Lord Byron and Madame De Staël: Born for Opposition

Lord Byron and Madame de Stael

Lord Byron and Madame de Stael Bom for Opposition

JOANNE WILKES First published 1999 by Ashgate Publishing

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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-32214-1 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-429-45224-6 (ebk) Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1 1 ‘Their She Condition’ 26 2 Heroines and Heroes 55 3 Citizens of the World 96 4 ‘Bom for Opposition’ 157

Bibliography 199 Index 207

The Nineteenth Century General Editors’ Preface

The aim of this series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that ,has been an inevitable feature of recent decades, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. Though it is dedicated principally to the publication of original monographs and symposia in literature, history, cultural analysis, and associated fields, there will be a salient role for reprints of significant text from, or about, the period. Our overarching policy is to address the spectrum of nineteenth-century studies without exception, achieving the widest scope in chronology, approach and range of concern. This, we believe, distinguishes our project from comparable ones, and means, for example, that in the relevant areas of scholarship we both recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas, while valuing tradition. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, as a whole, and in the lively currents of debate and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.

Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ann T. Gardiner, of the State University of New York, for inviting me to contribute a paper on Madame de Stael and Lord Byron to her session on ‘Coppet and Its Others’, at the 1997 Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. I was also pleased to have the opportunity to speak about Madame de Stael to the Alliance Fran9aise d’Auckland in 1996, and would like to thank my friends associated with the Alliance, especially Mme Jacqueline Zegers, for helping to keep my French up to the mark over the last few years. Thanks are also due to the colleagues in the English Department at the University of Auckland with whom I have taught Romantic literature - Terry Sturm, Alex Calder and Claudia Marquis. The experience of teaching with them our third-year paper on Romantic literature, especially since its reconfiguration in 1996 as ‘Byron and Romanticism’, has provided constant stimulus for this project. We would all recognize, too, the impetus given to the study of Byron at the University by the distinguished scholar, the late M.K. Joseph. I would also like to acknowledge the help of George Dibley, of the University’s Centre for Continuing Education, who drew my attention to the article on Madame de Stael inEncounter , and of M. Philippe Baude, who sent me extracts from Mercier’sTableau de Paris on women authors.

Joanne Wilkes University of Auckland

Introduction

When France’s most famous contemporary writer, Germaine de Stael, died in July 1817, at the age of 51, the event drew two extended written responses from Britain’s most famous contemporary writer, the 29-year-old Lord Byron. One appears in the notes to canto IV ofChilde Harold's Pilgrimage (1818), a work much concerned with the reputation and legacy of great writers; the other is part of a poem Byron included in a letter to his publisher, John Murray, in August 1817. The tribute directed to the public glosses stanzas 54-5 of Childe Harold IV, which celebrate the illustrious writers buried in Florence’s Santa Croce. It foretells the era when Madame de Stael will, as they do, enjoy ‘a just estimate of her singular capacity’, free from the distortions of contemporary judgements, and will also come into her own as a benignant influence on posterity. Grandiloquently, Byron declares: ‘She will enter into that existence in which the great writers of all ages and nations are, as it were, associated in a world of their own, and, from that superior sphere, shed their eternal influence for the control and consolation of mankind’.1 Most of the passage, however, focuses on Stael as an individual, and in this context, Byron is not just one (implicitly) great writer lauding another, but a man drawing on his personal knowledge of her. For during the summer of 1816, after he had fled abroad following the scandal-ridden breakdown of his marriage, Byron had often visited Stael at her estate at Coppet, on the shores of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) near Lausanne: thus he declares that ‘amidst the sublimer scenes of the Leman lake’, he had ‘received his chief satisfaction from contemplating the engaging qualities’ of Coppet’s ‘incomparable’ chatelaine. There is some bravado in all this: Byron is telling his compatriots that the admired Madame de Stael appreciated him, even if they did not. In going on to highlight her private virtues, Byron is implying that in his case, too, there is a gap between public assumptions about him and his actual domestic behaviour. But the passage also shows his awareness of how much celebrated women in

1 Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (7 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-93), vol. 2, pp. 234-5; henceforth abbreviated asCPW. 2 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition particular were vulnerable to calumny. He suggests that, because Stael was a woman, she incurred extravagant but insincere flattery, such that now she is dead, she risks being unjustly maligned: ‘The gallantry, the love of wonder, and the hope of associated fame, which blunted the edge of censure, must cease to exist’, and since she ‘has ceased to be a woman’, it is likely that ‘many will repay themselves for former complaisance, by a severity to which the extravagance of previous praises may perhaps give the colour of truth’. In order to defend Stael publicly, none the less, Byron must operate within contemporary assumptions about femininity, by highlighting the kinds of private virtues which were commended in women. What deserve praise, he says, are ‘the unaffected graces with which she adorned those nearer relationships, the performance of whose duties is rather discovered amongst the interior secrets, than seen in the outward management, of family intercourse’: thus, as a mother, she was ‘tenderly affectionate and tenderly beloved’ and, as a friend, ‘unboundedly generous’. Even in the necessarily more public role as ‘the amiable mistress of an open mansion, the centre of a society, ever varied, and always pleased’, Stael’s behaviour did not betray unfeminine ‘ambition’ or ‘the arts of public rivalry’, but simply a desire ‘to give fresh animation to those around her’. Byron’s overall response to Stael as a person and as a writer is inflected by his sense of what they shared as great authors and public figures, and also by the ramifications, in their particular historical context, of the fact that she was female and he was male. Byron’s other comment on Stael’s demise, although very different in form from the note to Childe Harold IV , also registers his awareness of how susceptible women in the public eye could be to prurient gossip. It forms part of a poem he wrote at Murray’s request - not for publication, but to provide a form of words Murray might use to decline publishing a play by Byron’s hapless physician Polidori.2 In it, ‘Murray’, in order to excuse himself for not giving Polidori’s play the attention it supposedly deserves, pleads pressure of company, and adduces his dinner guests, ‘Crabbe - Malcolm - Hamilton and Chantrye’ (1. 63), who are engaged in discussing ‘poor De Stael’s late dissolution’ (1. 66). ‘Murray’ recounts their tattle about her private life, including: ’Tis said she certainly was married To Rocca - and had twice miscarried, No - not miscarried - 1 opine - But brought to bed at forty-nine ... (11. 69-72)

2 CPW\ vol. 4, pp. 126-8. Introduction 3 These lines draw on the posthumous revelation that Stael had secretly married her longtime companion, John Rocca, and had, equally clandestinely, borne his son (at 45). They suggest how a woman in the public eye might suffer from male aspersions on her conduct which not only centre on her sexual behaviour but represent her as almost a biological freak; subsequent lines, focusing on Stael’s literary stature, also belittle her in gendered terms: ‘for a woman / Her talents surely were uncommon’ (11. 79-80). Moreover, hardly yet operating in that ‘superior’ sphere invoked in the Childe Harold tribute, Stall’s works are to these men mainly commercial commodities: ‘Her Publisher (and Public too) / The hour of her demise may rue - / For never more within his shop ... ’ (11. 81-3). Byron was, as Jerome Christiansen’s extensive study has shown, acutely conscious of the commercial credit associated with his own works, of the value of ‘Byron’ as a commodity: he by no means excoriates the attitudes he attributes to ‘Murray’s’ putative dinner guests. What also complicates any attempt to read Byron as a sort of proto-feminist here is the sense that the elaborate, crowded, noisy scenario he sets up for ‘Murray’s’ alleged struggles to offer Polidori an adequate reply, is something he enjoys creating: it may be an all-male gathering betraying insensitivity about a woman writer no longer in a position to defend herself, but it is also the kind of tumultuous social-cum- literary life that Byron, writing from Venice, is probably missing. He even incorporates references to himself by ‘Murray’ as the author of a drama (obviously Manfred ), which has given rise to speculation that Byron in Venice has ‘drained away his brains as Stallion / To some dark-eyed and warm Italian’ (11. 33-40). This is a joke against himself, but also an implicit boast about his sexual conquests, of a kind presupposing a male audience. That is, Byron’s letter/poem is an exile’s effort to write himself back into an English and masculine literary milieu, partly by demonstrating he is up with the latest gossip about Mme de Stael. Both of these responses to Stael’s death show Byron using this event - like so many others - as an opportunity to present versions of himself to his readers. Yet, as so often in Byron too, there is also a ‘truth in masquerade’, in this case, a genuine link between Stael and himself which is both personal and literary. Much writing on Byron’s personal-cum-literary connections from 1816 has focused on his friendship with Percy Bysshe Shelley and his circle: both Byron and Shelley are, after all, British and poets. As far as links with women are concerned, Mary Shelley has claimed attention because of her connection with Percy, her role as Byron’s amanuensis, and Byron’s presence on the occasion 3

3 Christiansen, J.,Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 4 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition which provided the germ of Frankenstein; needless to say, her step-sister Claire Clairmont has long been notorious for the affair with Byron which produced their daughter Allegra. The significant and fascinating links between Byron and the Shelley circle, plus, I would argue, the overall orientation of most anglophone Romantic scholarship towards British writers, have occluded Byron’s other important literary relationship of the famous summer at Diodati on Lake Geneva/ Byron was a regular visitor to Coppet, which was a well-known magnet for writers and intellectuals: Stael’s circle there included A.W. Schlegel, Benjamin Constant, Bonstetten, Simonde de Sismondi and Chateaubriand. In addition, Byron had already met Stael herself several times during her long visit to Britain in 1813-14. More importantly, he read her works, and she his, and although their personal relations were never free of tension, and they worked in diverse genres, they did express admiration for each other’s writings. I shall sketch in some details of the pair’s generally little-known links, and suggest some general similarities between them which make a comparative study of value. The progress of Byron’s reaction to Stael shows a shift from irritation at what he saw as her overwhelming and oppressive volubility in the London seasons of 1813-14, to an appreciation of her tolerance and helpfulness when they met again in Switzerland in 1816. Annoyed by her habit of deluging her audience with continuous talk, Byron complains in his journal of 1813-14 that Stael ‘writes octavos, andtalks folios’, and that ‘her society is overwhelming - an avalanche that buries one in glittering nonsense - all snow and sophistry’.4 5 4 To his confidante Lady Melbourne, he declares that he tries to avoid Stael, since ‘in society I see nothing but a very plain woman forcing one to listen & look at her with her pen behind her ear and her mouth full ofink’.6 Some years later, he would still recall how much she ‘harangued’ and ‘lectured’ and ‘made very long speeches’.7 Though the endless talk is the main object of his aversion, Byron is also repelled by the middle-aged Stael’s absence of good

4 James Soderholm has however written illuminatingly on the role of several female friends and lovers of Byron’s in the creation of his image and reputation: see Soderholm’s Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). 5 Entries for 16 November 1813 and 18 February 1814, inByron *s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (13 vols, London: John Murray, 1973-94), vol. 3, pp. 207, 244; henceforth abbreviated asBLJ. 6 Letter of 8 January 1814,BLJ , vol. 3, p. 19. 7 ‘Some Recollections of my Acquaintance with Madame de Stael’ [1821], in Lord Byron,The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 184-6; henceforth abbreviated asCMP. Introduction 5 looks: in June, 1814, he writes to a woman in Switzerland that he hopes she does not resemble Stael, as the latter is ‘frightful as a precipice’.8 In this last comment, there is certainly an element of name-dropping: Byron is highlighting the fact that the woman of Swiss background he knows best just happens to be Mme de Stael. There is also an element of professional jealousy in Byron’s overall reaction: Mme de Stael arrived in England in June of 1813, famous as the author of several works, notably the best-selling novel of 1807, Corinne, or Italy (Corinne, ou Vltalie). She was also celebrated as the centre of European intellectual resistance to Britain’s arch-enemy, Napoleon Bonaparte: in 1813, her study of German literature and politics,Germany (De VAUemagne), which had had its first print-run pulped in 1810 on Napoleon’s orders, was finally published - by Murray - in England. The English translation of this immensely long and scholarly work sold 2,250 copies in 1813, while the first edition of the French original, 1,500 copies, sold out in three days.9 Byron’s response to Stael in 1813-14 was thus arguably affected by his waking up to find someone else as famous as he was. A more substantial reason for Byron’s resistance to Stall’s influence at this point in their relations, was his belief that she had become an uncritical supporter of Britain’s Tory government and the country’s conservative (and for Byron, ‘canting’) religious forces. Soon after meeting her, he reports to his friend Thomas Moore that her politics are ‘sadly changed’, since ‘she is for the Lord of Israel and the Lord of Liverpool - a vile antithesis of a Methodist and a Tory - talks of nothing but devotion and the ministry, and, I presume, expects that God and the government will help her to a pension’.10 A few months later, his satirical poem, ‘The Devil’s Drive’, includes, among the devil’s sightings of evidence of Britain’s dire political state, a ball put on by the Regent and attended by Mme de Stael, ‘Turned Methodist and Tory!’11 Byron overstates the extent of Stael’s political and religious partisanship: she saw Britain’s political system in general, rather than the Tory government itself, as a model for other nations to emulate, and was attracted to religious idealism as such, rather than to any sect’s particular manifestation of it. Yet her tendency to celebrate British political, social and moral life remained a bone of contention for Byron, and his poeticexposes of what he saw as his compatriots’ corruption and hypocrisy have as one of their targets the flattering self-image offered to them by Stael’s works.

8 Letter to Henrietta d’Ussieres, 8 June 1814, inBU , vol. 4, p. 122. 9 John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in StaeTs (De VAllemagne\ 1810-1813 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 2. 10 Letter of 22 June 1813, BU, vol. 3, p. 66. 11 CPW, vol. 3, pp. 95-104, stanza 23. 6 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition In 1816, however, in the emotionally volatile state brought on by the marital scandal and departure from England, Byron found Mme de Stael at Coppet very welcoming. She even made a sincere if ham-fisted attempt at a reconciliation between him and his wife.12 There had been hints even during their London acquaintance that Byron was able to perceive something more attractive and interesting in Stael personally than an inveterate and self absorbed talker. When she thanked him effusively for acknowledging a literary debt to her in a note to his poemThe Bride of Abydos , he felt moved in his journal to try to account for her response: firstly, all women like all, or any praise; secondly, this was unexpected, because I have never courted her, and thirdly those who have been all their lives regularly praised, by regular critics, like a little variety, and are glad when any one goes out of his way to say a civil thing; and fourthly, she is a very good-natured creature, which is the best reason, after all, and, perhaps, the only one.13 Despite its apparently dismissive attitude to Stael as a typical female, supposedly drawn to Byron by his unusual and discriminating coolness towards her, the comment does end with Byron implicitly reproaching himself for his cynicism and acknowledging that Stael may in fact be generous spirited. According to the - admittedly unreliable - Captain Medwin, the personal links between the two writers could have become closer during 1813-14. He reports Byron saying that ‘There was a double marriage talked of in town that season’: one between himself and Stael’s daughter Albertine, and the other between her eldest son Auguste and Annabella Milbanke. This sounds like too much of a fortuitous combination of notables to be plausible, and Lady Byron (nee Annabella Milbanke) certainly denied the story after Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron came out in 1824.14 That Byron may have been linked to Albertine de Stael by rumour, if not by personal inclination, is suggested by a comment on her when he met her again at Coppet in the summer of 1816. In February of that year Albertine had married the future French liberal politician Victor, Due de Broglie, and Byron reports to Samuel Rogers a few months later that she does not appear to be pregnant - as if

12 See BLJ, vol. 5, p. 88, and Madame de Stael ses amis , ses correspondants: choix de lettres (1778-1817), presente et commente par Georges Solovieff (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), pp. 522-6. 13 Entry for 7 December 1813,BU, vol. 3, p. 231. 14 Medwin, T., Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron [1824], ed. with an introduction and notes by Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 182. Introduction 7 mentally comparing her husband’s virility with his own.15 This notwithstanding, Albertine and Victor de Broglie had several children, and one of them, Louise de Cleron, Comtesse d’Haussonville, went on to write an unreliable but interesting two-volume biography of Byron in the 1870s. Louise de Cleron never knew Byron, nor indeed, her grandmother Mme de Stael (she was bom in 1819), but she presumably draws on family lore as to Byron’s visits to Coppet. She claims that there, he came across as ‘bitter, sarcastic, taking pleasure in scandalizing the puritanism of Geneva society with irreligious comments’.16 However this may be, by September 1816, we find Byron admitting, in a rather self-pitying letter to his half-sister Augusta, that at Coppet, ‘Me. de Stael has been particularly kind & friendly towards me - & (I hear) fought battles without number in my very indifferent cause,’17 - and there are similar comments in subsequent letters to Augusta, Moore, Murray, and Rogers. To Murray, for example, Byron says that Stael ‘has made Coppet as agreeable as society and talent can make any place on earth’.18 His initial response, too, to news of her death, in a letter sent to Murray a week before enclosing the poem discussed earlier, contains no irreverence: ‘I have been very sorry to hear of the death of Me. de Stael - not only because she had been very kind to me at Coppet - but because now I can never requite her. - In a general point of view she will leave a great gap in society & literature’.19 The kind o f‘gap’ Byron thought Stael’s death would leave in ‘literature’ is suggested by his laudatory comments on her works. In describing the heroine Zuleika in The Bride of Abydos, he uses the phrase, ‘the mind - the Music breathing from her face!’,20 and defends it by drawing the reader’s attention to what he describes as ‘an eloquent passage in the latest work of the first female writer of this, perhaps, of any age, on the analogy (and the immediate comparison excited by that analogy) between “painting and music,” see vol. iii,

15 Letter of 29 July 1816,BU , vol. 5, p. 86; in a subsequent letter to Murray, however, he notes that Albertine de Broglie is ‘with child’ (5 October 1816, BU , vol. 5, p. 111). 16 Les demieres annees de Lord Byron (les rives du lac de Geneve - Tltalie - la Grece ), 2eme edition, revue et augmentee (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1874), p. 82: ‘amer, sarcastique, prenant plaisir a scandaliser par des propos irreligieux le puritanisme de la societe de Geneve*. All translations from French are my own, unless otherwise indicated. The first volume of the biography,La jeunesse de Lord Byron , appeared in 1872. Louise de Cleron does not allude to any marriage rumours linking Stael’s children with Byron or Annabella Milbanke. 17 Letter of 8 September 1816,BU , vol. 5, p. 92. 18 Letter of 30 September 1816, BU , vol. 5, p. 109. See also pp. 94, 111,114, 124, 204, 206. 19 Letter of 12 August 1817,BU, vol. 5, p. 256. 20 Canto I, stanza 6, inCPW, vol. 3, p. 113. 8 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition cap. 10, DE L’ALLEMAGNE’.21 His judgements in letters and journal are equally enthusiastic: his complaint that Mme de Stael ‘writes octavos, talksand folios’ is followed by further praise of Germany: ‘I have read her books - and like most of them - and delight in the last’. But, as the published compliment suggests, Byron sometimes commended her specifically as a pre-eminent woman writer, the implication being that she might not be in the same league as the great male writers. Writing to Murray early in 1814, for example, he declares that Stael ‘beats all your Natives hollow as an Authoress’, and compares her favourably with the prominent Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth22 - but makes no claims for her superiorityvis-a-vis male novelists. When he did rank her highly enough for her to compete with men, he seemed to feel on occasion that such talent was unnatural in a woman: according to another journal entry, ‘she is a woman by herself, and has done more than the rest of them together, intellectually; - she ought to have been a man’.23 On the other hand, in a sonnet published at the end of 1816, he includes her among the ‘mighty minds’ associated with Lac Leman, aligning her with the famous male writers Voltaire, Gibbon, and Rousseau.24 And when in 1817 Stael was seeking a publisher for her history of the French Revolution, Byron urged Murray from Venice to ‘close with’ her, claiming that ‘this will be her best work - & permanently historical’25 - unusual praise in a period when women writers were generally considered incapable of historical analysis. (As it turned out, Stael died before any arrangements had been completed, and Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution [Considerations sur les principaux evenements de la Revolution frangaise] was published in England by Baldwin and Cradock.) In Byron’s day, Madame de Stael was arguably the woman whose achievements offered the strongest challenge to contemporary assumptions of women’s intellectual inferiority to men. Although there is less evidence available about Stael’s direct response to Byron, it is clear that she admired his writing, but found him, at least in 1813 14, difficult to deal with. She was also given to grandiloquence: in thanking him for his tribute to her in the note to The Bride ofA by do s, she told him that it made her feel for the first time assured of fame, and that he had given her access to that realm of great reputation which for him would be ever-

21 CPW, vol. 3, p. 436. This allusion is discussed further in Chapter 2. 22 Letter of 11 January,BU , vol. 3, p. 25. 23 Entry of 30 November 1813,BU , vol. 3, p. 226. 24 CPW, vol. 4, pp. 16-17. 25 Letter of 2 April 1817, BU, vol. 5, p. 204. Introduction 9 increasing.26 But in complimenting him the following year on the ‘captivating style’ (‘style enchanteur’) ofThe Corsair, she reproaches him for his standoffishness towards her, and implies that he has something of a persecution complex: If you are making the mistake of not caring for the human race, it seems to me that it is doing all it can through its support to be reconciled with you, and destiny has not mistreated the man it has made the greatest poet of his century. Treat those who admire you with a little more kindness.27 Stael’s published comment on Byron, in her coverage of British culture in The French Revolution, is, like his on her, entirely laudatory. Just as he had aligned her with the ‘mighty minds’ of Lac Leman, she praises him as part of a new school of British poetry which includes Rogers, Moore, Campbell and Scott, and which is characterized by imagination, sensibility, and the kind of idealistic fervour which she called ‘enthusiasme’.28

There is considerable evidence in Byron’s poetry of the impact of Stael’s works, while she is known to have been powerfully moved by the part of Byron’s corpus published during her lifetime. The tribute to her in Childe Harold IV is placed where it is, not only so as to connect her with the great writers buried in Santa Croce in Florence, but to recall her own evocation of the same writers in the same place, in her most famous work,Corinne . Moreover, the well-known stanzas on the sea at the end of the canto (179-83) draw on a description of this element’s power in the same novel (bk 1, ch. 4),29 while the notable scene of the speaker in the Coliseum at midnight (sts 128 ff) owes as much to Corinne's evocation of just such a setting as it does to Byron’s own experience of Rome. As Kenneth Churchill has pointed out, Stael’s was the first novel to express a world-weary, melancholy attitude to

26 Letter of 30 November 1813, in Madame de Stael ... : choix de lettres, p. 465: ‘II me semble que pour la premiere fois je me crois certaine d’un nom d’avenir et que vous avez dispose pour moi de cet empire de reputation qui vous sera tous les jours plus sounds.’ 27 Letter of January/February 1814, ibid., p. 473: ‘Si vous avez le tort de ne pas aimer l’espece humaine, il me semble qu’elle fait ce qu’elle peut pour se raccommoder avec vous par son suffrage, et la destin6e n’a pas maltraite celui qu’elle a fait le premier poete de son siecle. Traitez ceux qui vous admirent avec un peu plus de bienveillance ... ’. 28 Considerations sur la Revolution jfrangaise [1818], presente et annote par Jacques Godechot (Paris: Tallandier, 1983), pt 5, ch. 5, p. 551. 29 The parallel was first pointed out in her notes by Isabel Hill, the translator in 1833 of the most popular nineteenth-century English edition ofCorinne. 10 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition travel, and to stress Italy’s aura of pathos - both of which characteristics we associate with an important strand of Romanticism, and particularly with Byron’s Childe Harold of several years later.30 One illuminating way of interpreting Childe Harold IV is as an extended and sometimes critical response to the much read Corinne. Stael and Byron shared more than an interest in the Italian past and its great men; they were both fascinated by the cultures and the national characteristics of the various countries of Europe. One of Stael’s early works, Literature Considered in Relation to Social Institutions (1800, revised 1802; De la litterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales), is a wide-ranging comparative examination of the relationship between literature and its geographical, social and political contexts in several countries and periods, and strives to identify the characteristic traits of different nations. Most famously, it explores the distinction between the literature of the Mediterranean countries, including ancient Greece and Rome, and that of northern Europe. This is a distinction which Stael would develop in Germany, and which would come to be identified as that between Classical and Romantic literature. Byron was sceptical about the value of Stael’s kind of general theorizing - what he thought had helped to engender the ‘bitterness of the classic and romantic war’ he alludes to in the Preface to ‘The Prophecy of Dante’ in 1819.31 Yet, like her, he was very interested in the contrasts among nations; in particular, one reason that the two writers gave detailed attention to Italy - a country to which they were both attracted - was that it offered a means of commenting on and critiquing Britain, a country which aroused ambivalent feelings in both. In addition, the cosmopolitan attitude the pair shared meant that both explored the ramifications of the human capacity to adapt to a variety of environments. This is a key feature of the ‘mobilite’ which Stael attributes to her heroine Corinne; Byron, meanwhile, specifically ascribes ‘mobility’ to Lady Adeline Amundeville inDon Juan, but also demonstrates the quality in the ‘heroes’ and the speakers of both this text andBeppo , as well as in the speaker of Childe Harold IV. Comparing the two writers in their handling of this theme clarifies important aspects of the outlook of both. There are intriguing links between Stael and Byron as well in their approaches to another issue recurrent in their works, love as experienced by each sex. As long ago as 1821, the journalist Alaric Watts pointed out that the celebrated lines from Donna Julia’s letter inDon Juan, ‘Man’s love is of his

30 See Churchill, K., Italy and English Literature 1764-1930 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 15, 25. 31 CPW, vol. 4, p. 215. Introduction 11 life a thing apart / Tis woman’s whole existence’,32 echo lines from the heroine’s lamentations in Corinne (bk 18, ch. 5) - and Byron’s annotations to Teresa Guiccioli’s copy of the novel show that he was particularly interested in this section. Both Byron’s Julia and Stael’s Corinne, too, attribute women’s greater dependence on love to the lack of other outlets for their energies in contemporary society. On the other hand, Byron himself seems to have thought that Stael’s constant analysis of the workings and effects of love, plus the high-flown rhetoric with which she often treated the theme, might foster sentimental and unrealistic expectations in female readers, and this belief enters into his complex reworking of this part of Corinne in Don Juan. Indeed Byron’s correspondence with Teresa suggests that he found their own relationship bedevilled by her habit of overdramatizing every minor development and expecting him to hold forth on love like the protagonists of Corinne. The following chapters will explore in detail these instances of the influence of Stael’s work on Byron’s. Discussion of the impact of Byron’s writings on Stael is necessarily much more limited, since there is less specific evidence of this (and of course her death in 1817 meant that there was much of his oeuvre that she never read). None the less, her first biographer, her cousin Mme Necker de Saussure, commented that Byron’s poems caused Stael inexpressible emotions, and had a revivifying effect on her ideas and creative endeavours.33 Yet one consequence of both her premature death, and the particular way she wished to celebrate British literature, was that she offered in The French Revolution a version of Byron (associated with ‘sensibility’ and ‘enthusiasme’) which he would increasingly have found inadequate: hence one facet of that change of orientation in Byron’s poetry after 1816 which has been noted by several critics, is in part a reaction against the image of him, and of his place in British literature, which Stael (more sympathetically than many commentators), had tried to fix. If Byron rewritesCorinne in Childe Harold IV, then in Don Juan he also challenges Stael’s final assertions about Britain, Byron, and the role of the writer. He does this too, through a poem which at many points addresses a specifically male audience, and which intermittently ridicules the pretensions and literary predilections o f‘ladies intellectual’. This study focuses, then, on the impact of each author’s work on the writings of the other. But it also takes cognizance of the difficulty of locating straightforward evidence for this kind of influence. Once Stael projected a

32 CPW, vol. 5, canto I, stanza 194, p. 71. 33 ‘Notice sur le caractere et les ecrits de Madame de Stael’, Oeuvresin completes de Mme la Baronne de Stael , ed. Auguste de Stael (17 vols, Paris: Treuttel and Wurtz, 1820-21), vol. 1, pp. cclxxxiv, cccxxx-cccxxxi. 12 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition drama on Richard Coeur de Lion - a drama which she did not in fact live to write; she was however asked whether her hero would be ‘un Lara’, and replied, ‘Perhaps ... but I promise you that no one in the world will suspect it’.34 Or consider Goethe’s response to Byron’s Manfred , in which he perceived the influence of his own Faust: The tragedyManfred by Byron impressed me as a wonderful, deeply moving work. This strangely brilliant poet has assimilated myFaust, and in his melancholy way has drawn the strangest nourishment from it. He has used motifs which suited his purpose in his own way, with the result that none is the same anymore, and this is precisely the reason why I cannot praise him enough.35 As well as contemporary writers’ perceptions of the complexities of literary influence, also relevant here are more recent conceptions of ‘intertextuality’ - the extent to which, as Roland Barthes puts it, all texts bear the traces of ‘other texts ... at varying levels, in more or less recognizable forms; earlier cultural texts and those of the surrounding culture’, such that ‘every text is a new texture of past citations’. As a result, ‘intertextuality ... is obviously not limited to a problem of sources or influences’, but includes ‘unconscious or automatic citations’. 36 In the cases of Mme de Stael and Lord Byron, too, we are dealing with two writers of very extensive reading, much erudition and great powers of memory, so that in each case even the number of allusions to other texts which are overt and identifiable is immense. Literary affinities between the two writers are not, then, totally explicable through the direct influence of one on the other. But a comparative study takes on a further dimension if we consider both their shared experience of the ‘surrounding culture’ which led to shared concerns in their writings, as well as the similarities of temperament between them which have been remarked on in their own period and in ours. Mme de Stael and Lord Byron lived through an unusually turbulent period of European history, full of dramatic political and social changes which generated urgent questions about human rights and freedom, about the most just and workable form of government, about the

34 Ibid., p. cclxxxiv: ‘Peut-etre ... mais je vous promets que personne au monde ne s’en doutera.’ 35 J.W. von Goethe, ‘ Manfred. A dramatic Poem by Lord Byron. London 1817’, Uberin Kunst une Alter turn, vol. 2, 1820, translated by Ellen and Ernest H. von Nardroff Goethe:in Essays on Art and Literature , ed. John Gearey, vol. 3 ofGoethe's Collected Works (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 175. 36 Entry on ‘Texte (theorie du’), inEncyclopaedia universalis (Paris, 1968), vol. 15, p. 1.015c, quoted in Claudio Guillen, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 246. Introduction 13 power and role of the remarkable individual. The two writers were passionately interested in political issues, and were sometimes placed so as to have some influence on political events, yet had to weigh up the prospects of direct political action, as against the impact they might have via their writing. In fact their personalities, affected by their personal and social backgrounds, drove them both to seek the limelight, and their activities in their personal, political and literary lives made them famous. These activities also provided them with public images which they could manipulate in their works, but which could hamper them as well. They both travelled extensively and thus gained a knowledge of other cultures and literatures which gave them great insight into their own countries, but at the expense of a difficult relationship with these homelands. A comparative study can explore the ways in which two writers of similar temperaments and experiences responded to an era which was strikingly troubled but also extraordinarily stimulating; an examination of resemblances and differences between their works will also highlight some of the distinctive qualities of each. It will show, too, that some of the salient divergences can be related to contemporary constructions of gender, attitudes which we have already seen affecting Byron’s personal reaction to Stael. The rest of this Introduction will outline more fully the notable affinities between Mme de Stael and Lord Byron, and will offer some preliminary suggestions about the implications of gender. Although of Swiss-German parentage, Mme de Stael was bom in Paris and always thought of herself as a Frenchwoman, particularly a Parisienne. But she was obliged to spend much of her life outside France, and took the opportunity to travel widely. For a few months of 1793 she was an emigree to England in the aftermath of the Revolution; then in 1802, Napoleon exiled her from Paris as a result of her political activities and her literary works - primarily her first novel, Delphine, and her father Jacques Necker’sFinal Views of Politics and Finance (Demieres vues de politique et de finance), in which Napoleon perceived her hand. The following year she set off on extensive travels through Italy and Germany, travels which would provide her with the detailed knowledge that would inform Corinne and Germany respectively. Then the imminent publication of the latter brought on, not just the pulping of its print- run, but also a further period of exile for the author: Napoleon considered its portrayal of a region he had justconquered far too favourable. Mme de Stael embarked on further protracted travels, returning to France only after the (first) fall of the Emperor in 1814. She took in Sweden, Russia, and of course Britain. Lord Byron, meanwhile, had from 1809 to 1811 taken a long journey from one side of Europe to the other and on to the near East, through countries which included Spain, Portugal, Greece, Albania and Turkey. In 1816 he felt so rejected by Regency society in the wake of the scandal over his marriage 14 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition breakdown and alleged incest, that he left Britain for Switzerland and then Italy. He never returned, spending about six years in various parts of Italy, and finally dying in April 1824 at Missalonghi, where he had been aiding the Greeks in their campaign for independence from the Turks. Both Mme de Stael and Lord Byron were disillusioned with political and social trends in their own countries: what they saw as oppressive governments, the growth of time-serving and opportunism, the hypocrisy of those who set themselves up as moral arbiters of others’ conduct (a major theme ofDelphine , and a central feature of what Byron called ‘cant’). For both, the critical attitudes towards their own societies were reinforced by the exposure to other countries resulting from their travels: Corinne and Germany both highlight some of the deficiencies of French politics, social mores and literary culture as Stael perceived them, while in Byron’sBeppo andDon Juan, aspects of British society are compared unfavourably with the societies of other countries. Both Stael and Byron had an unusually cosmopolitan outlook on the state of Europe for a time when years of revolution and war were fostering intolerance and jingoism. According to Captain Medwin, Byron told him that he owed to his wide-ranging journeys the fact that his views extended ‘to the good of mankind in general - of the world at large’, and went on to speculate: Perhaps the prostrate situation of Portugal and Spain - the tyranny of the Turks in Greece - the oppressions of the Austrian Government at Venice - the mental debasement of the Papal States, (not to mention Ireland,) - tended to inspire me with a love of liberty. No Italian could have rejoiced more than I, to have seen a Constitution established on this side the Alps. I felt for Romagna as if she had been my own country, and would have risked my life and fortune for her, as I may yet for the Greeks. I am become a citizen of the world.37 38 39 Louise de Cleron argued in her biography of Byron that his talent benefited from his distance from the artificial atmosphere of Regency society, as well as from the adventurous life as an artist and a ‘grand seigneur’ he led abroad.38 39 Stael, meanwhile, had written in the diary of her Italian travels, ‘there is no nationality which is not a limitation’, such that ‘you need several to be a complete man [sic]9}9 Among the most favourably presented figures in her

37 Medwin, Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 229. 38 Cleron, Les dernieres annees de Lord Byron, pp. 19-20. 39 Les carnets de voyage de Madame de Stael: Contributions a la genese de ses oeuvres, ed. Simone Balaye (Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1971), p. 162: ‘II n’y a pas de nationality qui ne soit une borne ... il en faut plusieurs pour etre un homme complet.’ Introduction 15 works are those she portrays as possessing characteristics of more than one nationality, such as Goethe, Germanyin , and Henri de Lebensei inDelphine - not to mention the half-English, half-Italian heroine of Corinne. George Brandes, who began hisMain Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature with a volume on what he called ‘The Emigrant Literature’ of the early nineteenth century, claimed that Stael’s experience as a political refugee meant that she ‘saw through the prejudices by which she was surrounded’, and that ‘her ever- active, enquiring mind’ had the chance ‘of comparing the spirits and the ideals of one people with those of another’.40 Yet Stael, despite her Swiss and German ancestry, her admiration for German and Italian culture, and her fervour for the political system of Britain, never ceased to consider herself a Frenchwoman, and suffered much anguish at being forced to spend many years away from France. Hence, although she called the post-1688 British constitution the ‘finest monument of justice and moral grandeur which exists among Europeans’, Britain was important to her primarily as ‘the France of the future’, a France for whose present she felt ‘an anguished, angry, wounded love, which sometimes need[ed] caustic expression’.41 Her works are directed mainly at her compatriots - as she put it in the preface to Delphine, ‘the France of silence and enlightenment’.42 And when the European allies’ response to their final victory over Napoleon was to give France what she saw as an oppressive and reactionary regime, she was very disillusioned. Indeed, a notable similarity between Stael and Byron in their reaction to the post-Waterloo new world order was the way they both attributed the worst of the allies’ autocratic and regressive policies to the British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh. For all his excoriation of figures like Castlereagh and his claims of identification with Romagna, however, Byron never ceased to engage with the politics, society and literature of the ‘tight little island’: the most densely detailed portrayal of any social milieu in his works is the evocation of the

40 Brandes, G., Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (6 vols, London: William Heinemann, 1901-05), vol. 1, p. 104. As well as Stael, Brandes includes in ‘Emigrant Literature’ Chateaubriand, Senancour, Constant, Barante and Nodier, but not Byron. 41 Considerations sur la Revolution Jrangaise, pt 1, ch. 1, p. 69: ‘plus beau monument de justice et de grandeur morale existant parmi les Europeens’, ‘la France future’; Mme Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. cxci: ‘un amour souffrant, irrite, blesse, qui a parfois besoin de l’expression acerbe’. 42 Germaine de Stael, Delphine [1802], translated with an introduction by Avriel H. Goldberger (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), p. 8: ‘la France silencieuse mais eclairee’, vol. 1, p. 90 of edition critique par Simone Balaye et Lucia Omacini (2 vols, Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1987). All translations will be from the Goldberger translation; the French will be quoted from the Balaye/Omacini edition, with the page references to this text immediately following the quotations. 16 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition Regency upper crust he had known in his ‘Years of Fame’, in the ‘English Cantos’ of Don Juan. After his self-exile, too, he continued to write for a British audience, and cared a great deal about the kind of impact he and his works had in Britain. Recent critics have stressed the importance Byron attaches to his influence on British readers, as well as illustrating the means he uses to exert such an influence, especially Donin Juan.43 Meanwhile, the phrase ‘citizen of the world’, which Medwin quotes Byron as using to illustrate the breadth of his knowledge and sympathies, is one he had employed earlier in the epigraph to the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, but to convey somewhat different implications. For Byron’s citation from L.C. Fougeret de Monbron’s 1753 book, The Cosmopolitan, or the Citizen of the World {Le Cosmopolite, ou le Citoyen du Monde), suggests that the ultimate value of extensive foreign travels may be to reconcile one with the deficiencies of one’s own country, after experiencing worse elsewhere: The universe is a kind of book, in which you have read only the first page when you have seen only your own country. I have leafed through quite a large number of them, and have found them all equally bad. This study has not been fruitless to me. I used to hate my homeland. All the impertinences of the various people I have lived among have reconciled me to it. If that were the only benefit I had gained from my travels, I would regret neither the expense nor the fatigue.44 Both Mme de Stael and Lord Byron can therefore be seen as sharing what was for the period an unusual mixture of nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

43 See Jerome J. McGann’s several works on Byron, especially his ‘Lord Byron’s Twin Opposites of Truth’, in his Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 38-64. See also Peter J. Manning,Byron and his Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 220 ff; Peter W. Graham,Don Juan and Regency England (Charlotteville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990),passim ; and Donald H. Reiman, ‘Byron and the Uses of Refamiliarization’ and Cheryl Fallon Guiliano, ‘Marginal Discourse: The Authority of Gossip in Beppo\ both in Rereading Byron: Essays Selected from Hofstra University’s Byron Bicentennial Conference, eds Alice Levine and Robert N. Keane (New York and London: Garland, 1993), pp. 101-17 and 151-63. 44 Translated from CPW, vol. 2, p. [3]: ‘L’univers est une espece de livre, dont on n’a lu que la premiere page quand on n’a vu que son pays. J’en ai feuillete un assez grand nombre, que j’ai trouve egalement mauvaises. Cet examen ne m’a point ete infructueux. Je haissais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinences des peuples divers, parmi lesquels j’ai vecu, m’ont reconcilie avec elle. Quand je n’aurais tire d’autre benefice de mes voyages que celui-la, je n’en regretterais ni les frais ni les fatigues.’ I am indebted here to Frederick Garber’s discussion of the epigraph in his Self Text, and Romantic Irony: The Example of Byron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 1 ff. Introduction 17 They were genuinely receptive to the new perspectives offered by their experience of a variety of countries, but their investment in cultures other than their own had much to do with the insights these could offer into the current state and future prospects of the lands which held their primary loyalties. In both cases, moreover, this emotional commitment, underpinned by extensive knowledge, could only fuel the ambition of these self-consciously remarkable individuals to make their mark. Stael had been in the public eye since childhood, when she had met the philosophes who patronized the salon of her mother Suzanne Necker during the 1770s and 1780s, while Byron became a celebrity at the age of 24, with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. The affinities of temperament between the two in their responses to public attention have been noted by modem commentators. Stael’s biographer Ghislain de Diesbach remarks that the pair both felt that they dominated the crowds of their admirers and occupied heights where superior creatures alone might recognize, understand and esteem each other, even when at odds.45 In a rather unsympathetic article, Frederick S. Frank discusses their self-absorption, and also how they had both ordered their careers into ‘a public spectacle of passionate pilgrimages and defiant poses’.46 But to judge from Lady Blessington’s recollections, contemporaries also noticed similarities between the two, and Byron was to some extent aware of these himself. He recalled to Lady Blessington that in London society Mme de Stael ‘declaimed to you instead of conversing with you ... never pausing except to take breath’ - but this complaint only amused his hearers, since they had observed the same tendency in himself. He claimed too that Stael’s accounts of Napoleon’s persecutions of her were exaggerated, and reflected merely a habit, common among talented people, of convincing both themselves and others that they are hated and persecuted, in order to prove their own importance. Again Lady Blessington could not suppress a smile, - but on this occasion, Byron recognized that she thought he shared this characteristic.47 In their works, both writers created protagonists whose temperaments, talents and experiences elevate them beyond the sphere of ordinary mortals - figures such as Stael’s Delphine and Corinne, and Byron’s famous heroes, Childe Harold, the Giaour, Selim, Conrad/Lara and Manfred. In each case, readers identified the characters with the author, and, while such interpretations

45 Madame de Stael (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1983), p. 499. 46 Frank, F.S., ‘The Demon and the Thunderstorm: Byron and Madame de Stael’,Revue de litterature comparee, 43 (1969), 320-43. 47 Blessington, M., Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron [1834], ed. with an introduction and notes by Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 22 ff. 18 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition were often simplistic, both writers did use their protagonists as projections of aspects of themselves, and learnt to exploit readers’ tendency to conflate the two. Although Stael said, of her most celebrated heroine, that she was not Corinne, she added that she would be pleased to become her,48 and even had herself painted in the role; as Peter J. Manning and Jerome J. McGann in particular have shown, Byron’s texts present a complex variety of self-images directed at a public only too willing to identify Byron with his heroes. A major function shared by some of both writers’ protagonists is to provide focal points for their exploration of the political condition of Europe. In France, Stael’s Delphine becomes caught up in the dangerously polarized world of the Revolutionary years, and is forced to make choices which have political implications; Corinne uses her many artistic talents, notably that for verbal improvisation, to strive to inspire the Italians of the 1790s to seek independence from foreign control. Childe Harold’s travels make him confront in particular the carnage and the heroism involved in the Peninsular War and the Battle of Waterloo, the subjugated state of Greece, and the condition of Italy; likeCorinne, the fourth canto of the Pilgrimage scans the rich history of Italy, and speculates on its prospects for freedom from what is by 1818 Austrian hegemony. In the works of both writers, however, there is sometimes a tension between a tendency to celebrate, even glamorize, the qualities of remarkable individuals, and the political ideals being endorsed. Mme de Stael by no means lamented the Revolution’s attempts to end the political and social injustices of the ancien regime, and came to support a system offering representative government; when what eventuated was the autocratic and imperialist regime of Napoleon, she became one of its major opponents. But in her works, hope for political change is generally invested in the endeavours of remarkable individuals, who are themselves often inspired by the remarkable individuals of the past. On the other hand, by the time she wroteThe French Revolution, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, Stael had gained a renewed sense of the importance of representative government, and especially of the power of public opinion. Byron’s own political views were more changeable than Stael’s, and he was more sceptical than she was about the political virtues of both the ordinary people and their likely leaders. In 1821, he called democracy the worst of all governments because it was ‘an Aristocracy of Blackguards’,49 but both his Eastern tales and his historical dramas show how charismatic political leaders

48 Madelyn Gutwirth,Madame de Stael, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 161. 49 Journal entry for 1 May 1821,BLJ, vol. 8, p. 107. Introduction 19 can be morally compromised, can even share the faults of their enemies. In Don Juan, Byron demonstrates the likely futility of constantly pinning hopes for political change on heroes: like Stael, but perhaps more pessimistically, he sees that ‘heroes’ reflect the public opinion, often fickle and ill-judging, which creates them. The ambivalent status of the remarkable individual for both Stael and Byron comes into focus in their responses to the most directly influential individual of their day, Napoleon Bonaparte. Stael was of course one of his most prominent antagonists, and much of The French Revolution is taken up with an analysis of his accruing power into his own hands, and what she saw as his fostering of a public desire for military conquest at the expense of the passion for freedom awakened by the Revolution. She also describes how political life was debased by his appealing to people’s most self-interested motives. She opposed his wars of conquest, too, not just because of the carnage they involved, but also because she believed he was out to destroy the individuality of European nations, by imposing on them a Gallic hegemony which was cultural as well as political. Yet as a fervent admirer of his in the late 1790s, she had called him in an article ‘the intrepid warrior, the most reflective thinker, the most extraordinary genius’ in history,50 and was always overwhelmed in his presence, sometimes being reduced to (uncharacteristic) silence. When she turned against him, she was also capable of enjoying in some measure this protracted opposition, once claiming that ‘there is something like a physical pleasure ... in resistance to an unjust power’,51 as if a part of her relished the sense of struggling with an enemy worthy of her own talents. Byron’s response to Napoleon was equally ambiguous. He expressed often in his poetry, letters and journals his disillusionment with the figure who had had the chance to be the champion of ‘man’s awakened rights’, but who had eventually become almost a clone of other European monarchs, herding with ‘vulgar kings and parasites’52 - as Byron described him in a late poem. But Byron’s rejection of Napoleon as a hero was reluctant, and his disillusionment all the more powerful because of the emotional investment he had had in the man. As a Harrow schoolboy of 15, he had defended his bust of Napoleon against the other boys, and later even had his travelling carriage modelled on

50 ‘Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Revolution et les principes qui doivent fonder la Republique en France’ (1798-99), quoted in Paul Gautier,Madame de Stael et Napoleon, 2eme Edition (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1903), pp. 11-12: Me guerrier intrepide, le penseur le plus reflechi; le genie le plus extraordinaire’. 51 Mme Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. cccvi: ‘il y a conune une jouissance physique ... dans la resistance a un pouvoir injuste’. 52 ‘The Age of Bronze’ [1823], in CPW, vol. 7, pp. 1-25,11. 139-40. 20 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition Napoleon’s. He also claimed to share with Napoleon a contemptuous attitude towards humanity in general - noting in his journal of 1814 his friend John Cam Hobhouse’s belief that Napoleon lackedbonhomie , he remarks, ‘how should he, who knows mankind well, do other than despise and abhor them?’53 As late asChilde Harold III , written in 1816, he identifies as one cause of Napoleon’s fall that Ambition steel’d thee on too far to show That just habitual scorn, which would contemn Men and their thoughts; ’twas wise to feel, not so To wear it ever on thy lip and brow54 That is, it was not wrong for him to be misanthropic - only bad tactics to show it. Contemporary reviewers sometimes accused Byron of sympathizing, and even identifying, with Napoleon. It is notable too that, after his mother-in law’s death early in 1822 gave him the right to style himself ‘Noel Byron’, he always signed his letters this way - or just with ‘NB’, the initials he had come to share with Napoleon.55 Mme de Stael and Lord Byron were both, none the less, sometimes in a position to aspire to political power of their own. Or rather, they shared a tantalizing closeness to, yet distance from, political power. With her father as Louis XVI’s Minister of Finance and her mother a leadingsalon hostess, Stael hoped to exert an influence on France’s political future: she set up salona of her own after her marriage in 1786. More politically orientated than Suzanne Necker’s, she used it to lead discussions with people of different political persuasions, and for a long time in the 1790s tried to promote the careers of her politically-orientated lovers, Louis de Narbonne-Lara and then Benjamin Constant. But several factors served to stymie these efforts. To begin with, she was not considered authentically French by everyone, and her Protestant background also put her outside the French mainstream. The advent of the Terror, followed a few years later by the rise of Napoleon, marginalized and then destroyed the influence of the salons. Most powerful, however, was the growing pervasiveness of an ideology of gender roles which relegated women to the private sphere of domesticity and motherhood. In any case, even when conditions were more propitious for Stael to exert political influence, as a woman she could do so only indirectly, mainly through her role ofsalon hostess to important men - she could hold no political office under any of the many forms of government France experienced during her lifetime.

53 Entry for 18 February,BLJ , vol. 3, p. 244. 54 CPW, vol. 2, p. 91, stanza 40. 55 See his letter to Douglas Kinnaird, 17 February 1822,BU , vol. 9, pp. 105-6 and note. Introduction 21 Byron, meanwhile, had a seat in the House of Lords, and used it, briefly, to oppose the death penalty for the ‘Luddite’ frame-breakers of Nottingham, and to support Catholic Emancipation in Ireland. Abroad, he was of course involved in independence movements in Italy and Greece. But Byron’s British career was hampered by the fact that his party, the Whigs, were out of power all his lifetime, and, just as Stael found avenues for political influence increasingly closed off to her, Byron experienced a sense of belatedness, a sense that he had missed the great days of British politics.56 In any case, he was not part of the inner circle in a political sense: coming from an impoverished family of dubious reputation, he owed his prominence in Regency society to his success as a poet. Furthermore, even in his more extended and direct political activities in Italy and Greece, he was often disillusioned by the calibre of those he was obliged to work with. A major consequence of the troubled relationship the two authors had with their own societies, plus their ruminations on the phenomenon of the powerful individual, was that it was ultimately as writers that both Stael and Byron sought to make a public impact. This is not to suggest that they had recourse to writing simply as a second-best option when more direct political agency became difficult to achieve. Both came to believe in the power of the writer to have a beneficial social and political influence. Mme de Stael was particularly eloquent on this in Literature and in Germany, highlighting the power of literary works — to probe the complexities of the human heart and mind, to analyse societies and their histories, to foster virtue and spirituality, to discourage selfishness and to promote political ideals, especially a passion for liberty. If a writer’s words are fired with elevated ideas and a generous indignation, she claimed, then in confrontation with tyranny, ‘the art of writing would also be a weapon’.57 Germany also celebrates the intellectual life, because, in Stael’s view, it unites thinkers of different countries and has them work for the benefit of the human race, as a kind of chosen people. Meanwhile Corinne aims to arouse political fervour for independence among modem Italians, by evoking great Italian writers of the past, such as Torquato Tasso, Dante, and Petrarch (presented here as a poet of politics rather than of love). Similarly Byron, in poems like ‘The Prophecy of Dante’ and ‘The Lament of Tasso’, turns to literary heroes as inspirational exemplars. Most importantly, Don Juan, the major work of his final years, shows a newly acute understanding of the power of words in political, social and military life, a

56 See his evocation of Parliament in the 1790s (his own childhood) in Don Juan, canto XII, stanzas 82-4,CPW, vol. 5, pp. 519-20. 57 De la litterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales [1800, revised 1802]. Edition critique par Paul van Tieghem (2 vols, Geneve: Librairie Droz; Paris: M.J. Minard, 1959), vol. 1, p. 35: ‘Part d’ecrire seroit aussi une arme’. 22 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition power to mislead, delude or corrupt - but recognizes, too, that a writer’s words might undo some of the damage by exposing these kinds of ‘cant’. Stael’s works likewise reveal an awareness of the potential impact of different sorts of language, not only celebrating the influence of great writers, but also targeting the jargon of Revolutionary polemics and the verbal style of Napoleon. It is significant that for both writers, Castlereagh’s baneful political influence is signalled by the language of his parliamentary speeches. For all the affinities between Mme de Stael and Lord Byron as both personalities and writers, they were inevitably affected by contemporary conceptions of gender roles, and these conceptions inflect their handling of the themes and issues I have been outlining. As detailed studies by Madelyn Gutwirth and Charlotte Hogsett58 have shown, Stael was very much influenced by her idolized father Jacques Necker’s disapproval of literary women, and Necker’s views were writ large in her milieu: even the socially prominent salon women seldom wrote for publication. In a situation, too, where the belief that women should confine themselves to the private sphere was becoming ever more pervasive, Stael actually expressed some support for such a view - partly because of her fervent admiration for the British social and political system, which in her reading of it did involve a strict demarcation between the public role of men and the private domain of women. But Stael was also very conscious of how women, if afforded no outlets for their thoughts and feelings but marriage and motherhood, could be left frustrated and miserable if their marriages failed. Moreover, if love was supposed to be a woman’s ‘whole existence’, then the sexual double standard meant that an extramarital affair would leave her disgraced and unhappy, while the man, with both sexual and career options still available to him, could abandon her, indifferent and unscathed. As suggested earlier, there is evidence that Byron felt that Stael’s novels encouraged in women an exaggerated and high-flown perspective on relations with the opposite sex. Lady Blessington reports Byron’s telling her that he had challenged the implications of Corinne to its author’s face. In the novel, the heroine is unable to survive being abandoned by her beloved; Byron (self confessedly baiting Stael), declared that the book would inculcate in women readers the dangerous belief that ‘genius, talents, and accomplishments, as Corinne was represented to possess, could not preserve a woman from becoming a victim to an unrequited passion, and that reason, absence, and

58 Gutwirth’s Madame de Stael Novelist , and Charlotte Hogsett’s The Literary Existence of Germaine de Stael (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). Introduction 23 female pride were unavailing’.59 Yet there are passages Don in Juan which register Byron’s awareness of the narrow limits of most women’s lives; like the poem sent to Murray with which I began,Don Juan is a work showing sympathy for women, but often addressing a knowing male audience. Another aspect of contemporary ideologies of gender emerges from looking at Stael’s heroines vis-a-vis Byron’s heroes. Much more than Harold, the heroes of the Eastern tales, and Manfred, her Delphine and Corinne are victims of forces beyond their control. The epigraph to Delphine reads, ‘A man must know how to defy public opinion, a woman must submit’,60 and the experiences of the heroine serve to demonstrate this: both the vagaries of Delphine’s emotional life and her limited interventions in the political sphere make her susceptible to misunderstanding and calumny. Corinne, meanwhile, suffers for years in an English milieu where, for all Stael’s championing of British life in other texts, her talents are stifled and treated with suspicion, and when she is abandoned by the man she loves, it is because he prefers a woman who apparently incarnates the domestic feminine ideal. Byron’s heroes, on the other hand, are generally figures of agency; rather than victims of others, they are driven to guilt and despair largely (if not entirely) by their own conduct. My first chapter will examine how Mme de Stael and Lord Byron’s works handle gender issues in the political, social and ideological contexts of their time, and will go on to discuss their conceptualizations of love and sexual desire. The following chapter considers the heroines of Stael’s novels and their literary successors, Byron’s famous heroes, and argues that each writer eventually interrogates the power and efficacy of the remarkable individual and reveals increasing interest in the influence of public opinion. The figure of Napoleon is here studied as a real-life focus for both writers’ grappling with the phenomenon of the remarkable individual - especially the military conqueror - while their responses to the French Revolution are outlined, so as to show their sense of the interplay of popular forces and individual leaders. I then turn in Chapter 3 to the writers’ treatment of the two European countries on which both wrote extensively - Italy and Britain - concentrating on Byron’s dialogue with Stael’s novel Corinne in his Childe Harold IV and his critique, in Don Juan, of her representation of Britain. This subject also involves an investigation of Stael and Byron’s concern with ‘mobility’. The last chapter attempts to identify the similarities and differences between the overall world views of the two writers, particularly with reference to their attitudes to, and handling of, irony and ridicule; it ends by considering their engagement with

59 Blessington, Lady Blessington's Conversations of Lord Byron , p. 26. 60 Delphine, title-page: ‘Un homme doit savoir braver l’opinion, une femme s’y soumettre’. 24 Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Bom for Opposition the power of language itself for good and ill, and by extension, with the role of writers themselves. My subtitle, ‘Bom for Opposition’, which is one of the ways the speaker characterizes himselfDon in Juan (can. XV, st. 22), points both to the affinity and the difference between Byron and Mme de Stael. That is, both found themselves constantly opposed to the political and social trends prevailing in their own countries, as well as to some nations’ efforts to assert hegemony over others, and their writings were to some extent energized by this sense of antagonism; in responding to each other’s personalities and works, none the less, they were sometimes in ‘opposition’ to one another. To embark on a comparative study such as this, is to participate in a field in which Madame de Stael was a notable pioneer. HerLiterature (1800) and Germany (1810; published 1813), which strove to identify the distinctive characteristics of the literature of different countries and to relate these to their political and social systems, were ambitious and wide-ranging works in an area which later in the nineteenth century would become known as comparative literature; the treatment of Italian and British literature in her novelCorinne (1807) makes this text a contribution to the field as well. Stael’s works express the sensibility which inflected the early days of such studies, a sensibility bom out of a Europe striving to emerge from years of war and political and social turmoil, where countries were gaining a renewed sense of their history, their distinctive cultural traditions, and their claims to nationhood, but where people were also coming to recognize the value of knowing and understanding cultures different from their own. As the first holder of a Chair in Comparative Literature in France (established in 1897 in Lyons), the felicitously named Joseph Texte, observed near the end of the nineteenth century, Romantic literary criticism like Stael’s had articulated this dual impulse: on the one hand has given rise to a movement of each people towards their origins, an awakening of the collective consciousness, a concentration of their sparse or scattered resources on the creation of truly autochtonic works. ... on the other hand, by a contrast to be expected, a lowering of frontiers, a freer communication between neighboring peoples, a more complete knowledge of foreign works.61

61 ‘L’histoire comparee des litteratures’, in his Etudes de litterature europeenne (Paris: Colin, 1898), pp. 1-24, at p. 12, quoted in Guillen, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, p. 28. For a succinct account of the history of comparative literature as a discipline, see the first three chapters of Susan Bassnett’sComparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). Introduction 25 The field of comparative literature has obviously changed a great deal since these words were written. Studies are now seldom as ambitious as were Stall’s efforts in Literature, to encompass both the classical writings of Greece and Rome and the development of modem literature in several European countries. This one is no exception, focusing squarely on my two writers and their works. I hope, none the less, to have done some groundwork on which subsequent studies of the links between French and British Romanticism might be built. There is also, I believe, further scope for relating both Stael and Byron to trends in German Romanticism. Comparative literary study has also expanded into literatures barely known in die early nineteenth century - in African, Asian, South American and Antipodean countries, and among colonized peoples all over the world. In a sense, we now know both more, and less, than Madame de Stael. Always rather amorphous, the discipline has become more so too, through its efforts to take account of, or define itself against, recent critical developments such as poststructuralism, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, feminism, new historicism and cultural studies. A good sense of the contested state of comparative literature in the 1990s can be gauged from the very varied approaches evident in the contributions to the 1995 collection, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. It is notable, however, that one contributor, discussing the relationship between comparative literature and feminism, points to the neglect, in the former field, of ‘earlier feminist writers who explicitly located themselves at the intersection of literary traditions’ - and adduces as one notable instance, Madame de Stael herself. 2 I hope that, by highlighting the literary links between France’s leading female Romantic writer and a central male figure of British Romanticism, the present study will help to rectify this neglect.

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