ART. IV. De l'Allemagne. Par Madame La Baronne De Staël Holstein. Seconde Edition. 3 tom. 8vo. 1813. FEW pieces of literary history are more curious than those connected with the present volumes. In themselves, whether we consider them as a review by a native of France of the vast circle of German authorship, or as the work of a woman' de omni scibili,' (for, in truth, it is not easy to name that branch of human inquiry which does not find its place in some part or other of the following pages,) their appearance is a phenomenon that fully justifies the interest which they have excited. Nor was it possible that this interest should not be much augmented by those singular acts of jealous power which sought to strangle in its swaddling clothes this formidable assertor of German eminence. The regular censors of the press in France (as Madame de Staël informs us, in an indignant and, to Englishmen, a sufficiently gratifying preface) were contented, indeed, to authorize its appearance with the exception of some few passages, which in the present edition are marked with inverted commas. This permission was in fact equivalent to an unqualified approbation of the whole; since the passages thus singled out are, in general, so little obnoxious either to praise or blame, so little distinguished from the rest of the work, and so easily spared from it, that the erasures may seem to have been made more from the desire of doing something than the impression that any thing was necessary to be done. Such harmless critics, whether before or after publication, are little qualified to disturb an author's tranquillity. But there exists in modern France another and a very different judge of literary questions, by whom the daughter of Necker was regarded with no kindly nor impartial eye. Πικρος λυτήρ νεικέων Ξεινος εκ πυρος συνεις σίδαρος. The will of this patron of literature was soon made manifest, in an order from the Lieutenant of Police to destroy the whole impres sion which the censors had sanctioned, and on which, thus authorized, the publisher had risked his property. This was followed by a polite message to Madame de Staël herself, requiring her to surrender the original copy of her work, (a demand which how she evaded we are not told,) permitting her, at the same time, to visit foreign countries, and allowing her, at first, twenty-four hours, afterwards, in excess of kindness, seven or eight days, for the arrangement of her affairs, and to bid adieu for ever to her paternal home and her native soil. This rigorous sentence was imposed, General Savary assured her, not as a punishment for having omitted the Emperor's praises in her last work, but because the air of France 7 4 France did not, in the General's opinion, agree with her, and because the French people were not as yet reduced to seek for models among the nations whom Madame de Staël admired. To these circumstances we owe the present residence of this lady in England, and the publication of her persecuted work by a London bookseller. In all this there is nothing which, under a government like that of France, could reasonably excite surprise, except the tone and character of the publication, on account of which a woman of ele vated rank, and still more elevated literary character, has incurred a treatment so severe. For, though General Savary affects in his letter to attribute her exile to her general conduct, and though 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc,' is not in logic a legitimate inference; still it is plain, from the expressions of Savary himself, that her work on Germany was the immediate cause which drew down on her head those thunder-clouds which only lowered before, and which had seemed to respect the ancient privilege of her laurel chaplet. Yet, of all publications, the present work might seem least likely to have attracted the storm, did we not recollect that eminence of every kind is hateful to despotic power. It is strictly and truly what it professes to be, a critical and philosophical treatise. On every subject which could inflame the public mind in France, or give a moment's well-grounded offence to any form of government, a guarded silence is observed; and, as we have General Savary's assurance that it is not absolutely expected by the police that every work published in Paris should contain the author's confession of his faith in the Emperor, we can only suppose what will excite, perhaps, the surprise of future generations, that it was in the nineteenth century regarded as treasonable in France to bestow any praises on, not the government but, the literary and moral character of the English and Germans. To imitate or to extol Europeans is in China, we believe, illegal; but in Europe it would be difficult to find another instance where an author was, under pain of banishment, forbidden to criticise with fairness or favour the writings and morals of foreigners; of foreigners, above all, whose nations, in every instance but one, were at that moment the allies of her own. Yet, in truth, the policy of such prohibition is altogether consistent with the interests and hazards of an empire built mainly on opinion, and whose ascendancy relies, as that of France so lately did, on a supposed superiority over all the earth in literature no less than in arms. 'Let France,' it might be said by the sages of the Thuilleries, let France be brought to perceive that other nations have any thing either great or wise or illustrious which they have not borrowed from herself, and half her confidence is gone. Let the rest of Europe Europe be convinced that in any point they equal their masters, and the yoke is so far broken.' France is not, like Rome, so firmly seated in her empire by the prescription of ages as to afford, like that great model, to other lands the praise of science and poetry, and content herself with the monopoly of conquest and government. Her claims to eminence are not, in any one instance, so undoubted as to permit her to be careless of the remainder. It is thus, we conceive, that the liberal opinions of Madame de Staël were accounted dangerous to the duration of the sacred empire, and that the majesty of France was alarmed on being informed that she had any thing to learn from barbarians: not that, in the present volumes, their author has in the cosmopolite forgotten the patriot, or merged in her admiration of exotic institu tions or genius the natural and laudable pride of a Frenchwoman. We do not detect, in any single instance, a desire to rob of one well-earned laurel that illustrious people, from whose intellect Europe has received almost as much instruction as she has suffered of misfortune from their corruptions and their turbulent ambition. On some points, which in the course of the work it will be our duty to notice, we can even distinguish certain traces of early prejudice, and passages in which an Englishman or German would, perhaps, accuse her of partiality to the composed and uniform stateliness of the models of her own country over the more natural and original characters of Teutonic composition. But it is not, surely, the conduct of an enemy or a traitor to disabuse her countrymen of that overweening and exclusive spirit which, even more than years of usurpation, has armed against France the hostility of mankind, which shuts out knowledge at every entrance but one, and proscribes, as disaffected or ridiculous or unfashionable, all desire to profit by whatever genius or wisdom is not impressed with the stamp of the universal language, or which has not received the imprimatur of the Parisian circles. Even so far, indeed, as national feeling is concerned, a laudable partiality to the peculiar taste or more illustrious models of our native country is not likely. to decline by a competent acquaintance with those of other nations. Of the few distinguished names, respecting whose precedence it is worth the while of empires to contend, the greater part present in fact but few features on which their admirers can insti tute a comparison. Those mighty spirits, who divide among themselves the upper seats of immortality, have mounted that proud eminence by very distinct and devious paths, and, in the rounds of fancy or of reason, in the defence of virtue or the pursuit of error, have marched, like the angelic guards of Milton's Eden,* by opposite *Paradise Lost, Book III. alleys, alleys, to meet in the same triumph. There are, accordingly, two leading objects which appear throughout the present work to have occupied its author's anxiety; the first, to remove all narrow rivalry of each other's renown from the admirers of French and Teutonic literature by demonstrating the wide dissimilarity and intrinsic merit of the walks which they have respectively chosen; the second, to justify German taste and genius from the aspersions, with which the ignorant and selfish critics of Paris have for a length of years assailed them. It would be long, and it is unnecessary, to recall the dull jests against dulness, the ignorant imputations of ignorance, which, from the reign of Lewis the XIVth to that of Napoleon, have afforded a cheap and ignoble triumph to the wits and even the graver writers of France over a nation perhaps more wise, certainly more learned and more moral than themselves. It is, however, not to Frenchmen alone that a work like the present may be serviceable, since it cannot be concealed that, even in England, and among a race of kindred language, and of genius very little dissimilar, the literature of Germany has experienced scarcely less unworthy treatment. To the learned labours of their hellenists and antiquarians our students have, indeed, been ever ready to render ample praise, but to the generality of English readers their best historians have remained altogether unknown; while their poets and philosophers, their plays and their romances, have been abandoned to the indiscriminate charge of folly and impiety, the scorn of the wise and the terror of the virtuous. The forms of contempt and religious alarm are, of all others, perhaps, the most frequent avatars of the mighty goddess Ignorance; and it may be reasonably supposed that many, both in England and France, were not sorry to spare themselves the trouble of acquiring a difficult language by declaring, beforehand, that it contained nothing but heresy and nonsense. There were, however, many other circumstances which, in this country, operated to depress the renown of our Teutonic kindred, and which, in the opinion of the best informed among themselves, afford no inconsiderable excuse for the hard measure of which they complain. The period at which German literature was first introduced into general notice in England was, it will be remembered, the moment of those tremendous convulsions in the political and moral world, under whose effect (though in the hands of Providence they may doubtless lead hereafter to the happiness of all) human nature at this hour is smarting; and when the abyss of error was pouring forth all her brood of serpents to corrupt or annoy the champions of religion and order. · Hey • Her vomit full of books and papers was With loathly frogs and toads which eyes did lack, So widely, indeed, was the land overspread with this pestiferous deluge, that many of the most wholesome herbs, and the fairest indi→ genous flowers, received a taint in its progress; and it would be easy to instance some of the most illustrious names both in England and Germany, whose early productions were impressed with feelings which they have long since unlearned, with hopes which they soon found it but too necessary to abandon. Of these, not only the unpopular politics, but the harmless or admirable peculiarities, were regarded with unjust, though not unnatural suspicion; since the defenders of existing institutions, while every wind brought to their ears the extending death-howl of anarchy and atheism, while they past their days on the watch-tower, and slept with the sword girded and the helmet on the head, were ready to suspect in every novelty a secret as dangerous as the Trojan horse, and to treat even their own friends as enemies if they appeared in the armour of the Greeks. But, besides this leading cause of jealousy and ill-will, there were others which contributed to increase or prolong the undue depression of the German character in England. In both countries the present generation has seen the establishment of a new school in composition, and in neither country, at the period to which we refer, had this school attained either perfection or consistency; its founders had, as yet, neither completely gained the public ear, nor perhaps very perfectly themselves understood the innovations to which their examples conducted. First essays are almost always faulty. England was obliged to submit to a long and nauseous course of diablerie and sentiment, before these morning shadows gave way to the sunshine of Thalaba and the Last Minstrel; and the eccentricities of the Robbers and Gortz von Berlichingen were, in like manner, the precursors of those mighty efforts of tragedy which have placed the Teutonic muse on a level with Aschylus, and little below Shakespeare. In both nations, in fact, the transition was of the same kind and nearly contemporary; it consisted in a reference to other models than those of France or Rome, and it is remarkable that the same was in the one attacked as English, which in the other was stigmatized as German. But, though in their native soils the heroes of the new school have been completely triumphant, their merit is still unknown or contested beyond this range, and the parts beyond the sea are to each of them ' partes in *Faery Queene, Book I. Canto į. fidelium.' |