Corinne, Volume 1 | Page 4

the return of the
Bourbons.
Then it was that the German and Italian journeys already mentioned
(the death of M. Necker happening between them and recalling his
daughter from the first) led to the writing of Corinne.
A very few words before we turn to the consideration of the book, as a
book and by itself, may appropriately finish all that need be said here
about the author's life. After the publication of Corinne she returned to
Germany, and completed the observation which she thought necessary
for the companion book _De l'Allemagne_. Its publication in 1810,
when she had foolishly kindled afresh the Emperor's jealousy by
appearing with her usual "tail" of worshippers or parasites as near Paris
as she was permitted, completed her disgrace. She was ordered back to
Coppet: her book was seized and destroyed. Then Albert de Rocca, a
youth of twenty-three, who had seen some service, made his
appearance at Geneva. Early in 1811, Madame de Stael, now aged
forty-five, married him secretly. She was, or thought herself, more and
more persecuted by Napoleon; she feared that Rocca might be ordered
off on active duty, and she fled first to Vienna, then to St Petersburg,
then to Stockholm, and so to England. Here she was received with
ostentatious welcome and praises by the Whigs; with politeness by

everybody; with more or less concealed terror by the best people, who
found her rhapsodies and her political dissertations equally boring.
Here too she was unlucky enough to express the opinion that Miss
Austen's books were vulgar. The fall of Napoleon brought her back to
Paris; and after the vicissitudes of 1814-15, enabled her to establish
herself there for the short remainder of her life, with the interruption
only of visits to Coppet and to Italy. She died on the 13th July 1817:
her two last works, _Dix Années d'Exil_ and the posthumous
_Considérations sur La Révolution Française_, being admittedly of
considerable interest, and not despicable even by those who do not
think highly of her political talents.
And now to Corinne, unhampered and perhaps a little helped by this
survey of its author's character, career, and compositions. The
heterogeneous nature of its plan can escape no reader long; and indeed
is pretty frankly confessed by its title. It is a love story doubled with a
guide-book: an eighteenth-century romance of "sensibility" blended
with a transition or even nineteenth-century diatribe of æsthetics and
"culture." If only the first of these two labels were applicable to it, its
case would perhaps be something more gracious than it is; for there are
more unfavourable situations for cultivating the affections, than in
connection with the contemplation of the great works of art and nature,
and it is possible to imagine many more disagreeable ciceroni than a
lover of whichever sex. But Corinne and Nelvil (whom our
contemporary translator[1] has endeavoured to acclimatise a little more
by Anglicising his name further to Nelville), do not content themselves
with making love in the congenial neighbourhoods of Tiber or Poestum,
or in the stimulating presence of the masterpieces of modern and
ancient art. A purpose, and a double purpose, it might almost be said,
animates the book. It aims at displaying "sensibility so charming"--the
strange artificial eighteenth-century conception of love which is neither
exactly flirtation nor exactly passion, which sets convention at defiance,
but retains its own code of morality; at exhibiting the national
differences, as Madame de Stael conceived them, of the English and
French and Italian temperaments; and at preaching the new cult of
æsthetics whereof Lessing and Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schlegel,
were in different ways and degrees the apostles. And it seems to have

been generally admitted, even by the most fervent admirers of Madame
de Stael and of Corinne itself, that the first purpose has not had quite
fair play with the other two. "A little thin," they confess of the story. In
truth it could hardly be thinner, though the author has laid under
contribution an at least ample share of the improbabilities and
coincidences of romance.
Nelvil, an English-Scottish peer who has lost his father, who accuses
himself of disobedience and ingratitude to that father, and who has
been grievously jilted by a Frenchwoman, arrives in Italy in a large
black cloak, the deepest melancholy, and the company of a sprightly
though penniless French _émigré_, the Count d'Erfeuil. After
performing prodigies of valour in a fire at Ancona, he reaches Rome
just when a beautiful and mysterious poetess, the delight of Roman
society, is being crowned on the Capitol. The only name she is known
by is Corinne. The pair are soon introduced by the mercurial Erfeuil,
and promptly fall in love with each other, Corinne seeking partly to fix
her hold on Nelvil, partly to remove his Britannic contempt for