CHAPTER XIII.
ENGLAND AGAIN.
After quitting Sweden, Madame de Staël went to England. Some eighteen years or so had passed since she had wept in the lanes at Mickleham at the thought of separating from the charming colony at Juniper Hall. Her heart was still almost as young as in those days; the vivid flame of enthusiasm for all that was good still burnt as brightly in her soul. If her spiritual horizon had widened, and a fervent if rather vague religious sentiment had succeeded to her unquestioning faith in men—that was almost all the change in her. For her nature was a singularly homogeneous one, and growth, while widening and deepening it, did not render it more complex.
Her reception in English society was marked by all the enthusiasm which we are accustomed to lavish on illustrious foreigners. She was mobbed at routs and assemblies, and ladies mounted on chairs and tables to stare at her.
She took up her abode at 30, Argyll Place, Regent Street, a house now a bathing establishment. It was here that she received the mixed but brilliant society which Byron declared reminded him of the grave, inasmuch as all distinctions were levelled in it!
These social meetings formed her protest against the enormous and overcrowded gatherings which were dignified then, as now, with the name of "society" in London, and where Madame de Staël found that all intellectual enjoyment was smothered by sheer force of numbers. She was willing enough to admit that clever men and women in England were transcendentally interesting when caught in sufficiently small groups to make rational conversation possible; but declared that all qualities of mind were annihilated in the crowds, where the only superiority necessary was physical force to enable one to elbow one's way along.
Byron and Madame de Staël became very good friends, although she rated him about his conduct in love; and he laughed, with quiet malice, at many of her peculiarities. One of his favourite diversions—or, at least, so he said—was to plague her by declaring that he did not believe in Napoleon's "persecutions." Nothing made her more angry, he declared, inasmuch as she was proud of the danger which, as she believed, threatened Napoleon's Government from her eloquence and her fame. Byron, in his Conversations with Lady Blessington, told one or two stories of "Corinne," more diverting probably than veracious, and complained of her overwhelming declamation (as distinguished from talk), her tendency to metaphysical subtleties, her extraordinary self-complacency, and the strange simplicity which caused her to be perpetually mystified. But he admitted that she was "a fine creature with great talent and many noble qualities"; and he loudly proclaimed her immeasurable superiority to every woman with pretensions to literary fame in England. He even found several things to admire in her appearance, which in a man of his taste was a very precious testimony, and might have consoled Madame de Staël, had she only known of it, for those personal defects which were said to afflict her.
The person who in all England appears to have been the best match, conversationally, for Madame de Staël was Sir James Mackintosh, who, perhaps, gave the best of all descriptions of her when he said, "She is one of the few persons who surpass expectation. She has every sort of talent, and would be universally popular if, in society, she were to confine herself to her inferior talents—pleasantry, anecdote, and literature, which are so much more suited to conversation than her eloquence and genius." At another time he remarked: "Her penetration was certainly extraordinary, with an air of apparent occupation in things immediately around her." He recorded, not always approvingly, some of her sweeping judgments, as, for instance, that "Political Economy was prosaic and uninteresting," and that "Miss Austen's novels were commonplace."
Her stay in England was saddened, although apparently not very deeply so, by the violent death of her younger son. Byron's flippant allusion to this tragic event has brought him into much disrepute. "Madame de Staël," he wrote, "has lost one of her young Barons, who has been carbonaded by a vile Teutonic adjutant. . . . 'Corinne' is, of course, what all mothers must be, but will, I venture to prophesy, do what few mothers could—write an essay upon it. She cannot exist without a grievance and somebody to see or read how much grief becomes her." All these epigrammatic previsions turned out to be apparently unfounded; for there is no proof that Madame de Staël mourned her son with anything approaching to the passion with which she had grieved for her father. Sismondi, indeed, always censorious, is rather severe on what he is pleased to consider her want of maternal feeling; and, as she was never known to hide her sentiments, it is only fair to conclude that comparative silence meant comparative insensibility. Albert de Staël was very high-spirited and impetuous, and rather wild. Judging from a severe and somewhat self-righteous epistle addressed to him on one occasion by his mother, he had many of the faults that irritated, and none of the qualities that pleased her. Auguste and Albertine, inspired by their adoring veneration, presumably tried to mould their tastes and pursuits by hers; but Albert appears to have been different—for his mother reproaches him with remaining unmoved by her own intellect, the dignity of his brother, the charm of his sister, and the talents of M. Schlegel! She assures him that he is unfit to appreciate the mother whom he possesses, and very characteristically requests to be told of what service it has been to him to be "the grandson of Necker." Neither the invocation of this august memory, nor the general drift of the arguments, strike one as happily chosen for moving a thoughtless lad in his teens, who was probably drawn towards his brother and sister by other reasons than their respective dignity and charm, and was more than likely to be secretly bored by the disquisitions of the learned Schlegel. However this may be, the letter gives the full measure of the contempt which Madame de Staël could feel for folly and frivolity; and, if these were the distinguishing characteristics of Albert, it is very comprehensible that, the first pangs of natural grief overcome, his loss would not leave a great void in her active existence.
In the autumn of 1813 L'Allemagne was published. It appeared in London, and straightway caused the greatest ferment known for a long while in the literary world. The circumstances under which it saw the light—the social position, sex, and history of its author—and its own intrinsic merits, combined to make it an event. It is notorious how much Sir James Mackintosh and Byron admired it; and articles concerning it, critical and laudatory, poured from the European press. Goethe admitted that no previous writer had so largely revealed the riches of German literature to the intelligence of an unappreciative generation; and although the great Teutonic race was not fully satisfied with the work at the time, and has since become somewhat captious regarding it, the talent which it displayed has never been called in question. By a sufficiently striking coincidence the publication of L'Allemagne took place in the same month as the battle of Leipzic. Only a brief period then elapsed before Napoleon abdicated, and Madame de Staël, her splendid and triumphant exile terminated, was enabled once more to re-enter the gates of beloved but, alas! humiliated Paris. She was far too patriotic not to entertain saddened feelings on seeing the streets of the capital filled with soldiers in German, Russian, and Cossack uniforms; for while rejoicing in the overthrow of Napoleon, she mourned the tarnished glory of the French arms.
She was received with the utmost cordiality by Louis XVIII., and her salon quickly became the rallying-ground for all the brightest intellects of France. It is interesting to read that Talleyrand—the supple, silent, time-serving Talleyrand—was among her guests. She forgave him, of course, for his long oblivion of her old claims on his friendship; but not more thoroughly, in all probability, than he forgave himself. To Paris had returned the Abbé de Montesquion, Lally, Tollendal, Lafayette. How changed were the times since the latter had hurried thither to plead, and plead in vain, for his imprisoned King; since the Abbé had waited in disguise on the highroad for Madame de Staël to arrive in her carriage and convey him out of France; since Lally, "the fattest of susceptible men," had brought his eloquence and sensibility to help in enlivening the sylvan glades of Mickleham.
Madame Récamier had returned and Constant, at the ripe age of forty-eight and married for the second time, was so in love with her as to resent any allusion to the past which could divert him, even momentarily, from his all-absorbing passion.
Madame de Krüdener, worn and wasted with sybilline fervour, had commenced her religious gatherings, and the Czar was drawn daily within the circle of her spells; while Madame Récamier was banished from it, because her beauty could still claim glances that were vowed to heaven. Constant, going once, never went again; perhaps because Juliette was wanting; perhaps because such mystic utterances as fell from the inspired priestess's lips were too vague to find an echo in his passion-tossed soul. To Paris also had come Bonstetten, younger than ever in spirit, and hopeful, for all his burden of years.
The dawn of the new era—so quickly clouded for more serious and prescient souls than his—filled him with delight. He was brighter and more contented now than he had been in youth; the world seemed a better place to him, and he almost wondered how anybody could be sad in a universe so full of new ideas and dazzling intellectual possibilities.
Besides all these interesting figures, other and more splendid, if not more illustrious, personages crowded Madame de Staël's salon. Thither came the Czar, so chivalrous and sympathetic in these days; thither came her old friend the Duke of Saxe Weimar; and Wellington presented himself to be received with the utmost cordiality, and to inscribe himself on the long list of Madame Récamier's admirers.
At first Madame de Staël's heart beat high with patriotic hopes. She had become monarchical in her feelings again, and expected great things for France from the liberal disposition of the King. She exerted herself quite in her old way to talk over dissidents and reconcile malcontents; for her one longing was that the new constitution of France might be made on the pattern and informed with the spirit of England. But she was not slow to discover how ill-founded were such aspirations. Egotism stalked through the exhausted land—egotism under various forms and professing various creeds; now wearing the superannuated uniform of the Maison Rouge; now decorated with the medals conferred by Napoleon; now prating of old services before the emigration; now professing a servile repentance for base obedience to Bonaparte. They were but differences in the mask after all; yet over these differences men wrangled, and meanwhile the poison of a deadly indifference crept through the veins of France. Madame de Staël saw all this, and felt it with a passionate regret. In the last volume of her Considerations she shows how everything was accorded in the letter, only to be constantly violated in the spirit. She deplored the irreconcilable folly of the emigrés; the abject cringing of converted Bonapartists, who only cared for power; and the disastrous reactionary influences which hampered the action of the Court.
She returned for the summer to Coppet—a very welcome refuge to her now that she went thither of her own free will. Her health was beginning to fail about this time, while that of M. Rocca gave her constant anxiety. Originally she had been blest, if not with a splendid constitution, at least with a royal disdain of physical influences. She had felt neither heat nor cold, and spoke even with a certain impatience of invalid considerations. But she had lived at such high pressure intellectually from her very earliest years; had thought, felt, talked, and done so much, that her existence could not be counted, like most people's, by years. In the sense of accumulated efforts and results it had been a very long life, and the expenditure of nervous energy so constantly kept up was beginning to tell at last. Even Bonstetten, the optimist, saw a change in her when in July 1814 he visited her at Coppet. She was, indeed, very depressed in spirits; but he appeared to allude only to a physical alteration, for he declared her to be as brilliant and good as ever. He might have added as indefatigable. She found somebody to translate Wilberforce's work on the Slave Trade, and wrote a preface to the French edition. Also she published, in pamphlet form, an appeal for Abolition addressed to the Sovereigns met together at that time in Paris; and she was busy with her work, Considerations, of which the first two parts alone were eventually revised by herself.
In July, from Coppet, she wrote a characteristic letter to Madame Récamier, telling what difficulty she experienced in keeping up the fine love of solitude, which had beguiled her momentarily into seeking that picturesque and sacred but monotonous retreat. "My soul is not sufficiently rural," she writes. "I regret your little apartment and our quarrels and conversations, and all that life which is yours." In this sturdy love of streets, Madame de Staël resembled Dr Johnson and, perhaps, if the truth were known, she resembled all good talkers.
She returned to Paris in the winter of 1814-15, and, conscious that her strength was failing, she became extremely anxious to marry her darling daughter to some man who would be worthy of her. Her circumstances had been recently much improved by the repayment, from the Treasury, of the two millions which Necker had left there. Such wealth, joined to her own brilliant social position, entitled her to look out for a good parti for Albertine; but she was resolute that the match should be a happy one. Her ideal of felicity was conjugal love. She preached, indeed, a code of wifely submission that would seem very insipid to some emancipated damsels in our days, and was perhaps a little too perfect to be possible. But she put into it all her own rare faith in good, and often laughingly declared that "she would force her daughter to make a marriage of the heart."
In the midst of these amiable preoccupations, and while enjoying once again the delight of social intercourse, unhampered by foreign modes of speech and thought, and untroubled by the irritation of exile, Madame de Staël was still haunted by a foreboding of evil. Such presentiments were very common with her. She had the quick, indefinable instinct of imaginative minds, and felt that subtle vibration of events which precedes, or perhaps causes, change in them. Probably she hardly knew what she anticipated; and yet, when the news of Napoleon's escape from Elba arrived, it seemed as if the expected disaster could only be that. An hour after she met M. de la Valette, and said to him: "If Bonaparte triumph, liberty is lost; and if he be beaten, our national independence is over."
A few days of utter consternation followed—a pause of bewildered, incapable silence, through which, as Châteaubriand graphically says, "the sound of Bonaparte's advancing footsteps echoed." Then came the news of one town and province after another rallying round the standard of the resurgent conqueror. Ney departed, vowing to bring back his former master in an iron cage; and the vain boast, so quickly yet not ludicrously disproved, inspired as little confidence as it deserved.
The Court prepared for ignominious flight, and Madame de Staël had no choice but to follow its example. But a few months previously she had by chance become aware of a conspiracy against Napoleon's life, and, for all her hatred of him, had been so moved by the menace of peril to her ancient and implacable foe, that she had found means to despatch a warning to him. Yet now, when she heard of his return, all her terror of him revived in its pristine force, bringing back with it the flood of agitated imagination which had so long poisoned her life.
Villemain has left a record of the evening of the 18th March 1815, which he passed in the salon of the Countess Rumford, and where he met Madame de Staël. Several famous, and to us now familiar, personages were present—Lafayette, Constant, Jancourt, Cuvier, Sismondi, and Lemercier, among others. Every moment somebody arrived with news of the advancing hero. Madame de Staël came late, and instantly attracted the general attention to herself. She was overwhelmed with sadness, but more for France even than for herself. She had been at the Tuilleries, and found that there all hope of resistance was abandoned. Her own mind was made up for flight, yet she urged Madame de Rumford to remain, showing that she considered Napoleon's hatred of herself to be inextinguishable and as active as ever. In point of fact, Napoleon's earliest care, on reaching the capital, was to express his regret at her departure. It is very unlikely that he would have molested her in any way had she remained; but it was ordained that, to the last, he should make her suffer even more in imagination than in reality. She urged Madame Récamier to escape with her, for, Juliette's prescription never having been formally revoked, Madame de Staël considered her danger as great as her own. But Madame Récamier, more calm, refused. With her remained also Benjamin Constant, although he also was admonished by Madame de Staël to seek safety in another land. His career during the Hundred Days is well known. He began by attacking Napoleon violently, then had an interview with him, was fascinated, converted, appointed a councillor of state, and helped to edit the Acte Additionnel. Another convert was the sober-minded Sismondi, and several people have asserted, on the authority first of an English editor, and then of M. Thiers, that the great, the irreconcilable "Corinne" herself, gave in a tardy but complete adhesion. Ste. Beuve endorsed the error, and based his belief upon the style of an unsigned note in French found among Lord Castlereagh's posthumous papers, and attributed by Lord Londonderry's secretary to Madame de Staël. This letter was supposed to have been written at Coppet and forwarded to Mr. Crawford, the American minister in Paris, in order that he might take it to London. Its object was to inspire English statesmen with the writer's own belief in Napoleon's new-found sincerity, and to recommend his government to their support.
A comparison of dates shows, however, that such a letter, if despatched from Coppet, could only have reached Paris twenty-four hours after Mr. Crawford's departure, and Thiers's assumption that Madame de Staël remained in Paris during the Hundred Days is disproved by her correspondence from Switzerland with Madame Récamier. Finally, and again according to Thiers, Sismondi's conversion was a result of Madame de Staël's own change of views. But this also appears quite untenable, inasmuch as Sismondi himself bears testimony to her resentment against Napoleon, strengthened, as he says, "to a blind and violent hatred." This is the natural language of a person who has veered about of another person who has not, and the expression occurs in a letter of Sismondi's written from Coppet a short time after Waterloo, and when he had gone to the château in some doubt as to the nature of the reception there awaiting him. He had been much relieved to find his hostess as cordial as ever. Madame de Staël, indeed, never seems to have willingly or spontaneously given up any friend whom she had once admitted to the title. Politics are apt to envenom the most intimate relations, but they left no bitterness in her great and gentle soul. Alas! the happy days at Coppet were numbered now for most of those whom we have seen congregating there through so many exciting summers.
Madame de Staël delighted in the exercise of a generous hospitality. Nobody ever seems to have managed her business affairs better than she did, and among the few apparent contradictions of her transparent nature was the spirit of order in which she dealt with life, as soon as the things presented to her consideration were hard facts and not sentiments. In all administrative matters she had the capacity of a true Frenchwoman, and, while systematic and careful, was the least avaricious of women.