Corinne, Volume 1 | Page 7

an excellent person"--through
respectable savants like Sismondi and Dumont, down to a very low
level of toady and tuft-hunter. It is rather surprising that with such
models and with no supreme creative faculty she should have been able
to draw such creditable walking gentlemen as the Frenchman Erfeuil,
the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian Castel-Forte; and should
not have produced a worse hero than Nelvil. For Nelvil, whatever faults
he may have, and contemptible as his vacillating refusal to take the
goods the gods provide him may be, is, after all, if not quite a live man,
an excellent model of what a considerable number of the men of his
time aimed at being, and would have liked to be. He is not a bit less
life-like than Byron's usual hero for instance, who probably owes not a
little to him.
And so we get to a fresh virtue of Corinne, or rather we reach its main
virtue by a different side. It has an immense historical value as showing
the temper, the aspirations, the ideas, and in a way the manners of a
certain time and society. A book which does this can never wholly lose
its interest; it must always retain that interest in a great measure, for
those who are able to appreciate it. And it must interest them far more
keenly, when, besides this secondary and, so to speak, historical merit,
it exhibits such veracity in the portraiture of emotion, as, whatever be
its drawbacks, whatever its little temptations to ridicule, distinguishes
the hapless, and, when all is said, the noble and pathetic figure of

Corinne.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] I am creditor neither to praise nor to blame for this translation,
which is the old English version brought out in the same year as the
original, but corrected by another hand for the present edition in the
pretty numerous points where it was lax or unintelligent in actual
rendering. In the places which I have compared, it seems to me to
present that original very fairly now; and I am by no means sure that an
excessively artificial style like that of the French Empire is not best left
to contemporaries to reproduce. At any rate, a really good new
translation of Corinne would be a task unlikely to be achieved except
by rather exceptional talents working in labour of love: and I cannot
blame the publishers of this issue for not waiting till such a translator
appeared.

Book i.
OSWALD.
[Illustration]

CORINNE.
Chapter i.
Oswald, Lord Nelville, Peer of Scotland, quitted Edinburgh for Italy
during the winter of 1794-5. He possessed a noble and handsome figure,
an abundance of wit, an illustrious name, and an independent fortune,
but his health was impaired by deeply-rooted sorrow, and his
physicians, fearing that his lungs were attacked, had prescribed him the
air of the South. Though indifferent as to the preservation of his life, he

followed their advice. He expected, at least, to find in the diversity of
objects he was about to see, something that might divert his mind from
the melancholy that preyed upon it. The most exquisite of griefs--the
loss of a father--was the cause of his malady; this was heightened by
cruel circumstances, which, together with a remorse inspired by
delicate scruples, increased his anguish, which was still further
aggravated by the phantoms of the imagination. Those who suffer,
easily persuade themselves that they are guilty, and violent grief will
extend its painful influence even to the conscience.
At twenty-five years of age he was dissatisfied with life, his mind
anticipated every thing that it could afford, and his wounded sensibility
no longer enjoyed the illusions of the heart. Nobody appeared more
complacent, more devoted to his friends when he was able to render
them service; but not even the good he performed could afford him a
pleasurable sensation.
He incessantly sacrificed his own taste to that of others; but it was
impossible to explain, upon principles of generosity alone, this total
abnegation of every selfish feeling, most frequently to be attributed to
that species of sadness which no longer permitted him to take any
interest in his own fate. Those indifferent to him enjoyed this
disposition so full of benignity and charm; but those who loved him
perceived that he sought the happiness of others like a man who no
longer expected any himself; and they almost experienced a pain from
his conferring a felicity for which it was impossible to make him a
return in kind.
He was, notwithstanding, of a nature susceptible of emotion, sensibility
and passion; he combined every thing that could evoke enthusiasm in
others and in himself; but misfortune and repentance had taught him to
tremble at that destiny whose anger he sought to disarm by forbearing