Napoleon gave France a constitution, in which autocracy was veiled by a slight pretence of freedom, he nominated-Constant, formerly his ardent admirer, a member of the Tribunate. In this capacity Constant, supported by some few sympathisers, carried on an honourable struggle against the Napoleonic absolutism, a struggle which attracted the attention of all Europe, and highly exasperated the First Consul. In 1802 the latter made the famous remark about the five or six metaphysicians among the Tribunes who deserved to be drowned, and not long after, these five or six, namely Constant and his friends, were expelled by the votes of a servile majority. Mme. de Staël and her father, the famous Necker, showing themselves actively antagonistic to Napoleon's autocratic policy, were both banished from France. Constant, who followed Mme. de Staël to Coppet, was forbidden to return. In May 1802, Mme. de Staël became a widow. In 1803-4 she and Constant travelled together in Germany. She, loving him devotedly, evidently seems to have expected that he would marry her; but it is plain that he did not reciprocate her feeling; it was only out of weakness and compassion that he concealed from her his constant correspondence with Charlotte von Hardenberg. Having probably invented some pretext for leaving her, he went to Weimar alone. There, in 1804, he translated Schiller'sWallensteininto French. It was not Constant but A. W. Schlegel who accompanied Mme. de Staël to Italy in 1805 (as tutor to her children), on the journey immortalised inCorinne. Constant was privately married to his Charlotte in the summer of 1808, and so little was Madame de Staël resigned to his defection, that terrible scenes occurred when she unexpectedly met the newly married pair in the neighbourhood of Geneva. Charlotte, driven to despair by her rival's furious jealousy, made an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. So great was Madame de Staël's influence over Constant, that she actually persuaded him to leave his wife and return for a time with her to Coppet.

For some years after this episode Benjamin Constant lived in quiet retirement at Göttingen, occupied with collecting material for his work on the origin and development of religion. The defeat of Napoleon in 1813 brought him and his friend Madame de Staël once more into the political arena. Her influence at the courts of Russia, Germany, and Sweden gave him a voice in the proceedings against the defeated autocrat. He went to Paris in Bernadotte's train, and, although he was in favour of the restoration of the monarchy, he strove ardently to save all that could be saved of constitutional liberty. He published masterly pamphlets on the liberty of the press, on ministerial responsibility, &c. It is well known that immediately after this, his blind infatuation for Mme. Récamier caused him to take such violent action against Napoleon on the latter's return from Elba, that there seems something traitorous in his acceptance of a post in the Council of State during the Hundred Days, and his collaboration in the Emperor's attempt to give France a species of constitution.

We must not judge Constant as a politician by this unfortunate episode. Under the Bourbons, and even during the first years of the reign of Louis Philippe, he was the determined and eloquent leader of the Liberal Opposition. Though never remarkable for purity of character, he had noble impulses. When in 1830 he received a letter from one of his friends in Paris saying, "A terrible game is being played here; our heads are in danger; come and add yours!" he did not hesitate for a moment, but came and undauntedly sided with the revolutionists. A few months later, however, although he was at the time leader of the Opposition, he accepted 100,000 francs from Louis Philippe for the purpose of paying his gambling debts. Constant was an accomplished dialectician. No truth, he was accustomed to observe, is complete unless it includes its antithesis. He succeeded in completing many truths. The imprint set upon him by the period in which his youth had fallen was never effaced. The doubleness which in the other notable men of the same generation is only a secondary quality, is in Constant's character the essential, distinguishing, and, at the same time, disturbing trait.

Adolphe, the chief work of this man's youth, deserves some study. In it we find the following utterance: "What surprises me is, not that humanity should feel the need of a religion, but that it should in any age fancy itself strong enough, and sufficiently secure from disaster, to venture to reject anyone religion. It seems to me as if in its weakness it should rather be prone to invoke the aid of them all. Is there, in the dense darkness which surrounds us, any ray of light that we can afford to reject? Does there float on the whirling torrent which carries us along with it any branch to which we dare refuse to cling?" We feel that the author is more certain of the existence of the whirling torrent than of the branch. His manner of recommending religion reveals his own lack of it, and a profound depth of melancholy.

The explanation is simple. There was a reaction against Voltaire in the air at that time, a reaction practically inaugurated by Rousseau—the rebound of repressed, unconsulted, ignored feeling. A half-unconscious effort was going on in men's minds to restore the balance between the demands and the possibilities of the human soul which had been disturbed during the autocratic reign of critical intellect; and this half-conscious tendency was plainly perceptible even in men whose natures were really akin to Voltaire's, and who, had they been born thirty years earlier, would have been his eager sympathisers and fellow-workers. Voltaire had not only criticised, he had been forced by the evils of the times and by his unruly wit into an attitude of aggression. With all available weapons, even poisoned ones, he had attacked those purely external, palpable forms of authority, which in his time stood in the way of honourable human conditions, nay, made them impossible. Now all these powers had fallen, and the times once more craved authority. There are inner, spiritual authorities. The Right, the Good, the True are such. But the enthusiastic attempts to introduce and establish a free form of government which should realise these ideals without the invocation of any authority unexplainable by reason, had resulted in the savage excesses of lawlessness. What wonder, then, that not only many ordinary individuals began to grope after planks from the wreck of the once powerful political and religious systems, but that also a majority of the most highly gifted came forward as the champions of some authority, either temporal or spiritual, which they supported for the sake of the principle, but with no real belief or confidence in it.

They had no real confidence, for the simple reason that for them, as genuine and intelligent sons of the young nineteenth century, it was impossible to believe in the strength of a stem which their fathers had sawn through. Chateaubriand's faith in legitimacy was as faint-hearted as Constant's in religion in general. Men were uneasy in their minds. The old house was burned down. The new was not even begun. And, instead of boldly beginning to erect a new building, events led them to seek refuge among the ruins of the old, the half-burned materials of which they built up as best they could. During this performance they were perpetually tempted to try experiments not planned from the first. After some vain attempts to give solidity to the building by the addition of new material, they would in despair give a kick at the shaky, newly built walls, which brought them down again. No group of writers whose aim was to preserve society ever brought such passionate accusations against it as the authors of the Emigrant Literature. It is one of these accusations of society which forms the basis of Benjamin Constant'sAdolphe.

Adolphe is a love story which, in its presentment of the relations of the individual to society, takes a quite different point of view fromWerther. InWertheroutward, and, by reason of these, also inward, obstacles prevent the union of a couple obviously made for each other. InAdolpheoutward, and because of them, also inward, reasons part two beings who are united.Wertherrepresents the power of society, and of once-accepted social responsibilities, to hinder a love match.Adolphedescribes the power of society and of public opinion to absolve from accepted personal responsibilities and to sever a long-united pair. The books, taken together, form a double picture of the pope-like power of society to bind and loose. But whereasWertherdepicts the feelings of the pre-revolutionary, enthusiastic, energetic generation to which its author belonged, the feelings described inAdolpheare those of the first French generation of the new century.

Unlike former love stories,Adolphedoes not delineate love only in its first awakening in the dawn of delusive hopes, but follows it through its whole existence, depicts its growth, its strength, its decay, its death, and even pursues it to the other side of the grave and shows the feelings into which it is transformed. HenceAdolphe, even more thanRené, is the story of the individual's rude awakening from delusion, the representation of the anguish of disappointment. It is the flower of life which is here stripped of its petals one by one and carefully dissected. In this point, too, the book is a great contrast toWerther, Wertheris naïve in comparison. It is the same flower, the perfume of which is a deadly poison to Werther, that is calmly dissected by Adolphe. The change is expressed in the very costume; the blue coat and yellow waistcoat have made way for our dull, funereal black.

But the flame which is extinguished in the man's breast now burns in the woman's.Adolpheis woman'sWerther. The passion and melancholy of the new age have advanced another step; they have spread to the other sex. InWertherit was the man who loved, suffered, stormed, and despaired; in comparison with him the woman was sound, strong, and unharmed—perhaps a trifle cold and insignificant. But now it is her turn, now it is she who loves and despairs. InWertherit was the woman who submitted to the laws of society, inAdolpheit is the man who does so. The selfsame war waged by Werther in the name of his love is now waged by Eléonore, and with equally tragic result.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to call this romance the prototype of a whole new species of fiction, namely that which occupies itself with psychical analysis. It is its treatment of love that is new. Far behind us now lies the time when Amor was represented as the charming child we all know from Thorwaldsen's bas-reliefs. To Voltaire Amor was the god of pleasure. "Les ris, les jeux et les plaisirs" were his attendants. To Rousseau he is the god of passion. With Goethe he has ceased to be a beneficent spirit; we understand when we read Goethe what Schopenhauer meant when he wrote that Amor pursues his way, indifferent to the misery of the individual. In Faust, the first poem of the new era, he is transformed from a roguish boy into a criminal. Faust seduces Gretchen and deserts her; Gretchen's love-story means the death of her mother, her brother, her infant, and herself. She, the innocent, loving girl, kills her mother with the sleeping-draught she administers in order that Faust may visit her by night; Faust and Mephistopheles together slay the brother who attempts to avenge his sister's disgrace; from fear of shame Gretchen kills her new-born child, for which she is thrown into prison and finally executed. Goethe's passion for truth impelled him to paint a very different picture of Amor from that which represents him as the rose-crowned boy. And in Goethe it is not only in its consequences but in its very nature that love is fraught with fate. InElective Affinitieshe has made a study of the mysterious and irresistible attraction and repulsion by which the mutual relations of souls are determined, as if they were chemical substances. The book is a kind of study of passion from the point of view of natural philosophy; Goethe shows us its rise, its magic power as a mysterious natural force, its foundation in the unfathomed depths of our soul.

An attempt had thus been made to explain the attraction to which we give the name of love by instituting a parallel between it and the attraction with which we are familiar in inanimate nature. But there was yet another step to be taken, namely, to dissociate love from everything with which it had hitherto been connected, and analyse it. This task fell to the lot of the unsettled, unsatisfied generation to which Constant belongs. However much men had differed in their conception of love, its causes and its consequences, they had all agreed in accepting the emotion itself as something understood, something simple. They now for the first time began to treat it as something composite, and to attempt to resolve it into its elements. InAdolphe, and the fiction which follows in its steps, an accurate calculation is made of how many parts, how many grains, of friendship, how many of devotion, of vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, hope, imagination, disappointment, hatred, weariness, enthusiasm, calculation, &c. on the part of each, go to make up the compound which the two concerned call their love. With all this analysis the emotion lost its supernatural character, and the worship of it ceased. Instead of its poetry, its psychology was offered to the reader. What happened resembled that which happens when we look at a star through a telescope; its bright rays disappear, only the astronomical body remains: before, in the bright full moon we saw only a clear, shining disc with an unchanging face; now, we distinguish a multitude of mountains and valleys.

From the moment when men began to desire really to understand, they necessarily fixed their attention less upon that first awakening of the emotion, which poets had sung and celebrated from time immemorial, than upon its later development, its duration and its cessation. In those tragedies which are to be found in the literature of all races, which are, as it were, their hymns to love, the death of the lovers follows close upon the blossoming time of their love. Romeo sees Juliet; they adore one another; after a few days and nights passed in the seventh heaven, both lie dead. The question of constancy does not occur. Our Danish love-tragedy,Axel and Valborg, seems, indeed, to deal with nothing but constancy; the whole plot turns on the prolonged engagement of the lovers, a characteristically national pivot—butin Axel and Valborgconstancy is glorified as a virtue, not explained as a product, for the play is a lyrical tragedy, not a psychological analysis.

It is the question of the conditions of constancy which is treated of inAdolphe—under what conditions is passion lasting or otherwise? And it is the answer to this question which is really an impeachment of society. For it is maintained that while society, in this case represented by public opinion, upholds those unions which are of its own institution, it at the same time basely strives to destroy all possibilities of faithfulness in any union it has not sanctioned, even if that union be to the full as honourable, to the full as unselfish, as any of those which it fences round and supports.

Constant prefers his accusation in a story which could hardly be less pretentious. It contains but two characters, no scenery, and there is not a single fortuitous incident in the whole course of its action. Everything occurs according to the natural laws indicated by the relations of the couple to each other and to society in general. The reader follows this history of two souls to its close much as a student of chemistry watches the fermentation of two substances in an inexplosible phial and observes the results. Who, then, are these two characters?

In the first place, who ishe? He is a very young man, who (like the author) has been given an appointment at one of the little German courts, after completing his studies at a small German university. He has been tolerably dissipated, but has also gone through a course of serious and laborious study. His relations with his father, an outwardly cold, ironical man, who represents the culture of the eighteenth century, have increased the hero's youthful taste for powerful, passionate emotions, and his leaning to the unusual, the extravagant. His father's severe discipline has inspired him with an impatient longing for freedom from the bonds which gall him, and a strong disinclination to let himself be trammelled by new ones.

At this stage of his development he comes to a court where monotony and formality reign. To him, who from his earliest youth has felt an unconquerable aversion to dogmatism and formalism, it is positive suffering to be obliged to listen to his companions' eternal platitudes. "The self-satisfied chatter of mediocrity about absolutely unquestionable and unshakable religious, moral, or social principles, all considered of equal importance, drove me to contradict, not so much because I was of a different opinion as because I had no patience with such clumsy, stolid certainty. I was involuntarily on the alert against all these general maxims which are considered universally applicable, without restriction or modification. The blockheads knead their morality into such an indivisible mass that it cannot possibly permeate their actions and be applicable in individual cases."

He revenges himself for the boredom which his associates inflict on him by jesting at them and their ideals, and soon acquires a character for ill-natured frivolity. He does not himself approve of his own contradictory, mocking spirit. "But," he says, "I may urge in self-defence that it takes time to accustom one's self to such beings, to that which selfishness, affectation, vanity, and cowardice have made of them. The astonishment a man in his early youth feels at such an artificial, arbitrarily regulated state of society witnesses rather to the naturalness of his character than to depraved tendencies. Besides, this society has nothing to fear from such as us; it weighs us down, its foolish influence is so strong that it quickly moulds us to the general pattern. Then we only wonder that we were ever astonished. We become accustomed to the new life as men become accustomed to the air in a room full of people, where at first they feel as if they could not breathe."

These skirmishes with his narrow surroundings were not sufficient to satisfy the gifted young man; his discontent is perpetually with him, he drags it about as a man drags a weight attached to his leg. Like René and Obermann, he belongs to a generation of sons to whom their fathers did not appear to have left anything to do worth doing. The future has no interest for him, for he has anticipated it in imagination, and the past has made him old, for he has lived in thought through many a century. He has desired much, but willed nothing, and the more lacking in will he feels himself, the vainer does he become; for vanity is the invariable stop-gap with which those in whom will or ability is defective, attempt to fill the lacunae in their will or ability. He wishes to love and to be loved, looking on love in the light of a tonic for his self-esteem. He expects to attain to a stronger persuasion of his own worth, to be raised in his own and other people's eyes, by some great triumph and scandal. The happiness that love is to bring to him is the happiness of feeling for once that his will is strong, because he is able to bend another's to it. He is not by nature more faithless than other men. It is in him to love more tenderly, to act more unselfishly than many do, but for him to love faithfully many circumstances would need to be altered. He is still so young that there is more of curiosity and of the spirit of adventure in his feeling for a woman than of real love; and even if he loved deeply, he is too weak, too little of the man, to be able to love on in spite of society's disapproval of his passion; above all, in spite of his unlikeness to his father, he is too much his son to be able, without despising or deceiving himself, to stake his whole existence on one card. He differs from and yet resembles his father, just as the beginning of the nineteenth century differed from and yet resembled the eighteenth.

And who isshe? She is carefully described by the author as being such that Adolphe's love for her, however strong, is certain sooner or later to be affected by social considerations. In the first place, Adolphe is not the only man she has loved, and the verdict of society has been passed upon her before they meet; she is not his equal in its eyes, although she is so by birth. In the second place, she is considerably older than he; and in the third, hers is a passionate, power-loving nature, which could only be fused with his if social conditions favoured the process, and which must make both unhappy if they harden him against her.

When Adolphe makes her acquaintance, Eléonore is no young, inexperienced girl, who learns for the first time what love is; she is a woman, whose new emotions stand out upon a background of sad, harrowing experience. The mark which this experience has set upon her is the first noticeable trait in her personality. Eléonore has relinquished her right to all the privileges and pleasures of a safe-guarded, peaceful life. Although of good family and born to wealth, she has left home and family to follow the man she loves, as his mistress. She has chosen between the world and him, and has ennobled her action by entirely, unconditionally sacrificing herself for his sake. She has done him the greatest services, has saved his fortune, and been as faithful as any wife could be, endeavouring by this absolute fidelity to solace the pride wounded by the reprobation and scorn of the world. Strength of will is the second noticeable feature of the character.

When the first doubt of her friend's constancy assails her, the whole edifice that she has raised crumbles to pieces. Does he love her, or does he only treat her as a man of honour must? is he faithful, or is he only too proud and too well-bred to show himself ungrateful and indifferent? With tears she puts the question to herself, with anguish answers it. It is at this moment that she meets Adolphe. He is drawn to her with a desire in which his whole thirst for life and all that life contains is concentrated, drawn as to one in whom he mysteriously feels treasures of passion, tenderness, enthusiasm, intellect, and experience to be accumulated, buried, as it were. And his longing and her regret, his vanity and her despair, his youth and her disappointment take hold of each other like two wheels in the works of a watch.

It is easy to foresee with what a fiery flame this passion will blaze at first, to foretell what a full and mighty chord, what a joyful paean will resound, as though both had won complete and lasting victory and salvation. There is a new and strange mixture in her feeling—an enthusiasm which is almost fanatical, because it must be equal to the task of stifling his constantly recurring jealousy of the past; a faith which is almost convulsive, because it is not based upon sound, natural confidence, but upon a determination to believe in spite of everything, even in spite of having already been deceived; and a fidelity which suffers tortures from being constantly called upon to demonstrate its existence, because it is the offspring of faithlessness towards the past. This redoublement of passion constitutes the third marked feature in Eléonore's character. "One regarded her," says Adolphe, "with the same interest and admiration with which one gazes on a magnificent thunderstorm."

It is in reality an entirely new female type which is here presented to us, a type which many years later Balzac appropriates, styles "la femme de trente ans," and varies with such genius that he may be said to be its second creator, and which George Sand too developed and embellished in a whole series of her novels. Under the treatment of these two authors this type proved to be a whole, hitherto unknown, world, in which every feeling, passion, and thought was infinitely stronger than in the world of the girlish heart. In time the type passed from the novel into the drama, and long usurped the French stage. In it the early literature of the century found its queen, as in René it found its king.[1]

The strong, Promethean generation to which Goethe belonged had produced its type in Faust, the fully developed man, with the powerful, cultivated intellect, who, having studied in all the schools and toiled through all the sciences, becomes conscious in his manhood's prime of a void in his heart, a thirst for youth, freshness, and simplicity. Casting himself into the whirl of life, he falls in love with a child. It is her simplicity and innocence that win and intoxicate him, and arouse the desire of possession.

The unhappy generation of the homeless and exiled, the young and yet old, the believers who were at the same time unbelievers, to which Constant belongs, has its type in Adolphe, who, blasé in thought, though a mere child in years and experience, seeks in love strong sensations, violent emotion, knowledge of life, of passion, and of the heart of woman, difficulties and dangers to overcome—in a word, mastery over woman. The young girl brought up under her mother's eye in an ordinary middle-class home does not attract him; it would not be a sufficient triumph to master her. But with the superiority of years and experience on the woman's side, the feeling and the relation change character. The passion uniting two such dissimilar beings is something less ordinary, less conventional, less happy, but more transient than the love which we know as a social power. It is no longer the prelude to a bourgeois wedding. It seems to come into existence when, under certain conditions, the paths of two beings of a certain complex type cross or intersect each other; but the result is not harmony.

It is not until considerably later that this new type of woman really takes possession of French literature. Saint Simon, the Revolution of July, and George Sand had to pave the way—Saint Simon with his doctrine of the emancipation of woman, and his theory that humanity can only be perfected in man and woman together, not in man alone; the Revolution of July by destroying many of the arbitrary restrictions to which woman had been subjected; and George Sand by carrying on, almost alone, the same struggle for the liberation of woman, which for man had been begun by the great Revolution. The fact that the type, and with it the conflict of woman with society, appears in literature so long before George Sand, is to be explained by the circumstance that Eléonore is modelled from the strongest woman of the day, the woman who ventured to oppose Napoleon himself—Mme. de Staël.

This new type forms a strong contrast to those female characters of Goethe's in which German poetry attained its highest level, and in which the characteristically Teutonic spiritual quality is expressed more perfectly than it ever had been before. Although Gretchen and Clärchen are the antitheses of each other, the one being mild and submissive, the other fiery and daring, both are children, both are absorbed by a single feeling, both have perfectly simple, single-minded natures, Both love for the first and only time. Both give themselves to the man they love without thought of marriage, with entire trust, without any resistance, without even the wish to resist; the one from deep womanly devotion, the other from lofty womanly enthusiasm. They do not understand that they are doing wrong, they do not think at all. Their whole being, their will, their thoughts pass out of their own possession, they themselves do not know how. Their hearts are soft as wax to receive an impression, but once received it is ineffaceable, it is as though it were stamped in gold. Their innocence, purity, and integrity are beyond compare. They are faithful by instinct, and do not dream of the possibility of being anything else. They possess no morality, but all the virtues; for human beings are moral consciously, but good by nature. They do not consider themselves the equals of their lovers, but look up to them, as if the old legend had been realised and the sons of God had come down to the daughters of men. Gretchen is amazed and overpowered by Faust's knowledge, Clärchen kneels like a child before Egmont when he appears in his full splendour. They lose themselves, they, as it were, disappear in their lovers. What we have here is not two equals, who take each other's hands, and plight their faith to each other, but a bewildered, admiring child clinging to a man. He is her life, while she is but an episode in his. At a glance he grasps and comprehends her whole nature; she is incapable of grasping his from any point, incapable of penetrating and judging. She can see neither his limits nor his faults. Whichever way she turns, she sees him as something gigantic, looming on every side. Hence there is in this love no criticism, no emancipation of the spirit, no employment of the understanding. He is the great, the glorious one—like Faust, who can talk of everything and has an answer for all questions, or like Egmont, whose name as a hero and a saviour is upon every tongue and who is known to the whole city. The reason why this love brings with it no spiritual emancipation is that the young girl has no spirit, in the sense of intellect; she is pure soul. When she performs actions which would seem to require a certain amount of will or firm determination, when Clärchen, for example, astonished and indignant that the citizens of Brussels are indifferent and cowardly enough to allow their hero to be carried off to prison and probable death, makes a public appearance in the market-place, and vainly attempts to rouse their dull souls with fiery words, the motive of the action is to be found in the young girl's naïve belief that her lover's life must be of as great importance to others as it is to her; as she sees nothing in the world but him, she cannot imagine how others can think of anything else. These young girls are genuine daughters of the great family to which Ophelia and Desdemona belong.

A sharp contrast confronts us in the new type of Frenchwoman; instead of sweetness, clinging affection, naturalness, we have passion, will, energy, and conscious intelligence. For it was in the most remarkable and intellectual woman of the day, a woman who had given up country, peace, and prosperity, rather than submit to the petty tyranny with which Napoleon's despotism pursued the unsubmissive, that Constant found the new type.

The appearance of woman in literature as conscious intelligence is a first step towards her appearance as genius. We already see Mme. de Staël's turban appearing on the horizon. The woman who shares man's passions and struggles will soon share his genius and his renown. Yet a little while and the struggle ends in victory, the same woman who succumbs under the name of Eléonore is crowned at the Capitol as Corinne.

It only now remains to direct attention to the accurate psychological observation inAdolphe, and to show the results arrived at. The hero starts, as we have seen, with the idea that the conquest of Eléonore is a task worthy of him; he imagines that he will be able coldly to study her character, and calmly to lay his plan of campaign; but, his susceptibility being quite as great as his egoism, he soon succumbs to a fascination which completely overmasters him, and which so increases his natural timidity that he cannot summon up courage to make the declaration which he had promised his vanity to arrive at very speedily. He writes, but Eléonore will have nothing to say to him, and avoids him. Her resistance and coldness produce in him a submission and devotion which soon become a species of worship. Never before has Eléonore been thus loved, for however much true devotion her protector has shown her, there has always been a touch of condescension in it. He could have made a more honourable alliance; he has never said so, but what is unsaid may quite well make itself felt. It is this reverence of Adolphe for her which wins Eléonore. She gives herself to him, and he is almost dazed with rapture and happiness. What first jars upon him is her not being able (when the Count has gone from home for a day or two) to let him out of her sight even for a few hours. She detains him when he attempts to leave her; when he goes, she asks when he will return. Pleased and flattered at first by this boundless devotion, he soon finds that his time is so absorbed by her that he has not an hour at his own disposal. He is compelled to refuse all invitations and break off with all his acquaintances. This is no great loss to him, but he would prefer being able to come and go as he pleases to being obliged to put in an appearance at the stroke of the clock. She who had been his aim and object in life is now a tie upon him.

Where are ye now, O touching romances, in which the lover never had anything to do but to love, in which he rose up early to love, loved all day, and for love passed sleepless nights! It is a wonderfully naturalistic touch inAdolphethat the lover feels his loss of time to be indeed a loss.

It avails not that he asserts his right to dispose of his time as he will, for the thought of the grief she endures when he fails to appear, prevents his making any satisfactory use of the time gained, especially as he is also tormented by a feeling of shame that another human being should have such an ascendency over him. Then when he returns to her, annoyed with himself for having come back much sooner than was prudent for the sake of her reputation or his own work, he finds her miserable because he has stayed away so long. For two hours he has been suffering from the knowledge that she is longing, and now he must suffer two more before he can pacify her. In spite of all this he feels happy; he tells himself that it is sweet to be thus loved; nevertheless, he is unconsciously consoling himself with the thought that the peculiarities of their position must, sooner or later, put an end to the situation.

The Count returns, and Adolphe first suffers from being compelled to deceive him, and then endures the torture of seeing Eléonore sacrifice everything for his own sake, give up at one and the same time her home and her fortune. It is a double grief, partly selfish, for he mourns over the inevitable restriction of his own liberty by the sacrifice she is so happy in making for him, and partly compassionate, for he knows with what hyena-like fury society will tear her reputation to pieces. All she has won by years of irreproachable behaviour she loses in one day. Her pride suffers agonies, and his devotion becomes a duty. From henceforth each has a secret suffering which is not confided to the other.

Adolphe's character begins to deteriorate. He fights a duel with a man who has spoken slightingly of Eléonore, but himself unintentionally injures her reputation by the incessant mockery of women and the men who live in subjection to them in which he indulges as a kind of relief from the feeling of his own dependence; men put their own interpretation on his jests and jeers. He who cannot resist a tear, makes a point of speaking of women with callous contempt.

Many have suffered the misery of loving without return; Adolphe's torment consists in being loved after he has ceased to love. Eléonore sees through his efforts to appear overjoyed when they meet, and one of those terrible scenes ensues with which Mme. de Staël had made Constant familiar; the exasperation of her passionate nature resembles hatred. An attempt is made by Adolphe's relations, who disapprove of his wasting his youth on such a connection, to get rid of Eléonore. Adolphe's chivalrous feeling impels him to run away with her, and for a time their tender feeling towards each other resembles love. Eléonore makes fresh sacrifices which it galls Adolphe to accept. At one time she suffers as much from not being loved as he from not loving; at another she so intoxicates herself with her own passion that she sees it double and believes that it is returned. Both live in the memory of their former happiness, which is vivid enough to make parting seem painful, even impossible, but not strong enough to impart any happiness to their daily life. The tender but faint protestations of love made now and again by Adolphe to Eléonore resemble the weak, colourless leaves put forth from the branches of some uprooted tree.

He fails to make the being happy who is the cause of so much unhappiness to himself. Every time she feels that she has won new rights, he feels that he is bound by new fetters. Her passionateness makes their daily life one incessant storm. In a biography of Constant we find the following significant sentence: "This year Constant was happy; Mme. de Staël was in Russia."

Eléonore inherits her father's fortune and is no longer dependent upon Adolphe's protection. The world now suspects him of deriving pecuniary advantage from the friendship; he is blamed for injuring her reputation by being always in her company, and it is of course impossible for him to explain that it is she who will not live without him.

His life is slipping away between his fingers; he is fulfilling none of the promises of his youth; for, as he is not allowed to forget, there is an insurmountable barrier between him and any possible future, and that barrier is Eléonore. He determines to break off with her, but this very determination makes his position more hopeless, for the moment he resolves upon the death sentence (which he is too weak not to postpone) all bitterness leaves him, and he feels such tender compassion for her that she misunderstands and believes that all is well.

She makes a final violent effort to win him by rousing his jealousy; but nothing now has any effect; on all sides the rupture is represented to him as the most natural thing in the world, as a duty to his father, to his own future, even to the unhappy being to whom he is chained, and whom he is tormenting. She receives a letter which throws light on his intentions, and soon after is attacked by a fatal fever and dies, proclaiming her devotion to her lover with her last breath.

The moment Adolphe is free he realises that freedom is now useless to him; he no longer knows what to do with it, and longs for the old fetters.

Constant himself thus expresses the moral of the book: "The strongest passion cannot survive the struggle with the established order of things. Society is too powerful. It makes that love too bitter which it has not recognised and stamped with the seal of its approval. Woe, then, to the woman who rests her hope of happiness upon a feeling which all things combine to poison, and against which society, when it is not obliged to respect it as legal, enlists all that is basest in the human heart, with the aim of destroying all that is good."

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