gotthold ephraim lessing 1729–1781 - St. Francis Xavier University

506 / GERMAINE NECKER DE STAËL
De Staël’s early “Essay on Fictions,” published in 1795 (our first selection), makes
the case, in her characteristic epigrammatic style, for what was eventually to
become the nineteenth- century realist novel. Novels, she claims, should broaden
their range to include every human predicament, not simply romantic love. Novels
can give the creative intellect the space to explore every intractable problem facing
postrevolutionary man and woman. Fictions in which “nothing is true and everything
is likely” will challenge novel writers to represent what they take to be the
real. Unlike philosophical allegories, which subordinate fiction to ideas, and historical
fictions, which subordinate fiction to facts, the novel can re- create the world
as it is and, in the pro cess, change it. Useless if merely accurate or merely imaginary,
literature has the power to move, to awaken, to inform, to distract, and to
console. Far from being outside of history, the novel can come to grips with everything
that makes history.
On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions (1800), from
which our second selection is taken, is a fitting monument to the turn from the
eigh teenth to the nineteenth century. Deeply connected to the fate of the French
Revolution, which had just passed through the Reign of Terror (during which Mme
de Staël lost many friends and was almost executed herself), On Literature describes
history as an ongoing pro cess that, what ever its setbacks, ultimately heads toward
human progress and perfectibility. As a domain in which the mind can stretch itself
to the utmost, literature is an intimate part of the pro cess. When, in later conversation,
Mme de Staël was introduced to Goethe’s views on art for art’s sake, she found
this Weimar aesthetic contrary to all she hoped for from literature, but so dialectical
was her mind that she loved to find an idea she could resist. As Goethe later
reported, “My obstinate contrariness often drove her to despair, but it was then that
she was at her most amiable and that she displayed her mental and verbal agility
most brilliantly.”
Romanticism in France is rooted in the writings of Rousseau, another Swiss, but
by all accounts the decisive turn was taken when Mme de Staël introduced German
Romanticism to the French. In her book On Germany (1810), she offered Eu rope
and particularly France an alternative to the empire of Napoleon with his taste for
classicism and absolutism. Her division between northern literature (melancholy,
medieval, Christian, emotional, misty— Romantic) and southern literature (sunny,
rational, sensual, pagan— classical) was both cosmopolitan and nationalist in an age
when modern nationalism was just taking shape. All of the categories were problematic,
but despite the rhetorical force of Mme de Staël’s oppositions, their thrust was
less essential (“the German soul,” “the French mind”) than dialectical. Within the
French tradition, the seeds of Romanticism already existed: all that was needed was
to make them grow. And German thinkers would provide the nutrients.
In addition to her theoretical and po liti cal writings, de Staël is famous for two
novels—Delphine (1802) and Corinne, or Italy (1807). The latter paints a portrait of
a celebrated, in de pen dent woman artist; her art is deepened by her love for an
En glishman who, initially attracted by her talent, eventually abandons her for a less
complex partner. Corinne, who is half En glish and half Italian, combines the
genius of the Mediterranean with the sensitivity of the North in her poetry, but she
suffers, in the end, from culture’s inability to incorporate superior and complex
women. Mme de Staël had much to say about the plight of the woman intellectual,
whether living in a monarchy or in a republic, a plight that is nowhere more
cogently analyzed than in our selection from On Literature. The category of “exceptional
woman,” a term invented by French culture both to counteract and to appropriate
women like Mme de Staël, continued to function well into the twentieth
century, as simone de beauvoir was to find out. By separating the exception from
the condition of women in general, society recognizes and benefits from female talent
without having to change its view— often shared by the exceptional woman
herself— of women as such.