Their opinions on all
subjects
were affected
and colored by their religious opinions.
and colored by their religious opinions.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v23 - Sha to Sta
With the
heavy swaying of the tapestry, had these people by any chance.
left their silken shroud and come out into the room to look at
the child?
Not the twelve white-faced nuns; not the featureless young
squires and dames: but that old châtelaine of whose needle-
wrought semblance she had always been half afraid,-who car-
ried the golden flagon and gave the knight to drink, perhaps for
sleep, perhaps for death. Yes, that was she; but she had left
her majesty in the hangings, with her veil and horned head-
piece, her trailing samite and cloth of gold of cramoisie. Here,
with her thin gray tattered locks, pallid, pinched, and shrunken,
white as some reptile blanched beneath a stone, what was she to
be afraid of now? But this other-"Once the place was mine,
mine and my love's! " she was exclaiming. "Till the sea dark-
ened with their gilded prows, the sky darkened with their bitter
arrows! " Ah, yes, how many hundreds of years ago it was since
she defended the castle after a lance-head laid her lord low; and
the sea-rover had scaled the heights and taken her, loathing and
hating him, to wife. And from them had been born the line of
the L'Aiglenoirs!
And what was she doing here? What were they all doing
here, these women? What right had they in her room? Why
## p. 13813 (#647) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13813
were they looking with such ardent and eager eyes, murmuring
among themselves, hurrying past one another toward the child?
"Give way! " was La Dame Blanche exclaiming. "I was the
first. "
"Après moi," said the laughing lady, flittering along in her
butterfly gauzes, the diamonds in her tiara flashing out and
reluming again. "I am the last. "
"If so false a thing ever existed at all," said the woman with
the mass-book, or was it a book of jests? -the Flemish woman
who sold her daughter for a tulip.
"I give you my word I existed! " was the gay reply.
"Under your own signature? " asked the pretty patched and
powdered Watteau.
-
"Never mind whose signature. "
"Worthless," murmured a lady, lifting her black lace mask
from features sharp as a death's-head, and of a tint as wan as
the tints of a Boucher design,—“worthless in any event. "
"Ah, madame, from you to me? I was but your natural con-
sequence, you Voltairiennes, as you were all born on the night of
St. Bartholomew! "
"Its tocsin still rings in the air! I am condemned ever to
hear the boom of the bell," complained the dark person with the
rosary.
And then the laughing lady twitched her beads; and there fell
out from her sleeve the perfumed fan whose breath was fever,
the gloves whose palms were deadly, brought with her Medicean.
mistress from Italy.
"A truce! ” cried the gay lady. "The birth of an heir to the
L'Aiglenoir Franche du Roys, with wealth to restore the ancient
splendor, is an event for due ceremony and precedence. I am
the child's grandmother, his very next of kin among us. And
you know the rights of the grandmother in France. "
«< They are our rights! " came a shrill multitudinous murmur.
"We all are grandmothers! "
"Are we all here ? " came a hollow whisper from the châte-
laine, the candlelight flickering in her flagon.
"All the fairy godmothers? " cried the gay lady.
"No, no," said La Dame Blanche: "there is one who has been
forgotten. "
"The wicked fairy," said the gay lady. "The rest of us are
of such a virtue. He will value us like his other objets de vertu. »
## p. 13814 (#648) ##########################################
13814
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
A COLD shiver coursed over Rosomond, but her eyes burned
with the intensity of her gaze. She understood it now. He was
the child of their blood. That was why they were here, why
they intruded themselves into her room. They had a right. It
had been their own room. For how many generations had the
L'Aiglenoirs been born in this room! She had never thought of
this when she sailed so gayly out of harbor, a bride with her
bridegroom, wearing his title, protected by his arm, so proud,
so glad, so happy that she had the wealth he needed, all that
so trifling beside the fact that they loved each other. She had
never dreamed of the little child to come, who would be dearer
than her life to her, and in whose veins must run a black drop
of the blood of all these creatures.
-
And now-oh, was there no remedy? Was there nothing
to counteract it, nothing to dissipate that black drop, to make
it colorless, powerless, harmless, a thing of air? Were there no
sweet, good people among all those dead and gone women?
Ah, yes, indeed, there they were! Far off, by the curtain of
the doorway, huddled together like a flock of frightened doves:
gentle ladies, quiet, timid, humble before heaven; ladies of placid
lives, no opportunities, small emotions, narrow routine; praying
by form, acting by precedent, without individuality; whose good-
ness was negative, whose doings were paltry; their poor drab be-
ings swamped and drowned and extinguished in the purples and
scarlets of these women of great passions, of scope, of daring
and deed and electric force, mates of men of force, whose posi-
tion had called crime to its aid, whose very crimes had enlarged
them, whose sins were things of power, strengthening their per-
sonality if but for evil, transmitting their potentiality—oh, no,
these gentle ladies signified nothing here!
A cold dew bathed Rosomond and beaded her brow. But
were the L'Aiglenoirs and their order all there were? Where
were her own people? Had they no right in the child? Could
they not cross the seas? Was there no requiting strength
among them? None in the mother of her father,―king of rail-
roads and mines and vast southwestern territory,-that stern,
repressed woman, who had spared and starved and saved to start.
her son in life? "Come! " cried Rosomond. "Come, my own
people! Oh, I need you now, I and my child! "
But among all these splendid dames of quality, accustomed to
wide outlook on the world, and a part of the events of nations,
## p. 13815 (#649) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13815
what had these village people to do,-these with their petty con-
cerns, the hatching of chickens, the counting of eggs, the quilt-
ing of stitches; these perhaps more prosperous, with interests
never going outside the burgh, whose virtues were passive, whose
highest dream was of a heaven like their own parlors, a God in
their own image: whose lives were eventless, whose memories.
were pallid, laid aside in the sweep of the great drama and with-
out a part; whose slighter nature was swollen, and whose larger
nature was shriveled from disuse? This colonial dame,- her
father the distilled essence of old Madeira and oily Jamaica, her
heart in her lace, her china, and her sweetmeat closet, her scrofu-
lous and scorbutic son lixiviated by indulgence,- had she much
counteracting force to give? Or had this one, in whom quar-
reled forever the mingled blood of persecuted Quaker and per-
secuting Puritan? Or this pale wife of the settler, haunted by
fear of the Indian, the apparitions of the forest, and the terrors
of her faith; or this other, the red-cloaked matron, fighting fire
with fire, the familiar of witches? Was there help to be hoped
for from this bland Pilgrim woman, who, through force of cir-
cumstances, was married with her nursling in her arms while her
husband was but three months dead? And did this downcast-
eyed, white-kerchiefed mistress, whose steadfastness her hardness
countervailed,-daughter of the Mayflower, the new sea-rover
coming out of the East, whose Norse fathers had come out of the
East before, do more than carry her back to the old Danes and
Vikings ambushed in their creeks? Her people, indeed! Return-
ing on the source -oh, it was all one and the same! It was all
misery!
―――――
-
What gifts were these grandmothers going to give the child
then? she asked. Pride and lust and cruelty, mocking impiety
and falsehood, bigotry that belied heaven as bitterly as unbelief,
vanity and selfishness and hate, theft and avarice and murder?
In the wild and wicked current of their blood the tide was hope-
lessly against him- his bones would be poured out like water!
Her pulse bounded, her brain was on fire. - Oh, no, no, the lit-
tle child-the new-born
help-some one!
some one must come.
some one must
Some one was coming. There was a stir without; the wind
was singing round the buttress as if it brought on its wings the
cry of the bright sea, the murmur of the wide wood; the moon-
light streamed in full and free.
-
-
## p. 13816 (#650) ##########################################
13816
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
"It is she," said La Dame Blanche.
"The wicked fairy-the unbidden godmother," said the gay
lady with a warning gesture.
"The one whom civilization has forgotten," said the Voltairi-
enne, readjusting her mask, "and whom culture has ignored. "
How sweet were the thunders of the sea sifted through dis-
tance, the whispers of the wave creaming up the shingle, that
crept into the room like the supporting harmony of the wind's
song! There was a rustle as if of all the leaves of the forest, a
quiver of reeds over blue water reflecting blue heaven, a sighing
of long grass above the nests of wild bees in the sunshine. And
who was this swift and supple creature with her free and fear-
less foot, large-limbed and lofty as Thusnelda, clad in her white
wolfskin, with the cloud of her yellow hair fallen about her,
carrying her green bough, strong, calm, sure, but with no smile.
upon her radiant face?
"The original savage," whispered the gay lady, as sovereign
and serene the unbidden godmother moved up the room; and the
others seemed to dissolve before her coming-to waver away
and to vanish.
She parted the hangings of the bassinet, and rested her hand
upon the sleeper of his first sleep, bending and gazing long.
"Waken," she said then, as she lifted and laid him at her
breast. "Drink of thy first mother's life, a balsam for every ill;
mother's milk that shall unpoison thy blood, and bring the thick
black drops to naught. Child of the weather and all out-doors,
latest child of mine, draw from me will and might and the love
of the undefiled, acquaintance with the rune that shall destroy
the venom that taints you, shall blast the wrong done you!
Draw large, free draughts! Return to me, thou man-child! I
give thee the strength of my forest, my rivers, my sea, my sun-
shine, my starshine, my own right arm, my heart! I cleanse
thee. The slime of the long years shall not cling to thee. I
start thee afresh, new-born. By night in my star-hung tent the
gods shall visit thee, by day thou shalt walk in the way of be-
coming a god thyself. I give thee scorn for the ignoble, trust
in thy fellow, dependence on thine own lusty sinew and uncon-
querable will,-familiar friend of hardship and content, spare
and pure and strong,-joy in the earth, the sun, the wind, faith
in the unseen. This is thy birthright. Whatever else the years
may bring, see that thou do it no wrong. I, the unpolluted,
## p. 13817 (#651) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13817
strong wild strain in thy blood, the vital savage, save thee from
thyself. Sleep now, sweet hope. The winds sing to thee, the
waves lull thee, the stars affright thee not! Dear son of thy
mother, sleep. "
And then a shiver ran through the long, moon-lighted tapes-
try, as the gust rose and fell, and the sea sighed up the reef,
and there was only silence and slumber in the room.
But Rosomond's women, when they came again, wondered and
were wise concerning a green bough that lay across the child.
THE KING'S DUST
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
HOU shalt die," the priest said to the King.
"Thou shalt vanish like the leaves of spring.
Like the dust of any common thing
One day thou upon the winds shalt blow! "
"Nay, not so," the King said: "I shall stay
While the great sun in the sky makes day;
Heaven and earth, when I do, pass away.
In my tomb I wait till all things go! "
"T"
Then the King died. And with myrrh and nard,
Washed with palm-wine, swathed in linen hard,
Rolled in naphtha-gum, and under guard
Of his steadfast tomb, they laid the King.
Century fled to century; still he lay
Whole as when they hid him first away.
Sooth, the priest had nothing more to say,-
He, it seemed, the King, knew everything.
One day armies, with the tramp of doom,
Overthrew the huge blocks of the tomb;
Swarming sunbeams searched its chambered gloom,
Bedouins camped about the sand-blown spot.
Little Arabs, answering to their name,
With a broken mummy fed the flame;
Then a wind among the ashes came,
Blew them lightly, and the King was not!
## p. 13818 (#652) ##########################################
13818
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
ON AN OLD WOMAN SINGING
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
S™
WEET are the songs that I have heard
From green boughs and the building bird;
From children bubbling o'er with tune
While sleep still held me half in swoon,
And surly bees hummed everywhere
Their drowsy bass along the air;
From hunters and the hunting-horn
Before the day-star woke the morn;
From boatmen in ambrosial dusk,
Where, richer than a puff of musk,
The blossom breath they drifted through
Fell out of branches drenched with dew.
And sweet the strains that come to me
When in great memories I see
All that full-throated quiring throng
Go streaming on the winds of song:
Her who afar in upper sky
Sounded the wild Brunhilde's cry,
With golden clash of shield and spear,
Singing for only gods to hear;
And her who on the trumpet's blare
Sang 'Angels Ever Bright and Fair,'
Her voice, her presence, where she stood,
Already part of Angelhood.
But never have I heard in song
Sweetness and sorrow so prolong
Their life as muted music rings
Along vibrating silver strings-
As when, with all her eighty years,
With all her fires long quenched in tears,
A little woman, with a look
Like some flower folded in a bock,
Lifted a thin and piping tone,
And like the sparrow made her moan,
Forgetful that another heard,
And sang till all her soul was stirred.
And listening, oh, what joy and grief
Trembled there like a trembling leaf!
## p. 13819 (#653) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13819
The strain where first-love thrilled the bars
Beneath the priesthood of the stars;
The murmur of soft lullabies
Above dear unconsenting eyes;
The hymns where once her pure soul trod
The heights above the hills of God,-
All on the quavering note awoke,
And in a silent passion broke,
And made that tender tune and word
The sweetest song I ever heard.
AT THE POTTER'S
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
THER
HERE were two vases in the sun :
A bit of common earthenware,
A rude and shapeless jar, was one;
The other- could a thing more fair
Be made of clay? Blushed not so soft
The almond blossom in the light;
A lily's stem was not so slight
With lovely lines that lift aloft
Pure grace and perfectness full-blown;
-
And not beneath the finger tip
So smooth, or pressed upon the lip,
The velvet petal . of a rose.
Less fair were some great flower that blows
In a king's garden, changed to stone!
King's gardens do not grow such flowers,—
In a dream garden was it blown!
Fine fancies, in long sunny hours,
Brought it to beauty all its own.
With silent song its shape was wrought
From dart of wing, from droop of spray,
From colors of the breaking day,
Transfigured in a poet's thought.
At last, the finished flower of art -
The dream-flower on its slender stem
What fierce flames fused it to a gem!
A thousand times its weight in gold
A prince paid, ere its price was told;
Then set it on a shelf apart.
-
## p. 13820 (#654) ##########################################
13820
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
But through the market's gentle gloom,
Crying his ever-fragrant oil,
That should anoint the bride in bloom,
That should the passing soul assoil,
Later the man with attar came,
And tossed a penny down and poured
In the rude jar his precious hoard.
What perfume, like a subtile flame,
Sprang through its substance happy-starred!
Whole roses into blossom leapt,
Whole gardens in its warm heart slept!
Long afterwards, thrown down in haste,
The jar lay, shattered and made waste,
But sweet to its remotest shard!
EQUATIONS
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
you
ou so sure the world is full of laughter,
Not a place in it for any sorrow,
Sunshine with no shadow to come after
Wait, O mad one, wait until to-morrow!
You so sure the world is full of weeping,
Only gloom in all the colors seven,
Every wind across a new grave creeping-
Think, O sad one, yesterday was heaven!
YOUNG and strong I went along the highway,
Seeking Joy from happy sky to sky;
I met Sorrow coming down a byway-
What had she to do with such as I?
Sorrow with a slow detaining gesture
Waited for me on the widening way,
Threw aside her shrouding veil and vesture —
Joy had turned to Sorrow's self that day!
*
IF SOME great giver give me life,
And give me love, and give me double,
Shall I not also at his hand
Take trouble?
*
## p. 13821 (#655) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13821
And if through awful gloom I see
The lightnings of his great will thrusting,
Shall I not, dying at his hand,
Die trusting?
"WHEN FIRST YOU WENT »
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
W
HEN first you went, oh, desert was the day,
The lonely day, and desert was the night;
And alien was the power that robbed from me
The white and starlike beauty of your face,
The white and starlike splendor of your soul!
Since you were all of life, I too had died,—
Died, not as you into the larger life,
But into nothingness,― had not the thought
Of your bright being led outward, as a beam
Piercing the labyrinthine gloom shows light
Somewhere existing.
Like a golden lure
Bringing me to the open was the thought,—
For since I loved you still, you still must be,
And where you were, there I must follow you.
And follow, follow, follow, cried the winds,
And follow, follow, murmured all the tides,
And follow, sang the stars that wove the web
Of their white orbits far in shining space,
Where Sirius with his dark companion went.
Bound in the bands of Law they ranged the deep;
And Law, I said, means Will to utter Law;
And Will means One, indeed, to have the Will.
And having found that One, shall it not be
The One Supreme of all, whose power I prove,
Whose inconceivable intelligence
Faintly divine, and who perforce must dwell
Compact of love, that most supreme of all ?
Had I found God, and should I not find you?
That love supreme will never mock my search.
That thought accordant in the infinite
The great flame of your spirit will not quench.
That power embattled through the universe
## p. 13822 (#656) ##########################################
13822
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
Needs in all firmaments your panoply
Of stainless purity, of crystal truth;
Your sympathy that melts into the pang,
Your blazing wrath with wrong, your tenderness
To every small or suffering thing, as sweet
As purple twilight touching throbbing eyes:
Your answer to great music when it breathes
Silver and secret speech from sphere to sphere;
Your thrill before the beauty of the earth;
Your passion for the sorrow of the race!
You who in the gray waste of night awoke
When clashing mill-bells frolicking in air
Called up the day, and sounded in your ear
Clank of enormous fetters that have bound
Labor in all lands; you whose pity went
Out on the long swell where the fisherman
Slides with his shining boat-load in the dark;
You whom the versed in statecraft paused to hear,
The sullen prisoner blest, the old man loved,
The little children ran along beside;
You who to women were the Knight of God.
Therefore as God lives, so I know do you.
And with that knowledge comes a keener joy
Than blushing, beating, folds young love about.
Again the sky burns azure, and the stars
Lean from their depths to tell me of your state.
Again the sea-line meets the line divine,
And the surge shatters in wide melody;
The unguessed hues that the soul swells to note
Haunting the rainbow's edges lead me on;
And all the dropping dews of summer nights
Keep measure with the music in my heart.
And still I climb where you have passed before,
Unchallenged spirit who inclosed my days
As in a jewel, walled about with light!
And far, far off, I seem to see you go
Familiar of unknown immensity,
And move, enlarged to all the rosy vast,
And boon companion of the dawn beyond.
## p. 13823 (#657) ##########################################
13823
MADAME DE STAËL
(1766-1817)
N THE very interesting and admirable notice of Madame de
Staël by her cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, it is said:
"The works of Madame de Staël seem to belong to the.
future. They indicate, as they also tend to produce, a new epoch in
society and in letters; an age of strong, generous, living thought,-of
emotions springing from the heart:" and there follows a description
of the sort of literature to which Madame de Staël's writings belong,
-a literature "more spoken than written," a literature of spontaneous,
informal expression, which appeals to us
more intimately and more powerfully than
any elaborate and studied composition. This
appeal is especially intimate and powerful
in Madame de Staël's pages, because she
may be called, perhaps, the first "modern
woman. " She had in many respects a tone
of mind resembling our Own more than
it resembled that of the greater number
of even the noteworthy men and women of
her own day. There is a much greater
moral distance between her and her imme-
diate predecessors in society and in liter-
ature, than between her and her immediate
successors-whether in France or elsewhere.
This kinship with the last half of the nineteenth century, and with
other modes of thought than those of her own country, is partly due
to her Protestant form of faith. She cared little for dogmas, but the
fibre of her being had been fed by liberal Protestant thought. From
this cause chiefly, though there were others also, arose a striking
contrast between the tone of her mind and that of her great contem-
porary Châteaubriand.
Their opinions on all subjects were affected
and colored by their religious opinions. He is now remote from us,
he is read as "a classic": she comes close to us, and inspires us with
friendly emotions.
To be in advance of one's age, if one is a genius, is to tread a
sure path to immortality; but if, like Madame de Staël, one is only
the possessor of intellectual ability, it is the straight road to for-
getfulness. Those who come after us take little interest in hearing
MADAME DE STAËL
## p. 13824 (#658) ##########################################
13824
MADAME DE STAËL
their own ideas expressed less effectively than they themselves are
expressing them; and so it happens that the world of letters now
takes too little account of Madame de Staël, while her own times
were incompetent to judge her. We do not value her enough: they
did not value her rightly. The false and brilliant light thrown
upon her by the enmity of Napoleon, obscured rather than revealed
what was really interesting and noble in her; while the assumption
that because there was a masculine scope and strength in her intelli-
gence she had a masculine nature, has completely confused her image.
She was not precisely feminine, but she was essentially a woman; and
her most admirable powers, her highest successes, her real importance
to the world, lie in the fact that her thoughts passed from her brain
through a woman's heart. It must be confessed it did not always
make them wiser thoughts; but it invested them with a sincerity and
an ardor that give the force of fine passion to studies in politics and
in literature. For these studies in politics and in literature are at
bottom studies in sociology,- that science whose name was unknown,
while its foundations were being laid by the promoters, the victims,
the critics of the French Revolution; the science whose students are
lovers of humanity.
This noble title is one to which Madame de Staël has full right.
She is a leader in the great army of those who love, who honor, and
who desire to serve their kind: one of those leaders who disseminate
their principles and communicate their emotions, but who give no
positive counsels; who show their quality chiefly by their love of
liberty and their love of light. Wherever she saw the traces of lib-
erty or the track of light, she followed fearlessly. And therefore it
is, that as one of the last and one of the ablest of her critics-M. Al-
bert Sorel- has remarked (in the excellent study of her published
in the series of 'Les Grands Écrivains Français), few writers have
exercised in so many different directions, so prolonged an influence.
She had during her life, and she continues to have after her death,
an immense power of inspiring other souls with lofty aspirations and
high thoughts.
It is chiefly the qualities of her character that make her writings
now worth reading. Her character illuminates the whole mass. Many
of her pages would be dull and empty to the reader of to-day, if
it were not that every sentence-involuntarily but unrestrainedly —
reveals the writer. She recognized this herself, and said: "When
one writes for the satisfaction of the inward inspiration that takes
possession of the soul, the writings make known, even without intend-
ing it, the writer's mental conditions, of every kind and degree. ”
Between the lines of her own writings her whole life may be read;
not her life of thought only, but her life of action.
## p. 13825 (#659) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13825
This life of action, of incessant humane action on others, and with
and for others, was of too complicated a character, and involved too
many relations, to be narrated here save in the most general terms.
The supreme affections of her life were, from birth to death, for her
father, and during twenty years for her lover, Benjamin Constant.
These two passions colored her whole existence: her ardent love and
admiration for her father supplied unfailing nutriment to her heart,
and her enthusiasm for Benjamin Constant (of which he was little
worthy) stimulated her intellect to its most brilliant achievements.
Too much stress can hardly be laid on the ennobling effects on her
character of her father's influence. He can scarcely be called a great
man; but she fervently adored him with the deepest gratitude all hi
life, and after his death, in a singularly delightful intimacy of rela-
tion.
As her father's daughter, and from her own noble powers, she be-
came one of the most conspicuous figures in the party of the consti-
tutional reformers, and was more or less drawn into political affairs.
But she never threw herself into the current; she never left her
salon, whatever was going on outside; and when the earthquake of
the Revolution came and her four walls fell, she could find no refuge
in any party lines. She was from first to last a witness of political
events rather than an actor in them; a witness of most exceptional
quality, who could distinguish in the confused and troubled present
the old instincts of the past and the new beliefs of the future, and
could indicate in lasting lines the meaning of the passing day.
This is the more remarkable because, woman-like, she was always
more interested in persons than in purposes,- in the actors than in
the actions: and while her sympathies were strong for "the people,"
she hardly took count of "the State" in the abstract; the word
rarely occurs in her writings. The establishment of guarantees of
political liberty was what her political friends strove for; and as M.
Sorel points out, this enlightened demand was not quite the same as
the blind demand for civil liberty and its concomitants, which inspired
the passions of the great majority of Frenchmen. It was the latter
cause and not the former that was gained by the Revolution; and
consequently the political interests of Madame de Staël were only a
source of disappointment and suffering to her, complicated as they
were with the political disgrace of her father, his unpopularity, and
the oblivion into which he fell.
After the Revolution broke out, she lived for the most part at
Coppet, her father's Swiss home. An object of bitter enmity first to
the Directory, later to the First Consul, and afterward to Napoleon
when Emperor, she was exiled from Paris from 1792 to 1814. Dur-
ing these years she visited England, Germany, and Italy, studying
XXIII-865
## p. 13826 (#660) ##########################################
13826
MADAME DE STAËL
--
the politics of England, the literature of Germany, the art of Italy,
and embodying her thorough researches in one remarkable book after
another. She was one of the first in date, and is still among the first
in ability, of cosmopolitan writers and thinkers. Her appreciation of
the intellectual achievements of other lands than France was stigma-
tized in her own day as a lack of patriotism; and at this moment -
since the German War - Madame de Staël is esteemed the less by
many of her countrymen for what students consider her chief claim
to honor, her recognition of the high rank to be assigned to German
thought and to German men of letters. This is perhaps the best
service her generous mind rendered her country; and it is a true
expression of her character.
When at Coppet she was the brilliant hostess of brilliant guests;
most of them celebrated men, many of them affectionate friends,
many of them admiring strangers. There were often a company of
thirty persons collected in the château; and frequently among them
Benjamin Constant. It was when he was there that Madame de
Staël's genius as a talker- and this was her greatest genius - shone
most vividly and intensely. It is said that no one ever stimulated
her to such marvelous achievements in conversation as he - whom
she speaks of as "gifted with one of the most remarkable minds that
nature ever bestowed on any man. " Nothing, Sainte-Beuve reports
from those who were present, was ever so dazzling and consummate
as the manner in which, hours long, they tossed the shuttlecock of
thought between them, with inimitable ease and grace and gayety.
Even in her books Madame de Staël is rather a great talker than
a great writer; and her writings are only rightly read when read as
eager and prolonged conversations. They are not even monologues:
they demand constantly the co-operation of the reader's responsive
intelligence. Her habits of life are in some measure an explanation
of this: they were fitted to develop a "great style" in a talker, but
not in a writer. Her books were written rapidly: sometimes when
she was at Coppet, she wrote surrounded by her many guests, gayly
meeting all interruptions half-way; when she was traveling, she wrote
"on the road. " Her writings fill seventeen octavo volumes, and the
list of them mounts to some thirty numbers.
Sainte-Beuve in one of his fervent essays on Madame de Staël,
remarking that as the personal remembrances of her die out, her
fame rests only on her works, continues in a passage which may well
be prefixed to selections from her books:
:-
"Her writings only are left to us; and they need to be filled out, to be
explained: their greatest charm and power is when they are considered in
the mass; and it is scarcely possible to detach one page from the others. The
phrases even do not retain their meaning when read separately; they must not
## p. 13827 (#661) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13827
be displaced. . .
She needs more than other writers to be read with
friendly, intelligent eyes. Let me take, for example, the most celebrated of
her phrases, if it can be called so,— that in which her life is summed up:—'I
have always been the same: full of life and full of sadness; I have loved God,
my father, and Liberty. ' How emotional, how suggestive: but how elliptical!
She has always been the same, 'vive et triste': but she has been many things
besides, and that must be added; she does not say so. 'Dieu et la liberté
is lofty, is the noblest aspiration; but mon père' inserted there between Dieu
and la liberté creates a sort of enigma, or at least is a singularity, and de-
mands explanation. When these words were uttered by her, she was mortally
ill and fading away: at that moment they must have seemed admirable, and
they were so; but only when there is added to them the illumination of her
look, of her expression, of her accent. Her words constantly need that to fill
them out; her pen did not complete them; there lacks almost always to her
written phrase some indescribable accompaniment. This is perhaps an added
reason for the refined reader to delight in it: there is a pleasure in imagi-
natively conceiving the appropriate gesture and accent. Sensitive souls enjoy
such occasions of exercising their sensitiveness. »
CLOSE OF THE INTRODUCTION TO THE TREATISE ON THE
INFLUENCE OF THE PASSIONS >
WHA ORLY
HATEVER may be thought of my plan, it is certain that my
only object has been to combat unhappiness in all its
forms; to study the thoughts, the sentiments, the institu-
tions, that cause suffering to men; to seek what form of reflec-
tion, action, combination, can somewhat diminish the intensity of
the troubles of the soul. The image of misfortune, under what-
ever aspect it presents itself, pursues and overwhelms me. Alas!
I have so fully experienced what it is to suffer, that an in-
expressible emotion, a sad uneasiness, takes possession of me at
the thought of the sorrows of all men, and of every man: the
thought of their inevitable misfortunes, and of the torments of
the imagination; of the reverses of the good man, and even of
the remorse of the guilty; of the wounds of the heart,— the
most grievous of all,-and of the regrets that are felt none the
less because they are felt with shame: in short, of all which is
the source of tears; tears that the ancients preserved in a conse-
crated vase, so august in their eyes was human grief. Ah! it is
not enough to have vowed that in the precincts of one's own
existence, whatever injustice, whatever wrong, we may be the
object of, we will never voluntarily cause a moment's pain, we
will never voluntarily relinquish the possibility of comforting a
―――
-
## p. 13828 (#662) ##########################################
13828
MADAME DE STAËL
sorrow: the further effort must be made to strive by some ray
of talent, by some power of meditation, to find the touching lan-
guage that gently opens the heart, and to help in discovering the
philosophic height where the weapons that wound cannot reach
us.
FROM THE 'PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE TO THE TREATISE
ON LITERATURE›
AN stands in need of support from the opinions of his fellow-
beings: he dares not rely entirely on the perceptions of
his conscience; he distrusts his own judgment if others do
not agree with him; and such is the weakness of human nature,
such is its dependence on society, that a man might almost repent
of his good qualities as if they were bad qualities, did public
opinion unite in blaming him for them: but he has recourse, in
his uneasiness, to these books, the records of the best and no-
blest sentiments of all ages. If he loves liberty,-if that name
of republic, so full of power in fraternal souls, is connected in his
mind with images of all virtues,- his soul, cast down by con-
temporary events, will be uplifted by the perusal of some of the
'Lives' of Plutarch, a Letter from Brutus to Cicero, the thoughts
of Cato of Utica in the language of Addison, the reflections
with which the hatred of tyranny inspired Tacitus, the emotions
reported or imagined by historians and poets. A lofty character
becomes content with itself if it finds itself in accord with these
noble emotions, with the virtues which Imagination herself selects
when portraying a model for all time. What consolations are
bestowed on us by writers of high talents and lofty souls! The
great men of the primal ages, if they were calumniated during
their lives, had no resource save in themselves; but for us, the
'Phædo' of Socrates, the beautiful masterpieces of eloquence, sus-
tain our souls in times of trial. Philosophers of all countries exhort
us and encourage us; and the penetrating language of the moral
nature, and of intimate knowledge of the human heart, seems to
address itself personally to all those whom it consoles.
How human it is, how useful it is, to attach great importance
to literature to the art of thinking!
-
## p. 13829 (#663) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13829
FROM DELPHINE'
LETTER OF DELPHINE TO LÉONCE
WHAT
THAT motive could prevent me from seeing you? Léonce,
no selfish emotions have power over me.
God is my
witness that for no possible advantages would I give up
an hour, à single hour, that I could pass with you without re-
――――
morse.
We are very wretched. O Léonce, do you think I do not
feel it? Everything seemed to unite only a few months ago to
promise us the purest happiness. I was free; my position and
my fortune assured me perfect independence; I had seen you; I
had loved you with my whole soul: and the most fatal stroke-
one that the slightest accident, the merest word, might have
turned aside has separated us forever!
If it is sweet to you, Léonce, when you suffer, to think that
at that moment, whenever it may be, Delphine, your poor friend,
overwhelmed by her sorrows, implores Heaven for power to bear
them, the Heaven which hitherto has always supported her,
and which now she implores in vain,-if this idea, both cruel and
sweet, can comfort you, ah! you may indulge in it at will! But
what have our sorrows to do with our duties? That nobleness
of life we worship in our days of happiness, is it not always the
same? Shall it have less empire over us, because the moment
has come to attain those heights we admired?
Fate has willed that the purest enjoyments of heart and soul
should be denied us. Perhaps, my friend, Providence has
thought us worthy of that which is noblest in the world,— the
sacrifice of love to duty.
•
-
•
What still depends on us is to command our actions: our
happiness is no longer in our power; we must trust that to the
care of Heaven: after many struggles, God will give us at least
calmness, yes, at least calmness.
Let us strive to lead
a life of devotion to others, a life of sacrifices and of duties;
such a life has given almost happiness to virtuous souls.
M. DE SERBELLANE (in conversation)
"One can still make serviceable for the happiness of others
a life that promises ourselves only pain; and this hope will give
you the courage to live. "
## p. 13830 (#664) ##########################################
13830
MADAME DE STAEL
FROM CORINNE›
THE
HE following day, the same company* again assembled at
her house; and to interest her in conversation, Lord Nelvil
turned the talk to Italian literature, and excited her natural
animation by affirming that England possessed a greater num-
ber of true poets than all those of which Italy could boast,- poets
superior in strength and delicacy of feeling.
"In the first place," answered Corinne, "foreigners only know,
for the most part, our poets of the highest rank,- Dante, Pe-
trarch, Ariosto, Guarini, Tasso, and Metastasio; while we have a
number of others, such as Chiabrera, Guidi, Filicaja, Parini, etc. ,
-without counting Sannazaro, Politian, etc. , who have written
admirably in Latin. All these poets, with more or less talent,
know how to bring the marvels of the fine arts, and of nature,
into the pictures created by words. Undoubtedly there is not
in our poets that profound melancholy, that knowledge of the
human heart, that characterizes yours; but does not this kind of
superiority belong rather to philosophical writers than to poets?
The brilliant melodiousness of the Italian language is better
suited to express the splendor of external objects than the moods
of meditation. Our language is more adapted to depict passion
than sadness, because the sentiments of reflection demand more
metaphysical expressions than it possesses. "
"Undoubtedly," answered Lord Nelvil, "you explain as well
as possible both the beauties and the deficiencies of your poet
but when these deficiencies, without the beauties, are perceived
in prose, how will you defend them? What is only vagueness in
poetry becomes emptiness in prose; and this crowd of common-
place ideas that your poets know how to embellish by the melo-
dious and the imaginative qualities of their language, reappears
unveiled in prose with wearisome vividness. The greater part
of your prose writers, to-day, use a language so declamatory, so
diffuse, so abounding in superlatives, that one would say they all
wrote by command with every-day phrases, and for an artificial
intelligence: they seem not to suspect that to write is to express
one's personal character and one's own thought. "
*The principal personages were Lord Nelvil and Mr. Edgermond, English-
men; the Count d'Erfeuil, a Frenchman; and the Prince, Castel-Forte, an
Italian. Corinne was an Italian.
## p. 13831 (#665) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13831
"You forget," Corinne eagerly interrupted, "first Machiavelli
and Boccaccio; then Gravina, Filangieri; and in our own day,
Cesarotti, Verri, Bettinelli, and so many others who know how
to write and to think. But I agree with you that during these
last centuries, unfortunate circumstances having deprived Italy of
her independence, her people have lost all interest in truth, and
often even the possibility of uttering it. From this has resulted
the habit of taking pleasure in words, without daring to approach
ideas.
When prose writers have no sort of influence on
the happiness of a nation, when men write only to become con-
spicuous, when the means is substituted for the end,-a thousand
steps are taken, but nothing is attained. . . Besides, southern
nations are constrained by prose, and depict their true feelings
only in verse. It is not the same with French literature," she
added, addressing Count d'Erfeuil: "your prose writers are often
more poetic than your poets. "
"It is true," replied Count d'Erfeuil, "that we have in this
style true classical authorities: Bossuet, La Bruyère, Montes-
quieu, Buffon, cannot be surpassed.
These perfect models
should be imitated as far as possible by foreigners as well as by
ourselves. "
"It is difficult for me to believe," answered Corinne, "that it
would be desirable for the whole world to lose all national color,
all originality of heart and mind; and I venture to say that even
in your country, Count d'Erfeuil, this literary orthodoxy, if I may
so call it, which is opposed to all happy innovation, would in the
long run render your literature very sterile. ”
"Would you desire, fair lady," answered the count, "that
we should admit among us the barbarisms of the Germans, the
'Night Thoughts' of the English Young, the concetti of the Ital-
ians and the Spaniards? What would become of the truthfulness,
the elegance, of the French style, after such a mixture ? »
Prince Castel-Forte, who had not yet spoken, said: "It seems
to me we all have need of each other: the literature of each coun-
try opens, to one familiar with it, a new sphere of ideas. The
Emperor Charles V. said that a man who knows four languages
is four men. If this great political genius so judged in regard to
affairs, how much truer it is as regards letters! All foreigners
know French, and so their point of view is more extensive than
that of Frenchmen who do not know foreign languages. "
"You will at least acknowledge," answered the count, "that
there is one matter in which we have nothing to learn from any
## p. 13832 (#666) ##########################################
13832
MADAME DE STAËL
one. Our theatrical works are certainly the first in Europe; for
I do not think that even the English themselves would dream of
opposing Shakespeare to us. "
"I beg your pardon," interrupted Mr. Edgermond: "they do
imagine that. "
"Then I have nothing to say," continued Count d'Erfeuil
with a smile of gracious disdain. "Every man may think what he
will: but still I persist in believing that it may be affirmed with-
out presumption that we are the first in the dramatic art; and as
to the Italians, if I may be allowed to speak frankly, they do not
even suspect that there is such a thing as dramatic art. The
music of a play is everything with them, and what is spoken, noth-
ing. If the second act of a play has better music than the first,
they begin with the second act; if they like two first acts of two
different pieces, they play these two acts the same day, and put
between the two one act of a prose comedy.
The Ital-
ians are accustomed to consider the theatre as a great drawing-
room, where people listen only to the songs and the ballet. I say
rightly, where they listen to the ballet, for it is only when that
begins that there is silence in the theatre; and this ballet is a
masterpiece of bad taste. "
"All you say is true," answered Prince Castel-Forte gently:
"but you have spoken only of music and dancing; and in no
country are those considered dramatic art. "
"It is much worse," interrupted Count d'Erfeuil, "when tra-
gedies are represented: more horrors are brought together in five
acts than the imagination could conceive.
The tragedians
are perfectly in harmony with the coldness and extravagance of
the plays. They all perform these terrible deeds with the great-
est calmness. When an actor becomes excited, they say that he
appears like a preacher; for in truth there is much more anima-
tion in the pulpit than on the stage.
There is no better
comedy than tragedy in Italy.
The only comic style that
really belongs to Italy is the harlequinades: a valet, who is a
rascal, a glutton, and a coward, and an old guardian who is
a dupe, a miser, and in love,- that's the whole subject of these
plays.
You will agree that 'Tartuffe' and 'The Misan-
thrope' imply a little more genius. "
This attack from Count d'Erfeuil greatly displeased the Ital-
ians who were listening to it, but yet they laughed; and Count
d'Erfeuil in conversation liked better to display wit than court-
esy. .
Prince Castei-Forte, and other Italians who were
## p. 13833 (#667) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13833
there, were impatient to refute Count d'Erfeuil, but they thought
their cause better defended by Corinne than by any one else; and
as the pleasure of shining in conversation scarcely tempted them,
they begged Corinne to make reply, and contented themselves
with only citing the well-known names of Maffei, Metastasio,
Goldoni, Alfieri, Monti.
Corinne at once agreed that the Italians had no great body
of dramatic works; but she was ready to prove that circumstances
and not lack of talent were the cause of this. The play-writing
which is based on the observation of society, can exist only in a
country where the writer lives habitually in the centre of a pop-
ulous and brilliant world: in Italy there are only violent passions
or lazy enjoyments.
But the play-writing that is based
on the unreal, that springs from the imagination, and adapts
itself to all times as to all countries, was born in Italy.
The observation of the human heart is an inexhaustible source
for literature; but the nations who are more inclined to poetry
than to reflection give themselves up rather to the intoxication
of joy than to philosophic irony. There is something, at bottom,
sad in the humor that is based on knowledge of men: true gayety
is the gayety of the imagination only. . It is not that Italians do
not ably study men with whom they have to deal; and they dis-
cover more delicately than any others the most secret thoughts:
but it is as a method of action that they have this talent, and
they are not in the habit of making a literary use of it.
One can see in Machiavelli what terrible knowledge of the human
heart the Italians are capable of: but from such depths comedy
does not spring; and the leisureliness of society, properly so called,
can alone teach how to depict men on the comic stage.
The true character of Italian gayety is not derision, it is
fancy; it is not the painting of manners, but poetic extrava-
gances. It is Ariosto and not Molière who has the power to
amuse Italy.
But to know with certainty what comedy
and tragedy might attain to in Italy, there is need that there
should be somewhere a theatre and actors. The multitude of
little cities who all choose to have a theatre, waste by dispersing
them the few resources that could be collected.
·
.
These different ideas and many others were brilliantly devel-
oped by Corinne. She understood extremely well the rapid art
of light talk, which insists on nothing; and the business of pleas-
ing, which brings forward each talker in turn.
## p. 13834 (#668) ##########################################
13834
MADAME DE STAËL
Mr. Edgermond had so eager a desire to know what she
thought about tragedy, that he ventured to speak to her on this
subject. "Madam," he said, "what seems to me especially lack-
ing in Italian literature are tragedies: it seems to me there is less
difference between children and men than between your tragedies
and ours.
Is not this true, Lord Nelvil? »
"I think entirely with you," answered Oswald.
who is famed as the poet of love, gives to this passion, in what-
ever country, in whatever situation he represents it, precisely the
same color.
It is impossible for us who possess Shake-
"Metastasio,
•
-
speare — the poet who has most deeply sounded the history and
the passions of man - to endure the two couples of lovers who
divide between them almost all the plays of Metastasio.
With profound respect for the character of Alfieri, I shall permit
myself to make some criticisms on his plays. Their aim is so
noble, the sentiments that the author expresses are so in accord
with his personal conduct, that his tragedies must always be
praised as actions, even when criticized in some respects as liter-
ary works. But it seems to me that some of his tragedies have as
much monotony of strength as Metastasio has monotony of sweet-
ness.
>>>
"My lord," said Corinne, "I am of your opinion almost en-
tirely; but I would offer some exceptions to your observations.
It is true that Metastasio is more a lyrical than a dramatic poet.
By force of writing amorous verses, there has been cre-
ated among us a conventional language in this direction; and it
is not what the poet has felt, but what he has read, that serves
for his inspiration.
In general, our literature but little
expresses our character and our modes of life.
•
"Alfieri, by a singular chance, was, so to speak, transplanted
from antiquity into modern days: he was born to act, and he
was able only to write.
He desired to accomplish through
literature a political purpose: this purpose was undoubtedly the
noblest of all; but no matter: nothing so distorts works of imagi-
nation as to have a purpose.
Although the French mind
and that of Alfieri have not the least analogy, they are alike in
this, that both carry their own contours into all the subjects of
which they treat. ”
Count d'Erfeuil, hearing the French mind spoken of, entered
again into the conversation. "It would be impossible for us," he
said, "to endure on the stage the inconsequences of the Greeks,
•
•
·
## p. 13835 (#669) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13835
or the monstrosities of Shakespeare: the taste of the French is
too pure for that.
It would be to plunge us into bar-
barism, to wish to introduce anything foreign among us. "
"You would do well, then," said Corinne, smiling, "to surround
yourselves with the great wall of China. There are assuredly
rare beauties in your tragic authors; perhaps new ones would
develop among them if you sometimes permitted to be shown
you on the stage something not French,
the 'Merope'
of Maffei, the 'Saul' of Alfieri, the 'Aristodemo' of Monti, and
above all else, the poem of Dante - though he composed no
tragedy, it seems to me, capable of giving the idea of what
dramatic art in Italy might be. "
"When Dante lived," said Oswald, "the Italians played a great
political part in Europe and at home. Perhaps it is impossible.
for you now to have national tragedies. That such works should
be produced, it is needful that great circumstances should develop
in life the sentiments expressed on the stage. "
"It is unfortunately possible that you are right, my lord,"
answered Corinne; "nevertheless I always hope much for us from
the natural intellectual vigor in Italy:
but what is
especially lacking to us for tragedy are the actors;
. yet
there is no language in which a great actor could show as much
talent as in ours. "
"If you would convince us of what you say," interrupted
Prince Castel-Forte, "you must prove it to us:
give us
the inexpressible pleasure of seeing you play tragedy.
heavy swaying of the tapestry, had these people by any chance.
left their silken shroud and come out into the room to look at
the child?
Not the twelve white-faced nuns; not the featureless young
squires and dames: but that old châtelaine of whose needle-
wrought semblance she had always been half afraid,-who car-
ried the golden flagon and gave the knight to drink, perhaps for
sleep, perhaps for death. Yes, that was she; but she had left
her majesty in the hangings, with her veil and horned head-
piece, her trailing samite and cloth of gold of cramoisie. Here,
with her thin gray tattered locks, pallid, pinched, and shrunken,
white as some reptile blanched beneath a stone, what was she to
be afraid of now? But this other-"Once the place was mine,
mine and my love's! " she was exclaiming. "Till the sea dark-
ened with their gilded prows, the sky darkened with their bitter
arrows! " Ah, yes, how many hundreds of years ago it was since
she defended the castle after a lance-head laid her lord low; and
the sea-rover had scaled the heights and taken her, loathing and
hating him, to wife. And from them had been born the line of
the L'Aiglenoirs!
And what was she doing here? What were they all doing
here, these women? What right had they in her room? Why
## p. 13813 (#647) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13813
were they looking with such ardent and eager eyes, murmuring
among themselves, hurrying past one another toward the child?
"Give way! " was La Dame Blanche exclaiming. "I was the
first. "
"Après moi," said the laughing lady, flittering along in her
butterfly gauzes, the diamonds in her tiara flashing out and
reluming again. "I am the last. "
"If so false a thing ever existed at all," said the woman with
the mass-book, or was it a book of jests? -the Flemish woman
who sold her daughter for a tulip.
"I give you my word I existed! " was the gay reply.
"Under your own signature? " asked the pretty patched and
powdered Watteau.
-
"Never mind whose signature. "
"Worthless," murmured a lady, lifting her black lace mask
from features sharp as a death's-head, and of a tint as wan as
the tints of a Boucher design,—“worthless in any event. "
"Ah, madame, from you to me? I was but your natural con-
sequence, you Voltairiennes, as you were all born on the night of
St. Bartholomew! "
"Its tocsin still rings in the air! I am condemned ever to
hear the boom of the bell," complained the dark person with the
rosary.
And then the laughing lady twitched her beads; and there fell
out from her sleeve the perfumed fan whose breath was fever,
the gloves whose palms were deadly, brought with her Medicean.
mistress from Italy.
"A truce! ” cried the gay lady. "The birth of an heir to the
L'Aiglenoir Franche du Roys, with wealth to restore the ancient
splendor, is an event for due ceremony and precedence. I am
the child's grandmother, his very next of kin among us. And
you know the rights of the grandmother in France. "
«< They are our rights! " came a shrill multitudinous murmur.
"We all are grandmothers! "
"Are we all here ? " came a hollow whisper from the châte-
laine, the candlelight flickering in her flagon.
"All the fairy godmothers? " cried the gay lady.
"No, no," said La Dame Blanche: "there is one who has been
forgotten. "
"The wicked fairy," said the gay lady. "The rest of us are
of such a virtue. He will value us like his other objets de vertu. »
## p. 13814 (#648) ##########################################
13814
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
A COLD shiver coursed over Rosomond, but her eyes burned
with the intensity of her gaze. She understood it now. He was
the child of their blood. That was why they were here, why
they intruded themselves into her room. They had a right. It
had been their own room. For how many generations had the
L'Aiglenoirs been born in this room! She had never thought of
this when she sailed so gayly out of harbor, a bride with her
bridegroom, wearing his title, protected by his arm, so proud,
so glad, so happy that she had the wealth he needed, all that
so trifling beside the fact that they loved each other. She had
never dreamed of the little child to come, who would be dearer
than her life to her, and in whose veins must run a black drop
of the blood of all these creatures.
-
And now-oh, was there no remedy? Was there nothing
to counteract it, nothing to dissipate that black drop, to make
it colorless, powerless, harmless, a thing of air? Were there no
sweet, good people among all those dead and gone women?
Ah, yes, indeed, there they were! Far off, by the curtain of
the doorway, huddled together like a flock of frightened doves:
gentle ladies, quiet, timid, humble before heaven; ladies of placid
lives, no opportunities, small emotions, narrow routine; praying
by form, acting by precedent, without individuality; whose good-
ness was negative, whose doings were paltry; their poor drab be-
ings swamped and drowned and extinguished in the purples and
scarlets of these women of great passions, of scope, of daring
and deed and electric force, mates of men of force, whose posi-
tion had called crime to its aid, whose very crimes had enlarged
them, whose sins were things of power, strengthening their per-
sonality if but for evil, transmitting their potentiality—oh, no,
these gentle ladies signified nothing here!
A cold dew bathed Rosomond and beaded her brow. But
were the L'Aiglenoirs and their order all there were? Where
were her own people? Had they no right in the child? Could
they not cross the seas? Was there no requiting strength
among them? None in the mother of her father,―king of rail-
roads and mines and vast southwestern territory,-that stern,
repressed woman, who had spared and starved and saved to start.
her son in life? "Come! " cried Rosomond. "Come, my own
people! Oh, I need you now, I and my child! "
But among all these splendid dames of quality, accustomed to
wide outlook on the world, and a part of the events of nations,
## p. 13815 (#649) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13815
what had these village people to do,-these with their petty con-
cerns, the hatching of chickens, the counting of eggs, the quilt-
ing of stitches; these perhaps more prosperous, with interests
never going outside the burgh, whose virtues were passive, whose
highest dream was of a heaven like their own parlors, a God in
their own image: whose lives were eventless, whose memories.
were pallid, laid aside in the sweep of the great drama and with-
out a part; whose slighter nature was swollen, and whose larger
nature was shriveled from disuse? This colonial dame,- her
father the distilled essence of old Madeira and oily Jamaica, her
heart in her lace, her china, and her sweetmeat closet, her scrofu-
lous and scorbutic son lixiviated by indulgence,- had she much
counteracting force to give? Or had this one, in whom quar-
reled forever the mingled blood of persecuted Quaker and per-
secuting Puritan? Or this pale wife of the settler, haunted by
fear of the Indian, the apparitions of the forest, and the terrors
of her faith; or this other, the red-cloaked matron, fighting fire
with fire, the familiar of witches? Was there help to be hoped
for from this bland Pilgrim woman, who, through force of cir-
cumstances, was married with her nursling in her arms while her
husband was but three months dead? And did this downcast-
eyed, white-kerchiefed mistress, whose steadfastness her hardness
countervailed,-daughter of the Mayflower, the new sea-rover
coming out of the East, whose Norse fathers had come out of the
East before, do more than carry her back to the old Danes and
Vikings ambushed in their creeks? Her people, indeed! Return-
ing on the source -oh, it was all one and the same! It was all
misery!
―――――
-
What gifts were these grandmothers going to give the child
then? she asked. Pride and lust and cruelty, mocking impiety
and falsehood, bigotry that belied heaven as bitterly as unbelief,
vanity and selfishness and hate, theft and avarice and murder?
In the wild and wicked current of their blood the tide was hope-
lessly against him- his bones would be poured out like water!
Her pulse bounded, her brain was on fire. - Oh, no, no, the lit-
tle child-the new-born
help-some one!
some one must come.
some one must
Some one was coming. There was a stir without; the wind
was singing round the buttress as if it brought on its wings the
cry of the bright sea, the murmur of the wide wood; the moon-
light streamed in full and free.
-
-
## p. 13816 (#650) ##########################################
13816
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
"It is she," said La Dame Blanche.
"The wicked fairy-the unbidden godmother," said the gay
lady with a warning gesture.
"The one whom civilization has forgotten," said the Voltairi-
enne, readjusting her mask, "and whom culture has ignored. "
How sweet were the thunders of the sea sifted through dis-
tance, the whispers of the wave creaming up the shingle, that
crept into the room like the supporting harmony of the wind's
song! There was a rustle as if of all the leaves of the forest, a
quiver of reeds over blue water reflecting blue heaven, a sighing
of long grass above the nests of wild bees in the sunshine. And
who was this swift and supple creature with her free and fear-
less foot, large-limbed and lofty as Thusnelda, clad in her white
wolfskin, with the cloud of her yellow hair fallen about her,
carrying her green bough, strong, calm, sure, but with no smile.
upon her radiant face?
"The original savage," whispered the gay lady, as sovereign
and serene the unbidden godmother moved up the room; and the
others seemed to dissolve before her coming-to waver away
and to vanish.
She parted the hangings of the bassinet, and rested her hand
upon the sleeper of his first sleep, bending and gazing long.
"Waken," she said then, as she lifted and laid him at her
breast. "Drink of thy first mother's life, a balsam for every ill;
mother's milk that shall unpoison thy blood, and bring the thick
black drops to naught. Child of the weather and all out-doors,
latest child of mine, draw from me will and might and the love
of the undefiled, acquaintance with the rune that shall destroy
the venom that taints you, shall blast the wrong done you!
Draw large, free draughts! Return to me, thou man-child! I
give thee the strength of my forest, my rivers, my sea, my sun-
shine, my starshine, my own right arm, my heart! I cleanse
thee. The slime of the long years shall not cling to thee. I
start thee afresh, new-born. By night in my star-hung tent the
gods shall visit thee, by day thou shalt walk in the way of be-
coming a god thyself. I give thee scorn for the ignoble, trust
in thy fellow, dependence on thine own lusty sinew and uncon-
querable will,-familiar friend of hardship and content, spare
and pure and strong,-joy in the earth, the sun, the wind, faith
in the unseen. This is thy birthright. Whatever else the years
may bring, see that thou do it no wrong. I, the unpolluted,
## p. 13817 (#651) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13817
strong wild strain in thy blood, the vital savage, save thee from
thyself. Sleep now, sweet hope. The winds sing to thee, the
waves lull thee, the stars affright thee not! Dear son of thy
mother, sleep. "
And then a shiver ran through the long, moon-lighted tapes-
try, as the gust rose and fell, and the sea sighed up the reef,
and there was only silence and slumber in the room.
But Rosomond's women, when they came again, wondered and
were wise concerning a green bough that lay across the child.
THE KING'S DUST
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
HOU shalt die," the priest said to the King.
"Thou shalt vanish like the leaves of spring.
Like the dust of any common thing
One day thou upon the winds shalt blow! "
"Nay, not so," the King said: "I shall stay
While the great sun in the sky makes day;
Heaven and earth, when I do, pass away.
In my tomb I wait till all things go! "
"T"
Then the King died. And with myrrh and nard,
Washed with palm-wine, swathed in linen hard,
Rolled in naphtha-gum, and under guard
Of his steadfast tomb, they laid the King.
Century fled to century; still he lay
Whole as when they hid him first away.
Sooth, the priest had nothing more to say,-
He, it seemed, the King, knew everything.
One day armies, with the tramp of doom,
Overthrew the huge blocks of the tomb;
Swarming sunbeams searched its chambered gloom,
Bedouins camped about the sand-blown spot.
Little Arabs, answering to their name,
With a broken mummy fed the flame;
Then a wind among the ashes came,
Blew them lightly, and the King was not!
## p. 13818 (#652) ##########################################
13818
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
ON AN OLD WOMAN SINGING
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
S™
WEET are the songs that I have heard
From green boughs and the building bird;
From children bubbling o'er with tune
While sleep still held me half in swoon,
And surly bees hummed everywhere
Their drowsy bass along the air;
From hunters and the hunting-horn
Before the day-star woke the morn;
From boatmen in ambrosial dusk,
Where, richer than a puff of musk,
The blossom breath they drifted through
Fell out of branches drenched with dew.
And sweet the strains that come to me
When in great memories I see
All that full-throated quiring throng
Go streaming on the winds of song:
Her who afar in upper sky
Sounded the wild Brunhilde's cry,
With golden clash of shield and spear,
Singing for only gods to hear;
And her who on the trumpet's blare
Sang 'Angels Ever Bright and Fair,'
Her voice, her presence, where she stood,
Already part of Angelhood.
But never have I heard in song
Sweetness and sorrow so prolong
Their life as muted music rings
Along vibrating silver strings-
As when, with all her eighty years,
With all her fires long quenched in tears,
A little woman, with a look
Like some flower folded in a bock,
Lifted a thin and piping tone,
And like the sparrow made her moan,
Forgetful that another heard,
And sang till all her soul was stirred.
And listening, oh, what joy and grief
Trembled there like a trembling leaf!
## p. 13819 (#653) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13819
The strain where first-love thrilled the bars
Beneath the priesthood of the stars;
The murmur of soft lullabies
Above dear unconsenting eyes;
The hymns where once her pure soul trod
The heights above the hills of God,-
All on the quavering note awoke,
And in a silent passion broke,
And made that tender tune and word
The sweetest song I ever heard.
AT THE POTTER'S
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
THER
HERE were two vases in the sun :
A bit of common earthenware,
A rude and shapeless jar, was one;
The other- could a thing more fair
Be made of clay? Blushed not so soft
The almond blossom in the light;
A lily's stem was not so slight
With lovely lines that lift aloft
Pure grace and perfectness full-blown;
-
And not beneath the finger tip
So smooth, or pressed upon the lip,
The velvet petal . of a rose.
Less fair were some great flower that blows
In a king's garden, changed to stone!
King's gardens do not grow such flowers,—
In a dream garden was it blown!
Fine fancies, in long sunny hours,
Brought it to beauty all its own.
With silent song its shape was wrought
From dart of wing, from droop of spray,
From colors of the breaking day,
Transfigured in a poet's thought.
At last, the finished flower of art -
The dream-flower on its slender stem
What fierce flames fused it to a gem!
A thousand times its weight in gold
A prince paid, ere its price was told;
Then set it on a shelf apart.
-
## p. 13820 (#654) ##########################################
13820
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
But through the market's gentle gloom,
Crying his ever-fragrant oil,
That should anoint the bride in bloom,
That should the passing soul assoil,
Later the man with attar came,
And tossed a penny down and poured
In the rude jar his precious hoard.
What perfume, like a subtile flame,
Sprang through its substance happy-starred!
Whole roses into blossom leapt,
Whole gardens in its warm heart slept!
Long afterwards, thrown down in haste,
The jar lay, shattered and made waste,
But sweet to its remotest shard!
EQUATIONS
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
you
ou so sure the world is full of laughter,
Not a place in it for any sorrow,
Sunshine with no shadow to come after
Wait, O mad one, wait until to-morrow!
You so sure the world is full of weeping,
Only gloom in all the colors seven,
Every wind across a new grave creeping-
Think, O sad one, yesterday was heaven!
YOUNG and strong I went along the highway,
Seeking Joy from happy sky to sky;
I met Sorrow coming down a byway-
What had she to do with such as I?
Sorrow with a slow detaining gesture
Waited for me on the widening way,
Threw aside her shrouding veil and vesture —
Joy had turned to Sorrow's self that day!
*
IF SOME great giver give me life,
And give me love, and give me double,
Shall I not also at his hand
Take trouble?
*
## p. 13821 (#655) ##########################################
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
13821
And if through awful gloom I see
The lightnings of his great will thrusting,
Shall I not, dying at his hand,
Die trusting?
"WHEN FIRST YOU WENT »
From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland
& Day
W
HEN first you went, oh, desert was the day,
The lonely day, and desert was the night;
And alien was the power that robbed from me
The white and starlike beauty of your face,
The white and starlike splendor of your soul!
Since you were all of life, I too had died,—
Died, not as you into the larger life,
But into nothingness,― had not the thought
Of your bright being led outward, as a beam
Piercing the labyrinthine gloom shows light
Somewhere existing.
Like a golden lure
Bringing me to the open was the thought,—
For since I loved you still, you still must be,
And where you were, there I must follow you.
And follow, follow, follow, cried the winds,
And follow, follow, murmured all the tides,
And follow, sang the stars that wove the web
Of their white orbits far in shining space,
Where Sirius with his dark companion went.
Bound in the bands of Law they ranged the deep;
And Law, I said, means Will to utter Law;
And Will means One, indeed, to have the Will.
And having found that One, shall it not be
The One Supreme of all, whose power I prove,
Whose inconceivable intelligence
Faintly divine, and who perforce must dwell
Compact of love, that most supreme of all ?
Had I found God, and should I not find you?
That love supreme will never mock my search.
That thought accordant in the infinite
The great flame of your spirit will not quench.
That power embattled through the universe
## p. 13822 (#656) ##########################################
13822
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
Needs in all firmaments your panoply
Of stainless purity, of crystal truth;
Your sympathy that melts into the pang,
Your blazing wrath with wrong, your tenderness
To every small or suffering thing, as sweet
As purple twilight touching throbbing eyes:
Your answer to great music when it breathes
Silver and secret speech from sphere to sphere;
Your thrill before the beauty of the earth;
Your passion for the sorrow of the race!
You who in the gray waste of night awoke
When clashing mill-bells frolicking in air
Called up the day, and sounded in your ear
Clank of enormous fetters that have bound
Labor in all lands; you whose pity went
Out on the long swell where the fisherman
Slides with his shining boat-load in the dark;
You whom the versed in statecraft paused to hear,
The sullen prisoner blest, the old man loved,
The little children ran along beside;
You who to women were the Knight of God.
Therefore as God lives, so I know do you.
And with that knowledge comes a keener joy
Than blushing, beating, folds young love about.
Again the sky burns azure, and the stars
Lean from their depths to tell me of your state.
Again the sea-line meets the line divine,
And the surge shatters in wide melody;
The unguessed hues that the soul swells to note
Haunting the rainbow's edges lead me on;
And all the dropping dews of summer nights
Keep measure with the music in my heart.
And still I climb where you have passed before,
Unchallenged spirit who inclosed my days
As in a jewel, walled about with light!
And far, far off, I seem to see you go
Familiar of unknown immensity,
And move, enlarged to all the rosy vast,
And boon companion of the dawn beyond.
## p. 13823 (#657) ##########################################
13823
MADAME DE STAËL
(1766-1817)
N THE very interesting and admirable notice of Madame de
Staël by her cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, it is said:
"The works of Madame de Staël seem to belong to the.
future. They indicate, as they also tend to produce, a new epoch in
society and in letters; an age of strong, generous, living thought,-of
emotions springing from the heart:" and there follows a description
of the sort of literature to which Madame de Staël's writings belong,
-a literature "more spoken than written," a literature of spontaneous,
informal expression, which appeals to us
more intimately and more powerfully than
any elaborate and studied composition. This
appeal is especially intimate and powerful
in Madame de Staël's pages, because she
may be called, perhaps, the first "modern
woman. " She had in many respects a tone
of mind resembling our Own more than
it resembled that of the greater number
of even the noteworthy men and women of
her own day. There is a much greater
moral distance between her and her imme-
diate predecessors in society and in liter-
ature, than between her and her immediate
successors-whether in France or elsewhere.
This kinship with the last half of the nineteenth century, and with
other modes of thought than those of her own country, is partly due
to her Protestant form of faith. She cared little for dogmas, but the
fibre of her being had been fed by liberal Protestant thought. From
this cause chiefly, though there were others also, arose a striking
contrast between the tone of her mind and that of her great contem-
porary Châteaubriand.
Their opinions on all subjects were affected
and colored by their religious opinions. He is now remote from us,
he is read as "a classic": she comes close to us, and inspires us with
friendly emotions.
To be in advance of one's age, if one is a genius, is to tread a
sure path to immortality; but if, like Madame de Staël, one is only
the possessor of intellectual ability, it is the straight road to for-
getfulness. Those who come after us take little interest in hearing
MADAME DE STAËL
## p. 13824 (#658) ##########################################
13824
MADAME DE STAËL
their own ideas expressed less effectively than they themselves are
expressing them; and so it happens that the world of letters now
takes too little account of Madame de Staël, while her own times
were incompetent to judge her. We do not value her enough: they
did not value her rightly. The false and brilliant light thrown
upon her by the enmity of Napoleon, obscured rather than revealed
what was really interesting and noble in her; while the assumption
that because there was a masculine scope and strength in her intelli-
gence she had a masculine nature, has completely confused her image.
She was not precisely feminine, but she was essentially a woman; and
her most admirable powers, her highest successes, her real importance
to the world, lie in the fact that her thoughts passed from her brain
through a woman's heart. It must be confessed it did not always
make them wiser thoughts; but it invested them with a sincerity and
an ardor that give the force of fine passion to studies in politics and
in literature. For these studies in politics and in literature are at
bottom studies in sociology,- that science whose name was unknown,
while its foundations were being laid by the promoters, the victims,
the critics of the French Revolution; the science whose students are
lovers of humanity.
This noble title is one to which Madame de Staël has full right.
She is a leader in the great army of those who love, who honor, and
who desire to serve their kind: one of those leaders who disseminate
their principles and communicate their emotions, but who give no
positive counsels; who show their quality chiefly by their love of
liberty and their love of light. Wherever she saw the traces of lib-
erty or the track of light, she followed fearlessly. And therefore it
is, that as one of the last and one of the ablest of her critics-M. Al-
bert Sorel- has remarked (in the excellent study of her published
in the series of 'Les Grands Écrivains Français), few writers have
exercised in so many different directions, so prolonged an influence.
She had during her life, and she continues to have after her death,
an immense power of inspiring other souls with lofty aspirations and
high thoughts.
It is chiefly the qualities of her character that make her writings
now worth reading. Her character illuminates the whole mass. Many
of her pages would be dull and empty to the reader of to-day, if
it were not that every sentence-involuntarily but unrestrainedly —
reveals the writer. She recognized this herself, and said: "When
one writes for the satisfaction of the inward inspiration that takes
possession of the soul, the writings make known, even without intend-
ing it, the writer's mental conditions, of every kind and degree. ”
Between the lines of her own writings her whole life may be read;
not her life of thought only, but her life of action.
## p. 13825 (#659) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13825
This life of action, of incessant humane action on others, and with
and for others, was of too complicated a character, and involved too
many relations, to be narrated here save in the most general terms.
The supreme affections of her life were, from birth to death, for her
father, and during twenty years for her lover, Benjamin Constant.
These two passions colored her whole existence: her ardent love and
admiration for her father supplied unfailing nutriment to her heart,
and her enthusiasm for Benjamin Constant (of which he was little
worthy) stimulated her intellect to its most brilliant achievements.
Too much stress can hardly be laid on the ennobling effects on her
character of her father's influence. He can scarcely be called a great
man; but she fervently adored him with the deepest gratitude all hi
life, and after his death, in a singularly delightful intimacy of rela-
tion.
As her father's daughter, and from her own noble powers, she be-
came one of the most conspicuous figures in the party of the consti-
tutional reformers, and was more or less drawn into political affairs.
But she never threw herself into the current; she never left her
salon, whatever was going on outside; and when the earthquake of
the Revolution came and her four walls fell, she could find no refuge
in any party lines. She was from first to last a witness of political
events rather than an actor in them; a witness of most exceptional
quality, who could distinguish in the confused and troubled present
the old instincts of the past and the new beliefs of the future, and
could indicate in lasting lines the meaning of the passing day.
This is the more remarkable because, woman-like, she was always
more interested in persons than in purposes,- in the actors than in
the actions: and while her sympathies were strong for "the people,"
she hardly took count of "the State" in the abstract; the word
rarely occurs in her writings. The establishment of guarantees of
political liberty was what her political friends strove for; and as M.
Sorel points out, this enlightened demand was not quite the same as
the blind demand for civil liberty and its concomitants, which inspired
the passions of the great majority of Frenchmen. It was the latter
cause and not the former that was gained by the Revolution; and
consequently the political interests of Madame de Staël were only a
source of disappointment and suffering to her, complicated as they
were with the political disgrace of her father, his unpopularity, and
the oblivion into which he fell.
After the Revolution broke out, she lived for the most part at
Coppet, her father's Swiss home. An object of bitter enmity first to
the Directory, later to the First Consul, and afterward to Napoleon
when Emperor, she was exiled from Paris from 1792 to 1814. Dur-
ing these years she visited England, Germany, and Italy, studying
XXIII-865
## p. 13826 (#660) ##########################################
13826
MADAME DE STAËL
--
the politics of England, the literature of Germany, the art of Italy,
and embodying her thorough researches in one remarkable book after
another. She was one of the first in date, and is still among the first
in ability, of cosmopolitan writers and thinkers. Her appreciation of
the intellectual achievements of other lands than France was stigma-
tized in her own day as a lack of patriotism; and at this moment -
since the German War - Madame de Staël is esteemed the less by
many of her countrymen for what students consider her chief claim
to honor, her recognition of the high rank to be assigned to German
thought and to German men of letters. This is perhaps the best
service her generous mind rendered her country; and it is a true
expression of her character.
When at Coppet she was the brilliant hostess of brilliant guests;
most of them celebrated men, many of them affectionate friends,
many of them admiring strangers. There were often a company of
thirty persons collected in the château; and frequently among them
Benjamin Constant. It was when he was there that Madame de
Staël's genius as a talker- and this was her greatest genius - shone
most vividly and intensely. It is said that no one ever stimulated
her to such marvelous achievements in conversation as he - whom
she speaks of as "gifted with one of the most remarkable minds that
nature ever bestowed on any man. " Nothing, Sainte-Beuve reports
from those who were present, was ever so dazzling and consummate
as the manner in which, hours long, they tossed the shuttlecock of
thought between them, with inimitable ease and grace and gayety.
Even in her books Madame de Staël is rather a great talker than
a great writer; and her writings are only rightly read when read as
eager and prolonged conversations. They are not even monologues:
they demand constantly the co-operation of the reader's responsive
intelligence. Her habits of life are in some measure an explanation
of this: they were fitted to develop a "great style" in a talker, but
not in a writer. Her books were written rapidly: sometimes when
she was at Coppet, she wrote surrounded by her many guests, gayly
meeting all interruptions half-way; when she was traveling, she wrote
"on the road. " Her writings fill seventeen octavo volumes, and the
list of them mounts to some thirty numbers.
Sainte-Beuve in one of his fervent essays on Madame de Staël,
remarking that as the personal remembrances of her die out, her
fame rests only on her works, continues in a passage which may well
be prefixed to selections from her books:
:-
"Her writings only are left to us; and they need to be filled out, to be
explained: their greatest charm and power is when they are considered in
the mass; and it is scarcely possible to detach one page from the others. The
phrases even do not retain their meaning when read separately; they must not
## p. 13827 (#661) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13827
be displaced. . .
She needs more than other writers to be read with
friendly, intelligent eyes. Let me take, for example, the most celebrated of
her phrases, if it can be called so,— that in which her life is summed up:—'I
have always been the same: full of life and full of sadness; I have loved God,
my father, and Liberty. ' How emotional, how suggestive: but how elliptical!
She has always been the same, 'vive et triste': but she has been many things
besides, and that must be added; she does not say so. 'Dieu et la liberté
is lofty, is the noblest aspiration; but mon père' inserted there between Dieu
and la liberté creates a sort of enigma, or at least is a singularity, and de-
mands explanation. When these words were uttered by her, she was mortally
ill and fading away: at that moment they must have seemed admirable, and
they were so; but only when there is added to them the illumination of her
look, of her expression, of her accent. Her words constantly need that to fill
them out; her pen did not complete them; there lacks almost always to her
written phrase some indescribable accompaniment. This is perhaps an added
reason for the refined reader to delight in it: there is a pleasure in imagi-
natively conceiving the appropriate gesture and accent. Sensitive souls enjoy
such occasions of exercising their sensitiveness. »
CLOSE OF THE INTRODUCTION TO THE TREATISE ON THE
INFLUENCE OF THE PASSIONS >
WHA ORLY
HATEVER may be thought of my plan, it is certain that my
only object has been to combat unhappiness in all its
forms; to study the thoughts, the sentiments, the institu-
tions, that cause suffering to men; to seek what form of reflec-
tion, action, combination, can somewhat diminish the intensity of
the troubles of the soul. The image of misfortune, under what-
ever aspect it presents itself, pursues and overwhelms me. Alas!
I have so fully experienced what it is to suffer, that an in-
expressible emotion, a sad uneasiness, takes possession of me at
the thought of the sorrows of all men, and of every man: the
thought of their inevitable misfortunes, and of the torments of
the imagination; of the reverses of the good man, and even of
the remorse of the guilty; of the wounds of the heart,— the
most grievous of all,-and of the regrets that are felt none the
less because they are felt with shame: in short, of all which is
the source of tears; tears that the ancients preserved in a conse-
crated vase, so august in their eyes was human grief. Ah! it is
not enough to have vowed that in the precincts of one's own
existence, whatever injustice, whatever wrong, we may be the
object of, we will never voluntarily cause a moment's pain, we
will never voluntarily relinquish the possibility of comforting a
―――
-
## p. 13828 (#662) ##########################################
13828
MADAME DE STAËL
sorrow: the further effort must be made to strive by some ray
of talent, by some power of meditation, to find the touching lan-
guage that gently opens the heart, and to help in discovering the
philosophic height where the weapons that wound cannot reach
us.
FROM THE 'PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE TO THE TREATISE
ON LITERATURE›
AN stands in need of support from the opinions of his fellow-
beings: he dares not rely entirely on the perceptions of
his conscience; he distrusts his own judgment if others do
not agree with him; and such is the weakness of human nature,
such is its dependence on society, that a man might almost repent
of his good qualities as if they were bad qualities, did public
opinion unite in blaming him for them: but he has recourse, in
his uneasiness, to these books, the records of the best and no-
blest sentiments of all ages. If he loves liberty,-if that name
of republic, so full of power in fraternal souls, is connected in his
mind with images of all virtues,- his soul, cast down by con-
temporary events, will be uplifted by the perusal of some of the
'Lives' of Plutarch, a Letter from Brutus to Cicero, the thoughts
of Cato of Utica in the language of Addison, the reflections
with which the hatred of tyranny inspired Tacitus, the emotions
reported or imagined by historians and poets. A lofty character
becomes content with itself if it finds itself in accord with these
noble emotions, with the virtues which Imagination herself selects
when portraying a model for all time. What consolations are
bestowed on us by writers of high talents and lofty souls! The
great men of the primal ages, if they were calumniated during
their lives, had no resource save in themselves; but for us, the
'Phædo' of Socrates, the beautiful masterpieces of eloquence, sus-
tain our souls in times of trial. Philosophers of all countries exhort
us and encourage us; and the penetrating language of the moral
nature, and of intimate knowledge of the human heart, seems to
address itself personally to all those whom it consoles.
How human it is, how useful it is, to attach great importance
to literature to the art of thinking!
-
## p. 13829 (#663) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13829
FROM DELPHINE'
LETTER OF DELPHINE TO LÉONCE
WHAT
THAT motive could prevent me from seeing you? Léonce,
no selfish emotions have power over me.
God is my
witness that for no possible advantages would I give up
an hour, à single hour, that I could pass with you without re-
――――
morse.
We are very wretched. O Léonce, do you think I do not
feel it? Everything seemed to unite only a few months ago to
promise us the purest happiness. I was free; my position and
my fortune assured me perfect independence; I had seen you; I
had loved you with my whole soul: and the most fatal stroke-
one that the slightest accident, the merest word, might have
turned aside has separated us forever!
If it is sweet to you, Léonce, when you suffer, to think that
at that moment, whenever it may be, Delphine, your poor friend,
overwhelmed by her sorrows, implores Heaven for power to bear
them, the Heaven which hitherto has always supported her,
and which now she implores in vain,-if this idea, both cruel and
sweet, can comfort you, ah! you may indulge in it at will! But
what have our sorrows to do with our duties? That nobleness
of life we worship in our days of happiness, is it not always the
same? Shall it have less empire over us, because the moment
has come to attain those heights we admired?
Fate has willed that the purest enjoyments of heart and soul
should be denied us. Perhaps, my friend, Providence has
thought us worthy of that which is noblest in the world,— the
sacrifice of love to duty.
•
-
•
What still depends on us is to command our actions: our
happiness is no longer in our power; we must trust that to the
care of Heaven: after many struggles, God will give us at least
calmness, yes, at least calmness.
Let us strive to lead
a life of devotion to others, a life of sacrifices and of duties;
such a life has given almost happiness to virtuous souls.
M. DE SERBELLANE (in conversation)
"One can still make serviceable for the happiness of others
a life that promises ourselves only pain; and this hope will give
you the courage to live. "
## p. 13830 (#664) ##########################################
13830
MADAME DE STAEL
FROM CORINNE›
THE
HE following day, the same company* again assembled at
her house; and to interest her in conversation, Lord Nelvil
turned the talk to Italian literature, and excited her natural
animation by affirming that England possessed a greater num-
ber of true poets than all those of which Italy could boast,- poets
superior in strength and delicacy of feeling.
"In the first place," answered Corinne, "foreigners only know,
for the most part, our poets of the highest rank,- Dante, Pe-
trarch, Ariosto, Guarini, Tasso, and Metastasio; while we have a
number of others, such as Chiabrera, Guidi, Filicaja, Parini, etc. ,
-without counting Sannazaro, Politian, etc. , who have written
admirably in Latin. All these poets, with more or less talent,
know how to bring the marvels of the fine arts, and of nature,
into the pictures created by words. Undoubtedly there is not
in our poets that profound melancholy, that knowledge of the
human heart, that characterizes yours; but does not this kind of
superiority belong rather to philosophical writers than to poets?
The brilliant melodiousness of the Italian language is better
suited to express the splendor of external objects than the moods
of meditation. Our language is more adapted to depict passion
than sadness, because the sentiments of reflection demand more
metaphysical expressions than it possesses. "
"Undoubtedly," answered Lord Nelvil, "you explain as well
as possible both the beauties and the deficiencies of your poet
but when these deficiencies, without the beauties, are perceived
in prose, how will you defend them? What is only vagueness in
poetry becomes emptiness in prose; and this crowd of common-
place ideas that your poets know how to embellish by the melo-
dious and the imaginative qualities of their language, reappears
unveiled in prose with wearisome vividness. The greater part
of your prose writers, to-day, use a language so declamatory, so
diffuse, so abounding in superlatives, that one would say they all
wrote by command with every-day phrases, and for an artificial
intelligence: they seem not to suspect that to write is to express
one's personal character and one's own thought. "
*The principal personages were Lord Nelvil and Mr. Edgermond, English-
men; the Count d'Erfeuil, a Frenchman; and the Prince, Castel-Forte, an
Italian. Corinne was an Italian.
## p. 13831 (#665) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13831
"You forget," Corinne eagerly interrupted, "first Machiavelli
and Boccaccio; then Gravina, Filangieri; and in our own day,
Cesarotti, Verri, Bettinelli, and so many others who know how
to write and to think. But I agree with you that during these
last centuries, unfortunate circumstances having deprived Italy of
her independence, her people have lost all interest in truth, and
often even the possibility of uttering it. From this has resulted
the habit of taking pleasure in words, without daring to approach
ideas.
When prose writers have no sort of influence on
the happiness of a nation, when men write only to become con-
spicuous, when the means is substituted for the end,-a thousand
steps are taken, but nothing is attained. . . Besides, southern
nations are constrained by prose, and depict their true feelings
only in verse. It is not the same with French literature," she
added, addressing Count d'Erfeuil: "your prose writers are often
more poetic than your poets. "
"It is true," replied Count d'Erfeuil, "that we have in this
style true classical authorities: Bossuet, La Bruyère, Montes-
quieu, Buffon, cannot be surpassed.
These perfect models
should be imitated as far as possible by foreigners as well as by
ourselves. "
"It is difficult for me to believe," answered Corinne, "that it
would be desirable for the whole world to lose all national color,
all originality of heart and mind; and I venture to say that even
in your country, Count d'Erfeuil, this literary orthodoxy, if I may
so call it, which is opposed to all happy innovation, would in the
long run render your literature very sterile. ”
"Would you desire, fair lady," answered the count, "that
we should admit among us the barbarisms of the Germans, the
'Night Thoughts' of the English Young, the concetti of the Ital-
ians and the Spaniards? What would become of the truthfulness,
the elegance, of the French style, after such a mixture ? »
Prince Castel-Forte, who had not yet spoken, said: "It seems
to me we all have need of each other: the literature of each coun-
try opens, to one familiar with it, a new sphere of ideas. The
Emperor Charles V. said that a man who knows four languages
is four men. If this great political genius so judged in regard to
affairs, how much truer it is as regards letters! All foreigners
know French, and so their point of view is more extensive than
that of Frenchmen who do not know foreign languages. "
"You will at least acknowledge," answered the count, "that
there is one matter in which we have nothing to learn from any
## p. 13832 (#666) ##########################################
13832
MADAME DE STAËL
one. Our theatrical works are certainly the first in Europe; for
I do not think that even the English themselves would dream of
opposing Shakespeare to us. "
"I beg your pardon," interrupted Mr. Edgermond: "they do
imagine that. "
"Then I have nothing to say," continued Count d'Erfeuil
with a smile of gracious disdain. "Every man may think what he
will: but still I persist in believing that it may be affirmed with-
out presumption that we are the first in the dramatic art; and as
to the Italians, if I may be allowed to speak frankly, they do not
even suspect that there is such a thing as dramatic art. The
music of a play is everything with them, and what is spoken, noth-
ing. If the second act of a play has better music than the first,
they begin with the second act; if they like two first acts of two
different pieces, they play these two acts the same day, and put
between the two one act of a prose comedy.
The Ital-
ians are accustomed to consider the theatre as a great drawing-
room, where people listen only to the songs and the ballet. I say
rightly, where they listen to the ballet, for it is only when that
begins that there is silence in the theatre; and this ballet is a
masterpiece of bad taste. "
"All you say is true," answered Prince Castel-Forte gently:
"but you have spoken only of music and dancing; and in no
country are those considered dramatic art. "
"It is much worse," interrupted Count d'Erfeuil, "when tra-
gedies are represented: more horrors are brought together in five
acts than the imagination could conceive.
The tragedians
are perfectly in harmony with the coldness and extravagance of
the plays. They all perform these terrible deeds with the great-
est calmness. When an actor becomes excited, they say that he
appears like a preacher; for in truth there is much more anima-
tion in the pulpit than on the stage.
There is no better
comedy than tragedy in Italy.
The only comic style that
really belongs to Italy is the harlequinades: a valet, who is a
rascal, a glutton, and a coward, and an old guardian who is
a dupe, a miser, and in love,- that's the whole subject of these
plays.
You will agree that 'Tartuffe' and 'The Misan-
thrope' imply a little more genius. "
This attack from Count d'Erfeuil greatly displeased the Ital-
ians who were listening to it, but yet they laughed; and Count
d'Erfeuil in conversation liked better to display wit than court-
esy. .
Prince Castei-Forte, and other Italians who were
## p. 13833 (#667) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13833
there, were impatient to refute Count d'Erfeuil, but they thought
their cause better defended by Corinne than by any one else; and
as the pleasure of shining in conversation scarcely tempted them,
they begged Corinne to make reply, and contented themselves
with only citing the well-known names of Maffei, Metastasio,
Goldoni, Alfieri, Monti.
Corinne at once agreed that the Italians had no great body
of dramatic works; but she was ready to prove that circumstances
and not lack of talent were the cause of this. The play-writing
which is based on the observation of society, can exist only in a
country where the writer lives habitually in the centre of a pop-
ulous and brilliant world: in Italy there are only violent passions
or lazy enjoyments.
But the play-writing that is based
on the unreal, that springs from the imagination, and adapts
itself to all times as to all countries, was born in Italy.
The observation of the human heart is an inexhaustible source
for literature; but the nations who are more inclined to poetry
than to reflection give themselves up rather to the intoxication
of joy than to philosophic irony. There is something, at bottom,
sad in the humor that is based on knowledge of men: true gayety
is the gayety of the imagination only. . It is not that Italians do
not ably study men with whom they have to deal; and they dis-
cover more delicately than any others the most secret thoughts:
but it is as a method of action that they have this talent, and
they are not in the habit of making a literary use of it.
One can see in Machiavelli what terrible knowledge of the human
heart the Italians are capable of: but from such depths comedy
does not spring; and the leisureliness of society, properly so called,
can alone teach how to depict men on the comic stage.
The true character of Italian gayety is not derision, it is
fancy; it is not the painting of manners, but poetic extrava-
gances. It is Ariosto and not Molière who has the power to
amuse Italy.
But to know with certainty what comedy
and tragedy might attain to in Italy, there is need that there
should be somewhere a theatre and actors. The multitude of
little cities who all choose to have a theatre, waste by dispersing
them the few resources that could be collected.
·
.
These different ideas and many others were brilliantly devel-
oped by Corinne. She understood extremely well the rapid art
of light talk, which insists on nothing; and the business of pleas-
ing, which brings forward each talker in turn.
## p. 13834 (#668) ##########################################
13834
MADAME DE STAËL
Mr. Edgermond had so eager a desire to know what she
thought about tragedy, that he ventured to speak to her on this
subject. "Madam," he said, "what seems to me especially lack-
ing in Italian literature are tragedies: it seems to me there is less
difference between children and men than between your tragedies
and ours.
Is not this true, Lord Nelvil? »
"I think entirely with you," answered Oswald.
who is famed as the poet of love, gives to this passion, in what-
ever country, in whatever situation he represents it, precisely the
same color.
It is impossible for us who possess Shake-
"Metastasio,
•
-
speare — the poet who has most deeply sounded the history and
the passions of man - to endure the two couples of lovers who
divide between them almost all the plays of Metastasio.
With profound respect for the character of Alfieri, I shall permit
myself to make some criticisms on his plays. Their aim is so
noble, the sentiments that the author expresses are so in accord
with his personal conduct, that his tragedies must always be
praised as actions, even when criticized in some respects as liter-
ary works. But it seems to me that some of his tragedies have as
much monotony of strength as Metastasio has monotony of sweet-
ness.
>>>
"My lord," said Corinne, "I am of your opinion almost en-
tirely; but I would offer some exceptions to your observations.
It is true that Metastasio is more a lyrical than a dramatic poet.
By force of writing amorous verses, there has been cre-
ated among us a conventional language in this direction; and it
is not what the poet has felt, but what he has read, that serves
for his inspiration.
In general, our literature but little
expresses our character and our modes of life.
•
"Alfieri, by a singular chance, was, so to speak, transplanted
from antiquity into modern days: he was born to act, and he
was able only to write.
He desired to accomplish through
literature a political purpose: this purpose was undoubtedly the
noblest of all; but no matter: nothing so distorts works of imagi-
nation as to have a purpose.
Although the French mind
and that of Alfieri have not the least analogy, they are alike in
this, that both carry their own contours into all the subjects of
which they treat. ”
Count d'Erfeuil, hearing the French mind spoken of, entered
again into the conversation. "It would be impossible for us," he
said, "to endure on the stage the inconsequences of the Greeks,
•
•
·
## p. 13835 (#669) ##########################################
MADAME DE STAËL
13835
or the monstrosities of Shakespeare: the taste of the French is
too pure for that.
It would be to plunge us into bar-
barism, to wish to introduce anything foreign among us. "
"You would do well, then," said Corinne, smiling, "to surround
yourselves with the great wall of China. There are assuredly
rare beauties in your tragic authors; perhaps new ones would
develop among them if you sometimes permitted to be shown
you on the stage something not French,
the 'Merope'
of Maffei, the 'Saul' of Alfieri, the 'Aristodemo' of Monti, and
above all else, the poem of Dante - though he composed no
tragedy, it seems to me, capable of giving the idea of what
dramatic art in Italy might be. "
"When Dante lived," said Oswald, "the Italians played a great
political part in Europe and at home. Perhaps it is impossible.
for you now to have national tragedies. That such works should
be produced, it is needful that great circumstances should develop
in life the sentiments expressed on the stage. "
"It is unfortunately possible that you are right, my lord,"
answered Corinne; "nevertheless I always hope much for us from
the natural intellectual vigor in Italy:
but what is
especially lacking to us for tragedy are the actors;
. yet
there is no language in which a great actor could show as much
talent as in ours. "
"If you would convince us of what you say," interrupted
Prince Castel-Forte, "you must prove it to us:
give us
the inexpressible pleasure of seeing you play tragedy.
