Corinne, Volume 1 | Page 6

in the work of
the greatest masters, is real. And it is perhaps only after a pretty long
study of literature that one perceives how very little real passion books,
even pretty good books, contain, how much of what at times seems to
us passionate in them owes its appeal to accident, mode, and the
personal equation. Of the highest achievement of art--that which avails
itself of, but subdues, personal thought and feeling in the elaboration of
a perfectly live character--Madame de Stael was indeed incapable. But
in the second order--that which, availing itself of, but not subduing, the
personal element, keeps enough of its veracity and lively force to
enliven a composite structure of character--she has here produced very
noteworthy studies. Corinne is a very fair embodiment of the beauty
which her author would so fain have had; of the youthful ardour which
she had once actually possessed; of the ideas and cults to which she
was sincerely enough devoted; of the instruction and talent which
unquestionably distinguished her. And it is not, I think, fanciful to
discover in this heroine, with all her "Empire" artifice and convention,
all her smack of the theatre and the salon, a certain live quiver and
throb, which, as has been already hinted, may be traced to the
combined working in Madame de Stael's mind and heart of the
excitements of foreign travel, the zest of new studies, new scenes, new

company, with the chill regret for lost or passing youth and love, and
the chillier anticipation of coming old age and death. It is a
commonplace of psychology that in shocks and contrasts of this kind
the liveliest workings of the imagination and the emotions are to be
expected. If we once establish the contact and complete the circle, and
feel something of the actual thrill that animated the author, we shall, I
think, feel disposed to forgive Corinne many things--from the dress and
attitude which recall that admirable frontispiece of Pickersgill's to Miss
Austen's Emma, where Harriet Smith poses in rapt attitude with
"schall" or scarf complete, to that more terrible portrait of Madame de
Stael herself which editors with remorseless ferocity will persist in
prefixing to her works, and especially to Corinne. We shall consent to
sweep away all the fatras and paraphernalia of the work, and to see in
the heroine a real woman enough--loving, not unworthy of being loved,
unfortunate, and very undeserving of her ill fortune. We shall further
see that besides other excuses for the mere guide-book detail, the
enthusiasm for Italy which partly prompted it was genuine enough and
very interesting as a sign of the times--of the approach of a period of
what we may call popularised learning, culture, sentiment. In some
respects Corinne is not merely a guide-book to Italy; it is a guide-book
by prophecy to the nineteenth century.
The minor characters are a very great deal less interesting than Corinne
herself, but they are not despicable, and they set off the heroine and
carry out what story there is well enough. Nelvil of course is a thing
shreddy and patchy enough. He reminds us by turns of Chateaubriand's
René and Rousseau's Bomston, both of whom Madame de Stael of
course knew; of Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, with whom she was very
probably acquainted; but most of no special, even bookish, progenitor,
but of a combination of theoretic deductions from supposed properties
of man in general and Englishman in particular. Of Englishmen in
particular Madame de Stael knew little more than a residence (chiefly
in _émigré_ society) for a short time in England, and occasional
meetings elsewhere, could teach her. Of men in general her experience
had been a little unfortunate. Her father had probity, financial skill, and,
I suppose, a certain amount of talent in other directions; but while he
must have had some domestic virtues he was a wooden pedant. Her

husband hardly counted for more in her life than her _maître d'hôtel_,
and though there seems to have been no particular harm in him, had no
special talents and no special virtues. Her first regular lover, Narbonne,
was a handsome, dignified, heartless _roué_ of the old _régime_. Her
second, Benjamin Constant, was a man of genius, and capable of
passionate if inconstant attachment, but also what his own generation in
England called a thorough "raff"--selfish, treacherous, fickle, incapable
of considering either the happiness or the reputation of women,
theatrical in his ways and language, venal, insolent, ungrateful.
Schlegel, though he too had some touch of genius in him, was half
pedant, half coxcomb, and full of intellectual and moral faultiness. The
rest of her mighty herd of male friends and hangers-on ranged from
Mathieu de Montmorency--of whom, in the words of Medora Trevilian
it may be said, that he was "only