Few celebrities who came to Paris failed to seek the drawing room of Mme. de Stael, which was still illuminated with the brilliancy of her genius and the splendor of her fame. But her triumphs were past, and life was receding. Her few remaining days of weakness and suffering, darkened by vain regrets, were passed more and more in the warmth and tenderness of her devoted family, in the noble and elevated thought that rose above the strife of politics into the serene atmosphere of a Christian faith. At her death bed Chateaubriand did her tardy justice. "Bon jour, my dear Francis; I suffer, but that does not prevent me from loving you," she said to one who had been her critic, but never her friend. Her magnanimity was as unfailing as her generosity, and it may be truly said that she never cherished a hatred.
The life of Mme. de Stael was in the world. She embodied the French spirit; she could not conceive of happiness in a secluded existence; a theater and an audience were needed to call out her best talents. She could not even bear her griefs alone. The world was taken into her confidence. She demanded its sympathy.
She chanted exquisite requiems over her dead hopes and her lost illusions, but she chanted them in costume, never quite forgetting that her role was a heroic one. She added, however, to the gifts of an improvisatrice something infinitely higher and deeper. There was no problem with which she was not ready to deal. She felt the pulse beats in the great heart of humanity, and her tongue, her pen, her purse, and her influence were ever at the bidding of the unfortunate. She traversed all fields of thought, from the pleasant regions of poetry and romance to the highest altitudes of philosophy. We may note the drift of her ardent and imaginative nature in the youthful tales into which she wove her romantic dreams, her fancied griefs, her inward struggles, and her tears. In the pages of "Corinne" we read the poetry, the sensibility, the passion, the melancholy, the thought of a matured woman whose youth of the soul neither sorrow nor experience could destroy. We may divine the direction of her sympathies, and the fountain of her inspiration, in her letters on Rousseau, written at twenty, and foreshadowing her own attitude towards the theories which appealed so powerfully to the generous spirits of the century. We may follow the active and scholarly workings of her versatile intellect in her pregnant thoughts on literature, on the passions, on the Revolution; or measure the clearness of her insight, the depth of her penetration, the catholicity of her sympathies, and the breadth of her intelligence in her profound and masterly, if not always accurate, studies of Germany. The consideration of all this pertains to a critical estimate of her character and genius which cannot be attempted here.
It has grown to be somewhat the fashion to depreciate the literary work of Mme. de Stael. Measured by present standards she leaves something to be desired in logical precision; she had not the exactness of the critical scholar, nor the simplicity of the careful artist; the luxuriance of her language often obscures her thought. She is talking still, and her written words have the rapid, tumultuous flow of conversation, together with its occasional negligences, its careless periods, its sudden turns, its encumbered phrases. Misguided she sometimes was, and carried away by the resistless rush of ideas that, like the mountain torrent, gathered much debris along their course. But her rapid judgments, which have the force of inspiration, are in advance of her time, though in the main correct from her own point of view, while her flaws in workmanship are more than counterbalanced by that inward illumination which is Heaven's richest and rarest gift. But who cares to dwell upon the shadows that scarcely dim the brilliancy of a genius so rare and so commanding? They are but spots on the sun that are only discovered by looking through a glass that veils its radiance. It is just to weigh her by the standards of her own age. Born at its highest level, she soared far above her generation. She carried within herself the vision of a statesman, the penetration of a critic, the insight of a philosopher, the soul of a poet, and the heart of a woman. If she was not without faults, she had rare virtues. No woman has ever exercised a wider or more varied influence. With one or two exceptions, none stands on so high a pinnacle. George Sand was a more finished artist; George Eliot was a greater novelist, a more accurate scholar, and a more logical thinker; but in versatility, in intellectual spontaneity, in brilliancy of conversation and natural eloquence of thought she is without a rival. Her moral standards, too, were above the average of her time. Her ideals were high and pure. The wealth of her emotions and the rich coloring of sentiment in which her thoughts and feelings were often clothed left her open to possible misconceptions. It was her fate to be grossly misunderstood, to miss the domestic happiness she craved, to be the victim of a sleepless persecution, to pass her best years in a dreary exile from the life she most loved, to be maligned by her enemies and betrayed by her friends. Her very virtues were construed into faults and turned against her. Though we may not lift the veil from her intimate life, we may fairly judge her by her own ideals and her dominant traits. The world, which is rarely indulgent, has been in the main just to her motives and her character. "I have been ever the same, intense and sad," were among her last words. "I have loved God, my father, and liberty." But she was a victim to the contradictory elements in her own nature, and walked always among storms. This nature, so complex, so rich, so ardent, so passionate, could it ever have found permanent repose?
