[1]Mme. Necker de Saussure:Notice sur le Caractère et les Écrits de Mme. de Staël, p. 358.
[1]Mme. Necker de Saussure:Notice sur le Caractère et les Écrits de Mme. de Staël, p. 358.
In her book,Essai sur les Fictions, Mme. de Staël makes the first attempt to define her literary ideal. Her motto is: Avoid legend and symbol, avoid the fantastic and the supernatural; it is nature, it is reality, that must reign in poetry. She does not as yet seem to have apprehended the fundamental difference between poetry as psychical delineation, and poetry as the free play of the imagination, the difference which later became so clear to her that we may call the apprehension of it one of her most important deserts as an authoress; for it was by means of this clear apprehension that she assisted her countrymen to an understanding of the relative position of their national poetic art. The French are, namely, accustomed to regard knowledge of human nature founded upon observation as the substance, the essence of poetry—such knowledge as is displayed in Molière'sTartuffeandMisanthrope. And just as Frenchmen as a rule seek the essence of poetry in observation, Germans seek it in intensity of feeling, and Englishmen in an exuberance of imagination which refuses to be restricted by rules, and leaps at a bound from the horrible to the ideal, and from the serious to the comic, not limiting itself to the natural, but also not employing the supernatural otherwise than as a profound symbol.
The poetry which radiates from the Italian soil and the Italian people is something different again from all these. In Corinne, the improvisatrice, Mme. de Staël seeks to personify poetical poetry as opposed to psychological poetry, i.e. poetry as understood by Ariosto, as opposed to the poetry of Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe. In spite of her intention, however, she unconsciously makes Corinne half northern. No one who has not laboured painfully to attain to a real, thorough understanding of the point of view of an entirely foreign race can know how difficult it is to shake off one's innate national prejudices. To do so it is necessary to breathe the same air, to live for some time in the same natural environments, as the foreign race. But for the foreign travel made obligatory by her banishment, Mme. de Staël could not have expanded her power of apprehension as she did.
In all modesty I lay claim to be able to speak on this matter from experience. It was during lonely walks in the neighbourhood of Sorrento that I first succeeded in seeing Shakespeare at such a distance that I could get a full view of him and really understand him and, consequently, his antithesis. I remember one day in particular which was in this respect to me very momentous.—I had been spending three days in Pompeii. Of all its temples, that of Isis had interested me most. Here, thought I, stood that goddess whose head (now in the National Museum) has open lips and a hole in the back of the neck. I went down to the underground passage behind the altar, from which the priests, by means of a neatly adjusted reed, enabled the goddess to deliver oracles. The reflection involuntarily occurred to me that, in spite of the craft of the priests and the credulity of the people, it must have been extremely difficult to produce any effect of mystery in this climate. The temple is a pretty little house standing in the bright sunshine; there is no abyss, no darkness, no horror; even at night its outlines must have stood clearly defined in the moonlight or the starlight. The landscape, in combination with the sober sense of the Roman people, prevented any development of mysticism or romance.
I went on to Sorrento. The road, hewn in the mountain side, follows the sea, now projecting into it, now receding from it; where it recedes one looks down upon a great ravine, filled with olive trees. The aspect of the country is at once grand and smiling, wild and peaceful. The bare rocks lose their austerity, illuminated by such a brilliant sun, and in every ravine lie white cottages, or villas, or whole villages, framed in the shining green foliage of the orange trees or the soft velvety grey of the olives. Upon the other side the white towns lie strewn, as if scattered by a sugar-sifter, on the wooded sides of the mountains, right up to the topmost ridge. The sea was indigo blue, in some places steel blue, the sky without a cloud; and in the distance lay the enchantingly beautiful rocky island of Capri. Nowhere else is to be found such a glorious harmony of line and colour. Elsewhere, even in the most beautiful spots, there is always something to take exception to—the lines of Vesuvius, for example, melt almost too softly into the air. But Capri! The contours of its jagged rocks are like rhythmic music. What balance in all its lines! How grand and yet how delicate, how bold and yet how charming it all is! This is Greek beauty—nothing gigantic, nothing that appeals to the vulgar, but absolute harmony within clearly defined bounds. From Capri one sees the islands of the sirens, past which Ulysses sailed. Homer's Ithaca was like this, only perhaps less beautiful; for Greek-peopled Southern Italy is the only living evidence of what the climate of Greece was in ancient days; the land of Greece itself is now but the corpse of what it was.
It began to grow dark; Venus shone brilliantly, and the great flanks and clefts of the mountains gradually assumed the fantastic appearances which darkness imparts. But the general impression was not what a Northerner calls romantic. The sea still glimmered through the delicate foliage of the olives, its deep blue broken by branch and leaf. Then it was I realised that there is a world, the world of which the Bay of Naples is an image, of which Shakespeare knew nothing; because it is great without being terrible, and enchanting without the aid of romantic mists and fairy glamour. I now for the first time rightly understood such painters as Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin; I comprehended that their classic art is the expression of classic nature; and by force of contrast I understood better than ever before such a work as Rembrandt's etching of "The Three Trees"—which stand like sentient beings, like types of northern humanity, on the swampy field in the pouring rain. I understood how natural it is that a land such as this should not have produced a Shakespeare, or needed a Shakespeare, because here Nature has taken upon herself the task which falls to the lot of the poet in the North. Poetry of the profound, psychological species is, like artificial heat, a necessity of life where nature is ungentle. Here in the South, from the days of Homer to the days of Ariosto, poetry has been able to rest content with mirroring, clearly and simply, the clearness and simplicity of nature. It has not sought to probe the depths of the human heart, has not plunged into caverns and abysses in search of the precious stones which Aladdin sought, which Shakespeare found, but which the sun-god here scatters in lavish profusion over the surface of the earth.
Corinne, ou l'Italieis Mme. de Staël's best tale. In Italy, that natural paradise, her eyes were opened to the charms of nature. She no longer preferred the gutters of Paris to the Lake of Nemi. And it was in this country, where a square yard of such a place, for instance, as the Forum, has a grander history than the whole Russian empire, that her modern, rebellious, melancholy soul opened to the influence of history, the influence of antiquity with its simple, austere calm. In Italy too, in Rome, that house of call for all Europe, the characteristics and limitations of the different nations were first clearly revealed to her. Through her, her own countrymen for the first time became conscious of their peculiarities and limitations. In her book, England, France, and Italy meet, and are understood, not by each other, but by the authoress and her heroine, who is half English and half Italian. Corinne is, in the world of fiction, like a prophecy of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning was to be in the world of reality. One thinks of Corinne when one reads that Italian inscription upon a house in Florence: "Here lived Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poems are a golden thread binding Italy to England."
The plot ofCorinneis as follows: A young Englishman, Oswald, Lord Nelvil, who has lost the father he loved above everything on earth, and whose grief is the more poignant because he reproaches himself for having embittered the last years of that father's life, attempts to distract his thoughts by travel in Italy. He arrives in Rome just as the poetess, Corinne, is borne in triumph to the Capitol, and, although public appearances and public triumphs do not harmonise with his ideal of womanhood, he is quickly attracted by, and soon passionately in love with, Corinne, who is as frank and natural as she is intellectual. But though intercourse with her reveals all her beautiful and rare qualities to him, he never loses the fear that she is not a suitable wife for a highly born Englishman. She is not the weak, timid woman, absorbed in her duties and her feelings, whom he would choose for his wife in England, where the domestic virtues are a woman's glory and happiness. He entertains morbid scruples as to whether his dead father would have desired such a daughter-in-law as Corinne, a question which, as time goes on, he plainly perceives must be answered in the negative.
Corinne, whose love is far deeper and fuller than his, is alarmed by his vacillation, and, fearing that he may suddenly leave Italy, endeavours to keep him there by rousing his interest in the history and antiquities of the country, its art, its poetry, and its music. Oswald is especially perturbed by the mystery attaching to Corinne's life; her real name and her parentage are unknown; she speaks many languages; she has no relatives; he fears something discreditable in the circumstances which have thrust her out into the world alone. As a matter of fact, Corinne is the daughter of an Englishman and a Roman lady. After her father's second marriage she had been brought up by her stepmother, in a little narrow-minded English country town. Tortured by the petty restrictions which were designed to crush her spirit, she had left England after her father's death, and had since lived an independent, but absolutely blameless life as a poetess. She is aware that her family and Oswald's are acquainted, that his father had chosen her for his daughter-in-law, and that a match is now projected between Oswald and her younger sister, Lucile. This not remarkably probable complication provides a pretext for description of Italy. Whenever Oswald entreats Corinne to tell him her past history, she endeavours to postpone the moment of explanation; and she can find no better means of diverting his thoughts than constituting herself his cicerone, showing him ruins, galleries, and churches, and finally carrying him off on a tour through the most famous parts of Italy. Like a second Scheherazade, she strives to prolong her life and ward off the threatening danger by daily showing him new splendours, in comparison with which those of theThousand and One Nightspale; and these splendours she provides with an accompaniment of subtle, profound comment.
In this manner the description of Rome, the delineation of Neapolitan scenery, and that of the tragic beauty of Venice, present themselves naturally, one after the other. It is in Rome that Corinne's great passion comes into being; so Rome provides the scenery for the first act of this love story; its solemn grandeur and wide horizon harmonise with these profound emotions and serious thoughts. In Naples her love rises to its highest lyrical expression; here the volcano and the smiling splendour of the bay are her background, and music upon the sea accompanies her passionately sorrowful improvisation on the subject of woman's love and woman's destiny. In Venice, where one is so perpetually forced to reflect on the decay and annihilation of beauty, Oswald leaves Corinne for ever.
The news that his regiment is ordered to India recalls him to England. He considers himself betrothed to Corinne, and hastens to find her stepmother and secure the restoration of the fugitive to her family rights. But at Lady Edgermond's he meets Corinne's half-sister, Lucile, and her modest, womanly loveliness by slow degrees obliterates the impression made by the elder sister, whose brilliant gifts do not seem so alluring from a distance, and whose independent, bold appearance in the full sunshine of public life does not augur well for wedded happiness in a country where the subdued light of home (with which Lucile's subdued character is in admirable keeping) is the only one in which a woman can show herself with advantage. Marriage with Corinne would be a challenge to society; and he feels that it would, consequently, be a slight to his father's memory. Marriage with Lucile, on the other hand, would be unanimously approved of by society. In Corinne, he would wed the foreign, the far off, that which would be irreconcilable in the long run with the spirit of his country; in Lucile, he would wed as it were England itself. Corinne, who in agonising anxiety has followed him to England, learns his state of mind, and sends him back his ring. Oswald believes that she has ceased to love him, and marries Lucile. He learns of the wrong he has done her, and the story ends tragically with his remorse, and Corinne's death.
We have little difficulty in determining which of the events and circumstances of the book had their counterparts in real life. Oswald's melancholy brooding over the memory of his father, reminds us that the authoress at the time she wrote was mourning Necker's death. Another trait in Oswald borrowed from her own character, is his very feminine fear of taking a step to which the sole objection offered by his conscience is, that it would scarcely have won his dead father's approbation. Possibly, too, his grief that the last years of his father's life had been troubled by his conduct, had a point of correspondence in the authoress's own history. In all else, Oswald's personality is obviously a free rendering of that of Benjamin Constant. Many small details betray that Mme. de Staël clearly had Constant in her mind. Oswald comes from Edinburgh, where Constant spent part of his youth; and it is stated that he is exactly eighteen months younger than Corinne (Mme. de Staël was born on the 22nd of April, 1766, and Constant on the 25th of October, 1767); but far weightier evidence is to be found in the whole cast of the character, in the blending of chivalrous courage, displayed towards the outer world, with unchivalrous cowardice, displayed towards the loving and long-loved woman whom he abandons in order to escape from her superiority. But remark that Mme. de Staël has created a typical Englishman out of these and many added elements.
In Corinne the authoress has depicted for us her own ideal. She has borrowed the chief characteristics of her heroine from her own individuality. Corinne is not, like Delphine, the woman who is confined to the sphere of private life; she is the woman who has overstepped the allotted limits, the poetess whose name is upon all lips. The authoress has given her her own exterior, only idealised, her own eyes, even her own picturesque dress, with the Indian shawl wound about her head. She has endowed her with her own clear, active intellect; but it is with Corinne, as with herself—the moment passion grips her with its eagle's talon, her intellect avails her nothing, she becomes its defenceless prey. Like Mme. de Staël, Corinne is an exile, with all the thoughts and sorrows of the exile. For in Italy she is severed from the land of her birth, in England banished from the home of her heart and its sunshine. Hence when Corinne sings of Dante, she dwells sorrowfully on his banishment, and declares her belief that his real hell must have been exile. Hence, too, when giving Oswald an account of her life, she says that for a being full of life and feeling, exile is a punishment worse than death; for residence in one's native country implies a thousand joys which one first realises when bereft of them. She speaks of all the manifold interests which one has in common with one's fellow-countrymen, that are incomprehensible to a foreigner, and of that necessity for constant explanation which takes the place of rapid, easy communication, in which half a word does duty for a long exposition. Corinne, too, like her creator, hopes that her growing fame will bring about her recall to her native land, and reinstatement in her rights. Finally, Mme. de Staël has endowed Corinne with her own culture. It is expressly stated that it was her knowledge of the literatures and understanding of the characters of foreign nations that gave Corinne so high a place in the literary ranks of her own country; her charm as a poet lay in her combination of the southern gift of colour with the northern gift of observation. Employing all these borrowed characteristics, and inventing many others, the authoress has, it is to be observed, succeeded in producing a distinctly Italian type of female character.
Mme. de Staël's literary activity divides itself, as it were, into two activities—a masculine and a feminine, the expression of thoughts and the dwelling upon emotions. We can trace this duality inCorinne. The book has, unquestionably, more merit as an effort of the intellect than as a work of creative imagination. A peculiar fervour and a certain tenderness in the treatment of the emotions betray that the author is a woman. Psychology is still in such a backward condition that as yet only the merest attempt has been made to define the characteristic qualities of woman's mind, of woman's soul, as distinguished from man's; when the day comes for making the attempt in good earnest, Mme. de Staël's works will be one of the most valuable sources of enlightenment.
The woman's hand is, perhaps, most perceptible in the delineation of the hero. The authoress supplies us with the reasons for each of his distinguishing qualities. His sense of honour is explained by his distinguished birth, his melancholy by his English "spleen" and by his unhappy relations with the father whom he worshipped, as Mme. de Staël worshipped hers, and by whose memory he allowed himself to be influenced in a manner which reminds us of the way in which Sören Kierkegaard was influenced by the memory of his father. Only one thing does the writer leave unexplained in a person whose moral courage is so extremely slight, and that is the recklessness with which he risks his life. Female novelists almost invariably equip their heroes with a courage which has no particular connection with their character, while at the same time, in modern society, it is generally women who prevent men from doing deeds of daring, and who also as a rule admire and pay hysterical homage to essentially cowardly public characters—the priests who carefully protect their own lives in epidemics, the warriors who attack the enemy upon paper. The explanation would seem to be that masculine courage is a quality which, regarded as the highest attribute of man, becomes to woman a sort of ideal, but an ideal which she does not understand, which she does not recognise in real life, and which perhaps for this very reason she chooses to portray—and portrays badly.
These remarks apply more particularly to Oswald's heroic behaviour on the occasion of the fire at Ancona, where he saves the entire town under the most terrible circumstances. He alone, with his English followers, makes an attempt to extinguish the conflagration, an attempt which is crowned with success. He rescues the Jews, who are shut up in the Ghetto, where the people in their religious frenzy have left them to be burned as a propitiatory offering. He ventures into the burning asylum, into the room in which the most dangerous lunatics are confined; these maniacs he controls and rescues from the flames by which they are already surrounded; he loosens their chains, and will not leave one recalcitrant behind. The whole scene is excellently described, but, as already said, the psychology is weak. Mme. de Staël makes full amends for this, however, in her description of the impression made by these deeds upon Corinne's womanly heart. Oswald, by leaving the town at once, manages to escape from all expressions of gratitude; but on the return journey they come to Ancona again, he is recognised, and Corinne is awakened in the morning by shouts of: "Long live Lord Nelvil! long live our benefactor!" She goes out on the piazza, is recognised as the poetess whose name is famous all over Italy, and is received with acclamation. The crowd beseech her to be their spokeswoman, and interpret their gratitude to Oswald. When he in his turn appears on the piazza, he is amazed to see that the crowd is led by Corinne. "She thanked Lord Nelvil in the name of the people, and did it with such grace and nobility that all the inhabitants of Ancona were enraptured." And, adds the authoress with feminine subtlety, she said we in speaking for them. "You have saved us." "Weowe you our lives." Thiswemakes the more impression because of the authoress, earlier in the book, having dwelt upon the moment when Corinne and Oswald first used the word we, in arranging a walk in Rome, feeling all the happiness of the timid declaration of love therein implied. Now Corinne dissolves thatwe, that she may range herself on the side of those who owe him everything. And the story goes on to tell that when she approached to offer Lord Nelvil in the name of the people the wreath of oak and laurel leaves which they had woven for him, she was overcome by an indescribable emotion, and felt almost afraid as she drew near him. At the moment of her offering the wreath, the whole populace, in Italy so susceptible and so ready to worship, fell on their knees, and Corinne involuntarily followed their example. It is in the delineation of feminine emotions that Mme. de Staël excels, the emotions of a gifted woman who pays dearly for her gifts.
Domestic happiness and feminine purity are what touch Corinne most deeply. She, the Sibyl, is moved when she reads the inscription on a Roman woman's sarcophagus: "No stain has soiled my life from wedding festival to funeral pyre. I have lived chastely between the two torches." But wedded happiness was not to be hers. It was not for Corinne as it was not for Mignon, the two children of longing who, the one in French, the other in German literature, as it were personify enthusiasm for Italy. Corinne herself says that only through suffering can our poor human nature attain to an understanding of the infinite; and she is as if created to suffer. But before she perishes as the last victim in the ancient arena, she is adorned for the sacrifice and led in triumphal procession.
When we first meet her, on her progress to the Capitol, she is simply but picturesquely clad, with antique cameos in her hair, and a fine red shawl wound turbanwise about her head, as in Gérard's well-known portrait of Mme. de Staël. The costume suits Corinne: she is the child of the land of colour, and she has not lost her love of colour; even in stiff conventional England she has retained her fresh natural tastes, her joy in what Gautier has called the trinity of beautiful things—gold, purple, and marble.
Like all the other great types of the period, she must be seen in the surroundings with which she harmonises, among which she is at home, as René is in the primeval forest, Obermann upon the heights of the Alps, and Saint-Preux by the Lake of Geneva. Her appearance has been preserved to posterity in the painting which engravings have made so familiar: Corinne improvising at Cape Miseno.
Her volcanic, glowing nature is at home in this volcanic, glowing region. The Bay of Naples appears to be a great sunken crater, surrounded by fair towns and forest-clad mountains. Encircling a sea which is even bluer than the sky, it resembles an emerald goblet filled with foaming wine, its rims and its sides adorned with vine leaves and tendrils. Near land the sea is a deep azure blue; farther out it is, as Homer said, wine-coloured; and above it shines a sky which is not, as is generally believed, bluer than ours, but really paler, only that its blue is underlaid by a white fire, which glows with a shimmer that is both blue and white. It was in this region that the ancients imagined hell to lie; the descent to it being through the cave of the Lake of Avernus. They called it hell, this paradise. Its volcanic origin and surroundings made them feel as if Tartarus were not far off. Volcanic formations everywhere! One great mountain has a side which looks as if it had been cut with a knife; half of that mountain fell in an earthquake. Cape Miseno, the farthest-out point of land on one side of the bay, with the little rocky island of Nisida in front of it, and Procida and Ischia behind it, did not always consist, as now, of two separate heights—long ago there was only one. The two craters of Vesuvius were formed by the eruption which overwhelmed Pompeii. Fertility and fire everywhere! A few steps from where the sulphureous fumes of Solfatara force their way up into the air through the crumbling lava, lie fields, some one mass of bright-red poppies, others full of great blue flowers, of powerfully scented downy mints and other herbs growing waist-high in such thronging profusion, such fruitfulness and luxuriance, that one feels as if all this billowing fulness would shoot up again in a single night, were it all cut down. And then the overpowering perfume! a spicy fragrance unknown in the north, a stupendous symphony of the scents of millions of different plants!
It is towards evening that Corinne and her friends find their way out to Cape Miseno. From there one looks back upon the great town, and one hears a dull sound, which is like the beat of its heart. After sunset lights become visible everywhere; they are lying even in the ruts of the roads; across the path and away up the mountain sides bright flames leap and flit through the air; those which fly highest resemble moving stars. These flames, which move with long leaps and are extinguished for a moment after each leap, are the fire-flies of the South. The myriads of lights flashing through the darkness transport one in thought to fairyland. Right opposite, looking from Cape Miseno, the fiery lava glows with a ruddy glare as it streams down the side of Vesuvius.
It is here that they bring Corinne her lyre, and that she sings of the glories of the scenery, and of the many memories of this land—of Cumæ, where the Sibyl dwelt; of Gaeta, close to the spot where the tyrant's dagger was plunged into Cicero's heart; of Capri and Baiæ, where men recall the deeds of darkness of Tiberius and Nero; of Nisida, where Brutus and Portia bade each other a last farewell; of Sorrento, where Tasso, just escaped from a mad-house, a miserable, hunted creature, ragged and unshaven, knocked at the door of the sister, who first did not recognise him, and then could not speak for tears. It is here that she ends her song with an elegy on all the suffering of this earthly life and all its happiness.
Listen to the inspired words uttered by Corinne in these surroundings, where beauty is based upon ruin, where happiness reveals itself as a flitting, quickly extinguished flame, and where fertility is perpetually endangered by a volcano.
She says: "Jesus permitted a frail and perhaps repentant woman to anoint His feet with the most precious ointment; He rebuked those who counselled her to keep it for a more useful purpose. 'Let her alone,' He said; 'Me ye have not always with you.' Alas! all that is good and great is with us upon this earth only for a short time. Old age, infirmities, and death soon dry up the dewdrop which falls from heaven and rests upon the flower. Let us then blend everything together—love, religion, genius, sunshine and perfumes, music and poetry; the only true atheism is coldness, selfishness, and baseness. It is said: 'Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.' And what is it, O God, to be gathered together in Thy name, if it be not to enjoy the wondrous gifts of Thy-fair nature, to render homage to Thee for them, to thank Thee for life, and to thank Thee most of all when another heart also created by Thee fully and entirely responds to our own!"
Thus she speaks under the influence of her dual inspiration, in her life's meridian, when she is attempting to interweave the happiness of genius with the happiness of love, as the myrtle and the laurel were interwoven in the wreath with which she was crowned at the Capitol. It may not be; they untwist, they recoil from each other; and Corinne, the inspired Sibyl, becomes one of the many crushed, despairing spirits through whom the genius of the century utters its protest against that society which, like these apparently safe towns, is undermined by volcanic flames, flames which are never at rest, but find vent in one outburst after another, throughout the whole of the restless and unhappy nineteenth century.
One might callCorinnea work on national prejudices. Oswald represents all those of England; his travelling companion, Count d'Erfeuil, all those of France; and it is against the prejudices of these two nations, at that time the most powerful and the most self-reliant in Europe, that the heroine does battle with her whole soul. It is no coldblooded, impersonal warfare, for Corinne's future depends upon whether she can succeed in freeing Oswald from his national prejudices to such an extent as to enable him to be happy with a woman like herself, whose life conflicts at every turn with the English conception of what is becoming in woman. But while she is attempting to widen Oswald's view of life and to impart pliancy to his rigid mind, which always starts back again into its accustomed grooves, she is at the same time carrying on the education of the reader. Mme. de Staël continues in the domain of the emotions the task with which we have seen her occupied in the domain of thought. She sketches the first outlines ofnationalpsychology, shows how there is a colouring of nationality even in men's most private, personal feelings. Her countrymen were then, much in the manner of the Germans of to-day, attempting to blot out the national colours of neighbouring countries in the complacent persuasion that they themselves had a monopoly of civilisation. Her inmost desire is to show them that their conception of life is but one among many conceptions that are equally justifiable, some of them possibly more justifiable.
When we remember how powerful is the prejudice which, in every country without exception, makes it a crime for the individual to deny that his nation is in possession of all the virtues which it ascribes to itself, and which so many a sanctimonious Jack-in-the-box finds it to his advantage to assure it daily that it possesses, we shall understand what courage Mme. de Staël displayed in attacking French national vanity at such a period.
There is one great idea that is more fatal than any other to the coercive power wielded by the established beliefs and customs of any given society. It has nothing to do with the logic of the matter. One would imagine that logic, let loose among the whole stock of prejudices ruling in any given country at any given time, would work the same havoc as a bull in a china-shop; but such is not the case; pure logic does not affect the majority of mankind at all I No! if you would really awaken and astound the generality of men, you must succeed in making it plain to them that what they consider absolute is only relative—that is to say, must show them that the standards which they believe to be universally recognised, are only accepted as standards by so and so many similarly constituted minds; whereas other nations and other races have an entirely different conception of the befitting and the beautiful. In this manner the general public of a country learn for the first time that the art and poetry which they despise are regarded by whole races as the highest, while their own, which to them seem the finest in the world, are held in slight esteem by other nations; learn, moreover, that it is vain to take refuge in the thought that all other nations are mistaken in their judgment, seeing that each one of these other nations believes that all the rest are mistaken. If I were asked to define in one word the service rendered by Mme. de Staël to French society, to its culture and literature, and through these to Europe in general, I should express myself thus: By means of her writings, more particularly her great works on Italy and Germany, she enabled the French, English, and German peoples to take acomparativeview of their own social and literary ideas and theories.
Count d'Erfeuil, inCorinne, is a cleverly drawn type of French superficiality and vanity in combination with some of the most charming and characteristic of French virtues. One does not really appreciate the character until one has repeatedly reflected on the amount of courage that was required to introduce into a circle of foreigners, as the sole, and properly accredited, representative of France, such an extremely narrow-minded personage as D'Erfeuil. He is a young Frenchémigré, who has fought with singular gallantry in the war, has submitted to the confiscation of his large estates not merely with serenity, but with cheerfulness, and has with great self-sacrifice tended and supported the old uncle who brought him up, who like himself is anémigréand who without him would be absolutely helpless—in short, there is a foundation of chivalry and unselfishness in his character. When one talks to him, however, one feels it impossible to believe that he is a man of much and sad experience, for he positively seems to have forgotten all that has happened to him. He talks of the loss of his fortune with admirable frivolity, and with equal, if less admirable, frivolity on all other subjects.
Oswald meets him in Germany, where he is nearly bored to death; he has lived there for several years, but it has never occurred to him to learn a word of the language. He intends to go to Italy, but anticipates no pleasure from travelling in that country; he is certain that any French provincial town has more agreeable society and a better theatre than Rome. "Do you not mean to learn Italian?" asks Oswald. "No," he replies; "that is not part of my plan of study;" and he looks as serious when giving this answer as if something very important had led him to the determination. In Italy he does not vouchsafe the landscape so much as a glance. His conversation turns neither on outward objects nor on feelings; it hovers between reflection and observation as between two poles, neither of which it touches; its topics are always society topics; it is garnished with puns and anecdotes, is chiefly about his numberless acquaintances, is indeed in its essence nothing but society gossip. Oswald is astonished by this strange mixture of courage and superficiality. D'Erfeuil's contempt for danger and misfortune would have seemed admirable to him if it had cost more effort, and heroic if it had not been the outcome of the very qualities which render him incapable of deep feeling. As it is, he finds it tiresome.
When D'Erfeuil for the first time sees St. Peter's in the distance, he likens it to the dome of the Invalides in Paris—a comparison more patriotic than apt; when he sees Corinne at the Capitol he feels a desire to make her acquaintance, but no reverence for her. He is not surprised that her heart has remained untouched in a country where he finds no good qualities in the men, but he cannot help flattering himself with the hope that she will be unable to resist the charms of a well-bred young Frenchman. When she speaks to others in his presence in Italian or English (languages he does not understand), he says to her: "Speak French. You know the language and are worthy to speak it."
When he sees that Corinne loves Oswald he does not take it amiss, though his vanity is wounded; but he thinks her passion foolish, because of the improbability of its bringing her happiness. At the same time he most strongly advises Oswald not to enter into a life-long union with an unpresentable woman like Corinne. With all his daring, he bows to the supreme authority of established custom. "If you will be foolish," he says to Oswald, "at least do nothing irreparable;" reckoning among irreparable follies marriage with Corinne. His ideas on literary, correspond to his ideas on social subjects. In Corinne's house the conversation frequently turns upon Italian and English poetry. D'Erfeuil, starting from the premise that French poetry from the time of Louis XV. onwards forms the unquestioned standard, is naturally very severe in his judgment of all foreign productions. To him the Germans are barbarians, the Italians are corrupters of style, and "the taste and elegance of French style" are law-giving in literature. "Our stage literature," he remarks, "is admittedly the finest in Europe, and I do not think that it occurs even to the English themselves to compare Shakespeare with our dramatists." In a company of Italians he shrewdly enough, if without much delicacy, defines Italian drama as consisting of ballets, silly tragedies, and wearisome harlequinades; to him the Greek drama is coarse, Shakespeare formless. "Our drama," he says, "is a model of refinement and beauty of form. To introduce foreign ideas among us would be to plunge us into barbarism."
D'Erfeuil considers the antiquities of Rome altogether overrated. He is not going to fatigue himself, he says, by toiling through all these old ruins. He makes his way northwards, but is as bored by Alpine scenery as he was by Rome. In the end he goes to England, where he assists Corinne in her misfortunes; his deeds have ever been nobler than his words. He cannot, however, when he sees how miserable her love for Oswald has made her, deny his vanity the satisfaction of ringing the changes upon "I told you so;" and he considers it a duty to himself not to let the opportunity slip of offering himself as Oswald's successor. For all this, it is true and unselfish devotion that he displays, and Corinne is distressed by her inability to be more truly grateful to him; but he is so careless and scatterbrained that she is constantly tempted to forget his generous deeds just as he himself forgets them. "It is very charming, no doubt," observes the authoress, "to set little value on one's own good deeds, but it may be that the indifference with which some men regard their own noble actions has its origin in their superficiality." Without regard for anything but what she considers the truth, she thus derives some of the most conspicuous virtues of her countrymen from weaknesses in their character.
By means of this typical character of D'Erfeuil, Mme. de Staël shows how in France all good feelings are held in check by one vice, that fear of society which has its origin in vanity. It seems to her as if all feeling, the whole of life, indeed, were ruled byesprit, by the desire to appear to advantage, and by a fear which may be expressed in the words, "What will people say?" An author who writes not long after Mme. de Staël, the acute and original Henri Beyle, is of the same opinion. His name for Frenchmen isles vainvifsand he asserts that all their actions are dictated by the consideration,Qu'en dira-t-on? the fear, that is to say, of the unbecoming or ridiculous. The French were then, what the Danes are still, very proud of their keen sense of the comical; it was this which led them to describe themselves modestly as the wittiest nation in the world. Corinne maintains that this sense of the ridiculous, with the corresponding fear of being ridiculous, destroys all originality in manners, in dress, and in speech, prevents all free play of imagination, and stifles natural expression of feeling. She maintains that feeling, that every kind of intellectuality, is obliged to take the form of wit instead of the form of poetry, in a country where the fear of becoming the victim of wit or mockery makes each man try to be the first to seize those weapons. "Are we," she asks D'Erfeuil, "only to live for what society may say of us? Is what others think and feel always to be our guiding star? If this be so, if we are intended to imitate each other for ever and ever, why has each one of us been given a soul? Providence might have spared itself this unnecessary outlay."
The national prejudices of France are typified in D'Erfeuil; in Oswald we have a personification of all the prejudices which have been part of England's strength and England's weakness throughout the centuries. Powerful nations are always unjust, and their injustice both adds to their power and limits it. It was upon this injustice that Mme. de Staël considered it her mission to throw a very strong light.
The story of the book turns upon the attempt of a woman to regain, by means of a man's love, that place in English society which she has forfeited by too great independence, by entering the arena of public life; consequently what the authoress chiefly dwells upon in her delineation of English character is the narrowness of the English conception of ideal womanhood. From this conception, with which he has been brought up, Oswald makes sincere but fruitless efforts to free himself. When, in Italy, he sees Corinne admired and loved for her great gifts, without a thought being given to her sex or her enigmatical past, he is greatly perplexed. There is something repulsive to him in a woman's leading this public life. He is accustomed to look upon woman as a sort of higher domestic animal, and for long cannot reconcile himself to the idea of society forgiving her the crime of having talent. He feels himself as it were humiliated and exasperated by the thought; he regards it as impossible that a woman with such a well-developed, independent mind should be capable of binding herself faithfully to one man and living contentedly for him alone. And though, in spite of everything, Corinne loves him, loves him with a passion beside which all that he has seen or heard of pales, and which is so unselfish that it leads her to risk her reputation for his sake without demanding anything whatever in return, he forgets her, her great gifts, her nobility of mind and soul, the moment he stands once again upon English soil, inhales English mists and prejudices, and meets a fresh young girl of sixteen, the very perfection of a wife after the English recipe, reserved, ignorant, innocent, silent, a fair-haired, blue-eyed incarnation of domestic duty.
The authoress tracks the prejudice which explains Oswald's conduct to its source, which she finds to be the English conception of home. Oswald's principal difficulty in coming to a decision about Corinne is expressed in the words: "Of what use would all that be at home?" "And home is everything to us—to the women, at least," remarks an Englishman to Oswald; and the authoress herself remarks elsewhere: "Though it is possible for an Englishman to find pleasure for a time in foreign ways and customs, his heart invariably returns to the impressions of his childhood. If you ask the Englishman you meet on board ship in foreign climes whither he is bound, he answers, if he is upon the return journey: 'Home.'"[1]It is to this English love of home that she attributes both the superstition that the independent intellectual development of woman is absolutely incompatible with the domestic virtues, and the English idolatry of these virtues. And, strange as it may seem to us to see the Italian woman, nowadays so indifferent to everything intellectual, set up as a model of independence, there is no doubt that Mme. de Staël is right. The ideal of well-being conveyed by the word home, is a genuine Northern, Teutonic conception, originally so foreign to the Latin races that the English wordhomehas passed into the Latin languages, because these possess no equivalent. To this conception of home corresponds the word "cosiness" (untranslatable into any Latin language), which was created to express the pleasure of being able to sit warm and comfortable within four walls. We have not far to seek for the origin of this ideal. The inhabitant of Northern Europe, living in a raw climate, amidst cold, harsh natural surroundings, finds the same pleasure in the thought of sitting by a warm hearth whilst snow and rain beat impotently on the window pane, which a Neapolitan feels in the thought of sleeping under the warm, glorious, starry sky, or passing the cool night in dance, play, and song, in the open air. But to each of these different ideals of well-being and happiness corresponds a different conception of virtues and duties, which the nation that possesses or enforces them regards as the universal conception. It considers itself the first among nations because it exacts the fulfilment of these particular duties and possesses these particular virtues (which is not surprising, seeing that both are naturally entailed by the national character), and it moreover censures all the nations whose conceptions differ from its own.
Speaking of England, Oswald asks Corinne: "How could you leave the home of chastity and morality and make fallen Italy the country of your adoption?" "In this country," Corinne replies, "we are modest; neither proud of ourselves like the English, nor pleased with ourselves like the French." It gratifies her to put both the Puritanic arrogance of the Northerner and the vain Frenchman's fear of ridicule to shame, by comparing them with the frank naturalness which the people of Italy even in their humiliation have preserved. She describes, delicately and truthfully, the touching naïveté with which the latter display their emotions. There is no stiff reserve, as in England, no coquetry, as in France; here the woman simply desires to please the man she loves, and cares not who knows it. One of Corinne's friends, returning to Rome after an absence of some duration, calls upon a distinguished lady. He is informed by the servant that "the Princess does not receive to-day; she is out of spirits, she isinnamorata." Corinne tells how indulgently a woman is judged in Italy, and how frankly she owns her feelings. A poor girl dictates a love-letter to a writer in the open streets, and the man writes it with the utmost seriousness, never omitting to add all the polite forms which it is his business to know; hence some poor soldier or labourer receives a letter in which many tender assurances occupy the space between "Most honoured contemporary!" and "Yours with reverential respect."Corinneis perfectly correct. I have myself seen such letters. And, on the other hand, it seems as if learning had not been at all unusual among the Italian women of those days. A Frenchman inCorinnewho calls a learned woman a pedant, receives the reply: "What harm is there in a woman's knowing Greek?"
Neither does Corinne fail to perceive that the official recognition and support of duty and morality in the North is accompanied by the greatest brutality in all cases in which the laws of society have once been transgressed. She shows how the Englishman respects no promise or relation which has not been legally registered, and how in strict England the sanctity of marriage and an irreproachable home life exist side by side with the most shameless and bestial prostitution, just as the personal devil exists side by side with the personal God. She remarks, with womanly circumspection and modesty, but yet quite plainly: "In England it is the domestic virtues which constitute woman's glory and happiness; but, granted that there are countries in which love is to be met with outside the bonds of holy matrimony, then undoubtedly among all these countries Italy is the one in which most regard is shown to woman's happiness. The men of that country have a code of morality for the regulation of those relations which are without the pale of morality—a tribunal of the heart." It is the same tribunal as that of the mediæval Courts of Love. Byron is greatly impressed when he comes to Italy and finds this complete moral code, exactly the opposite of the English. Mme. de Staël as usual tries to explain the milder morality by the milder climatic conditions; she says: "The aberrations of the heart inspire a more indulgent compassion here than in any other country. Jesus said of the Magdalen: 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.' Those words were spoken under a sky as beautiful as ours. The same sky invokes for us the same Divine mercy."
Corinne, who is herself a Catholic, teaches the Scottish Protestant who loves her, to understand Italian Catholicism. "In this country, Catholicism, having had no other religion to combat, has become milder and more indulgent than it is anywhere else; in England, on the other hand, Protestantism, in order to annihilate Catholicism, has been obliged to arm itself with the utmost severity of principle and morality. Our religion, like the religion of the ancients, inspires the artist and the poet; is a part, so to speak, of all the pleasures of our life; while yours, which has had to adapt itself to a country where reason plays a much more important part than imagination, has received an imprint of moral severity which it will always retain. Ours speaks in the name of love, yours in the name of duty. Although our dogmas are absolute, our principles are liberal, and our orthodox despotism adapts itself to the circumstances of life, while your religious heresy insists upon obedience to its laws without making any allowance for exceptional cases."
She shows how, in consequence of this, there is always a certain dread of genius, of intellectual superiority, in Protestant countries. "It is a mistaken fear," she says; "for it is very moral, this superiority of mind and soul. He who understands everything becomes very compassionate, and he who feels deeply becomes good."
"Why are great powers a misfortune? Why have they prevented my being loved? Will he find in another woman more mind, more soul, more tenderness than in me? No, he will find less; but he will be content, because he will feel himself more in harmony with society. What fictitious pleasures, what fictitious sorrows are those we owe to society! Under the sun and the starry heavens all that human beings need is to love and to feel worthy of each other; but society! society! how hard it makes the heart, how frivolous the mind! how it leads us to live only for what others will say of us! If human beings could but meet freed from that influence which all collectively exercise upon each, how pure the air that would penetrate into the soul! how many new ideas, how many genuine emotions would refresh it!"—"Receive my last salutation, O land of my birth!" cries Corinne in her swan song in praise of Rome—and one feels the bitterness of the exile and the thrust at Napoleon in the words that follow: "You have not grudged me fame, O liberal-minded people that do not banish women from your temples, that do not sacrifice immortal talent to passing jealousies! You welcome genius wherever you recognise it; for you know that it is a victor without victims, a conqueror that does not plunder, but takes from eternity wherewith to enrich time."
This sketch of the contrast between the emotional life of Catholicism and that of Protestantism prepares for a digression on the contrast between their respective views of art. On this latter point the book makes a decided attack on Protestant arrogance and want of all understanding of art, as exhibited by Oswald, who represents the narrowest English ideas.
In the midst of this plastic and musical people, who are so good-natured, so childlike, so careless of their dignity, and, according to English ideas, so immoral, Oswald, who is accustomed to regard it as the aim and end of existence to live up to certain insular conceptions of duty and dignity, feels himself very ill at ease. Devoid of all artistic feeling, he judges art now by a literary, now by a moral, now by a religious standard; his prejudices are constantly offended; he understands nothing. He notices some reliefs on the doors of St. Peter's, and great is his amazement to find that they represent scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Leda with the swan, and the like! What is this but pure paganism! Corinne takes him to the Colosseum, and (in this resembling his contemporary Oehlenschläger) his one thought is that he is standing in a gigantic place of execution, his one feeling, moral indignation at the crimes here perpetrated against the early Christians. He enters the Sistine Chapel and, ignorant of the history of art, is greatly outraged that Michael Angelo has ventured to portray God the Father in ordinary human form, as though he were a Jupiter or a Zeus. He is equally scandalised on finding in Michael Angelo's prophets and sibyls none of that humble Christian spirit which he had looked for in a Christian chapel.
All this the authoress has drawn from life. Italy presupposes in her visitors a certain amount of artistic, or æsthetic, taste. There are three ways of looking at everything—the practical, the theoretical, and the æsthetic. The forest is seen from the practical point of view by the man who inquires if it conduces to the healthiness of the district, or the owner who calculates its value as firewood; from the theoretical, by the botanist who makes a scientific study of its plant life; from the æsthetic or artistic, by the man who has no thought but for its appearance, its effect as part of the landscape. It is this last, the artistic, æsthetic view, that Oswald is unable to take. He has no eyes; his reasoning power and his morality have deprived his senses of their freshness. Therefore he cannot lose sight of the substance in the form, therefore the Colosseum awakens in him only the remembrance of all the blood so wickedly spilled there. In Corinne's vindication of the æsthetic view we feel the influence of Germany, more particularly of A. W. Schlegel, the first exponent of the awakening romantic spirit in that country. For, however differently Romanticism may develop in different countries, one thing which it invariably maintains is, that the beautiful is its own aim and end, or Selbstzweck, as it was called in Germany; an idea borrowed from Kant'sKritik der Urtheilskraft; the vindication of beauty as the standard and true aim of art. In France this theory was expressed by the formulal'art pour l'art, and it makes its appearance for the first time in Denmark in certain of Oehlenschläger's poems.
But it is not only the art, but the people and the life of Italy, that must be seen with the artist's eye to be understood and appreciated. Nothing is more common than to meet in Italy, Englishmen, Germans or Frenchmen, who, seeing everything from their national point of view, have nothing but blame for everything. In the eyes of the Germans the women lack that timid modesty, that maidenliness, which is their ideal; Englishmen are shocked by the want of cleanliness and order; Frenchmen are dissatisfied with the social intercourse, the absence of conversational ability, and express contempt for the Italian prose style.
Corinne points out that the beauty of Italian women is not of a moral, but of a plastic and picturesque kind; that to appreciate it we must have an eye susceptible to colour and form, not dulled by too much poring over printed books. She contrasts Italian improvisation with French conversation, and finds it equally admirable.
A sensible people like the English cultivate and appreciate practical business qualities; an emotional people like the Germans cultivate and love music; a witty people like the French cultivate conversation—that is to say, the best in them is brought out in intercourse, in converse with others; an imaginative people like the Italians improvise—that is to say, rise naturally from their ordinary feelings into poetry. Corinne says: "I feel myself a poet whenever my spirit is exalted; when I am conscious of more than usual scorn for selfishness and meanness, and when I feel that a beautiful action would be easy to me—then it is that my verses are best. I am a poet when I admire, when I scorn, when I hate, not from personal motives, but on behalf of the whole of humanity." And she does not rest content with defending the light nightingale-song which was what the Italians at that time understood by lyrical poetry; she also accounts for the exaggerated importance attached to style and rhetorical pomp in Italian prose. She explains it partly by the love of the South for form, partly by the fact that men lived under an ecclesiastical despotism which forbade the serious treatment of any theme; they knew that it was not possible for them to influence the course of events by their books, and so they wrote to show their skill in writing, to excite admiration by the elegance of their composition—and the means became the end.
Another of the things which had shocked Oswald was Michael Angelo's representation of the Divinity and the prophets in the Sistine Chapel. In the mighty human form of Jehovah he does not recognise that invisible, spiritual divinity into which the passionate national God of the old Hebrews has been transformed by the Protestantism of the North; and where among all these proud forms with which Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling in his Promethean desire to create human beings, where among those defiant, enthusiastic, despairing, struggling figures, is to be found the humility, the meekness he expected to see? Corinne reads her countrymen a lesson, a lesson needed in other countries at this day, and especially in one like ours, where so much unintelligent talk is to be heard on the subject of Christian art and Christian æsthetics.
The passionately violent attack made by Sören Kierkegaard towards the end of his life upon so-called Christian art does not surprise us, coming as it did from a man destitute of all artistic culture. He first invests the painters of the Renaissance with his Protestant, nay, his personal, conception of religion, and is then shocked because, with this conception in the background of their consciousness, they could paint as they did. Oswald behaves in much the same way. He does not realise that the painters of the Renaissance stood in a different relation to their subjects from the painters of our day; that whereas the artists of to-day seek to gain a real understanding of their subject, and study it either from the antiquarian, the ethnological, or the psychological point of view, the artist of the Renaissance took his subject as he found it, and made of it what he fancied—that is to say, what harmonised with his character. Herein is to be found the explanation of what surprises and shocks the North—ener in the old masters. For, just as a small selection of themes taken from the Iliad and the Odyssey provided the whole of Greek art—sculpture, painting, and drama—with its subjects (it is always the same story, of Paris and Helen, of Atreus and Thyestes, or of Iphigenia and Orestes), so a score of themes from the Old and New Testament (the Fall, Lot and his Daughters, the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt, the Passion) keep brush and chisel at work in Italy for three centuries. It is such subjects alone which artists are commissioned to paint, and for long it is only for the purpose of painting such subjects that study from the nude is permitted. Men's minds develop, the subjects remain the same. The pious, naïve faith of old days is superseded by the enthusiastic humanism and reviving paganism of the Renaissance; but it is still Madonnas and Magdalens that are painted, with this difference, that the stiff Queen of Heaven of Byzantine art is transformed into an idealised peasant girl of Albano, and the woefully emaciated and remorseful sinner of Andrea del Verocchio into the voluptuous Magdalen of Correggio; the apostles and martyrs too are still depicted, but the stoned and crucified saints of olden times, painted for the purpose of exciting compassion and devotional feeling, are transformed into the St. Sebastians of Titian and Guido Reni, the beautiful young page glowing with health and beauty, the dazzling white of whose flesh is thrown into relief by one or two drops of blood which drip from an arrow-head inserted becomingly between the ribs.
Oswald is taught by Corinne to admire the liberal spirit of Italian Catholicism, which in the days of the Renaissance permitted each artist to develop his talent or genius with perfect independence, even when he only made his Christian or Jewish subject a pretext for the representation of his own personal ideal of man or woman. This brings us to another of Oswald's stumbling-blocks, namely, that blending of the Christian and the pagan which so offended him in the reliefs by Antonio Filarete on the doors of St. Peter's. The same thing is to be observed everywhere; everywhere the pagan material has been preserved and employed. The old basilicas and churches are built with the pillars of antique temples. A simple cross superficially christianises the obelisks, the Colosseum, and the interior of the Pantheon. The statues of Menander and Posidippos were prayed to as saints all through the Middle Ages.
Corinne shows Oswald that it is to this often childish, but always unprejudiced position towards the pagan and the human, that Catholicism owes the artistic glory with which it will always shine in history, a glory which will never be dimmed by the artistic performances of Protestantism. Protestantism tears down from above its altars the beautiful Albano peasant women with smiling babes at their breasts, tinder the pretext that they are Madonnas, whitewashes all the glowing pictures, and glories in bare walls.
The Italy of the Renaissance divested Christianity of its spirit of self-renunciation, of its Jewish-Asiatic character, and transformed it into a mythology, fragrant of incense, wreathed with flowers. Italian Catholicism allied itself with the civic spirit in the cities, and with all the fine arts when art was born again. Thus its interests were quite as often promoted from patriotic as from religious motives. It was in Tuscany that the Renaissance began. There humanity was born again after its fall, its renegation of Nature. There the first Italian republics were founded. There men once more willed; houses congregated and formed small, proud, indomitably liberal states, each a town with its surrounding district. Towers and spires rose into the air, erect and proud as the bearing of a free man; fortified palaces were begun, churches were completed; but the church was far more a state treasure-house, a witness to wealth, perseverance, and artistic taste, a valuable item in the rivalry between state and state, between Siena and Florence, than a dwelling-place of "Our Most Blessed Lady." Much more was done in honour of Siena than in honour of God. A Tuscan church, such as that of Orvieto, with its mosaics inlaid in gold, or that of Siena, with its façade of sculptured marble resembling the lace robe of some youthful beauty, is to us much more of a jewel-casket than a church.
Or think of the Church of St. Mark in Venice. The first time one sees it, one feels momentarily surprised by its oriental façade, its bright cupolas, its peculiar arches resting on pile upon pile of short, clustered pillars of red and green marble. After casting a glance from the piazza at the mosaics of the outside walls, rich colours on a golden ground, one enters, and one's first thought is: Why, this is all gold, golden vaulting, golden walls! The minute gilt tesseræ composing the mosaic background of all the pictures form one great plane of gold. A sunbeam falling upon it produces sparkling flecks upon the darker ground, and the whole church seems aflame. The floor, undulating with age, is composed of a mosaic of red, green, white, and black marble. The pillars, which are of reddish marble, have capitals of gilded bronze. The small arched windows are of white, not stained glass; coloured windows would be unsuitable with all this magnificence; they are for less gorgeous churches. The pillars are alternated with enormous square columns of greenish marble, at least six yards in diameter, which support gilded half-arches; each cupola rests upon four such half-arches. The smaller pillars which support altars, &c., are, some of green and red speckled marble, some of transparent alabaster. All the lower-lying marble, that, for instance, of the seats and benches running along the sides of the church and surrounding the columns, is of a bright red colour. The whole church, as seems only natural in a town whose school of painting so entirely subordinated form to colour, impresses by its picturesqueness, not by its architectural grandeur. With its gilded ornaments, its inlaid stalls, its lovely bronzes, its golden statues, candelabra, and capitals, San Marco lies there like some luxurious Byzantine beauty, heavily laden with gold and pearls and sparkling diamonds, the richest brocade covering her oriental couch.
Such a church as this was undoubtedly originally an expression of religious enthusiasm, but in the palmy days of the Renaissance, as the building became ever more and more richly ornamented, religious feeling was entirely supplanted by love of art. Very significant of this is the one inscription in the church, which is to be found above the principal entrance: "Ubi diligenter inspexeris artemque ac laborem Francisci et Valerii Zucati Venetorum fratrum agnoveris tum tandem judicato." (When you have diligently studied and considered all the art and all the labour which we two Venetian brothers, Francesco and Valerio Zucati, have expended here, then judge us.) A caution by the artists against hasty criticism.
The brothers Zucati were the masters in their art who in the sixteenth century executed most of the mosaics in the church, entirely, or principally, after designs by Titian. Such an inscription, which, instead of being an invitation to worship, a greeting to the faithful, a benediction, or a text of Scripture, is an appeal to the beholder to examine carefully and seriously the artistic work executed in the service of religion, would be an impossibility in or on a Protestant church.
When the Catholic faith disappears, as it is doing to-day in Italy, from the Catholic Church, when Inquisition and fanaticism become a legend, when the ugly animal in the snail-shell dies, the beautifully whorled shell will still remain. There will still remain the magnificent churches, statues, and paintings; there will still remain Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Sistine Madonna, St. Peter's at Rome, the cathedrals of Milan, Siena, and Pisa. Protestantism has shown itself incapable of producing any great religious architecture; and, though iconoclasm has long been a thing of the past, Rembrandt remains the one great master in whose pictures it has shown capacity to give artistic expression to its religious sentiments.
It has been necessary to dwell a little upon the fact that Corinne, the art-loving poetess, always takes the part of Catholicism against Protestant Oswald, because here again the influence upon Mme. de Staël of her intercourse with Germans may be clearly traced. Here again we feel, and this time more forcibly, the approach of Romanticism, with its loathing of Protestantism, as unimaginative, uncultured, dry, and cold, and its steadily increasing affection for Catholicism, a faith whose æsthetic proclivities, and close and warm relations with imagination and art, gave it an unexpected new lease of life and power in the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the prosaic reasonableness of the "enlightenment" period. We have here a most distinct attack upon the France of the eighteenth century, which, with Voltaire at its head, had persecuted and scorned Catholicism, and which, without any love for Protestant dogma, had yet expressed a distinct preference for Protestantism, with its independence of Papal authority, its married clergy, and its hatred of the real or pretended renunciations of conventual life.