The Press. — London, England, 1853-08-13 00:00:00

AUGUST 13, 1853 proached by any of her own sex. and, had her judgment equalled her imagination, she would have been rarely surpassed by the other ; in her own age she had few rivals of either sex. Though born during the prevalence of democratic opinions, and warmly attached to a father who, by education aunt inclination. professed them, but living in Paris. surrounded by a brilliant aristocracy, and captivated by the distinction of historic names and the splendour of noble birth, she had all her life an inclination to over-estimate the advantages she did not herself possess. Warmly attached in her youth to two of the most subtle and unsteady of the wits and poli ticians of her day—the Conde Louis de Nar bonne, anti the I'rineo de Talleyrand—her political principles were unsettled and incon sistent. She loved a monarchy. and she knew that without the support of an aristocracy it must either degenerate into a despotism or a republic ; but she disliked the Royal Family of France, by whom she had been slightingly treated, and she admired the democratic insti tutions which had called forth the powers of those orators whose eloquence had fixed her youthful fancy. Her first publication was the " Letters on Rousseau." It was soon followed by an essay on " The Influence of the Passions." Both these works possess passages of great eloquence and power, but they exhibit no profound knowledge of human nature—both were written under the corrupting influence of revolutionary opinions in morals and religion. and both inculcate the baleful doctrine that the dictates of the passions should be our only guide. Her own feelings were vehement. anti site had never learnt the duty of self-con trol : neither the philosophy of her father, nor the formal Calvinism of her mother, was calcu lated to instil religious principles on her ardent and susceptible nature; and during the whole of her life she acknowledged no moral restraint, except such as her kindly nature and her generous heart imposed upon her. Her polities' essays are numerous, and none of them without eloquence and power. Her " Considerations star la Revolution Francaise," though unfinished, is decidedly the best of these. It was a posthumous work, and the oc• cupation of her last years : it contains the cream of her experience, the result of a life of keen observation passed amongst the most sagacious and least scrupulous of her con temporaries. We are unable to draw from it. how ever, any practical or comprehensible scheme of government. Mankind will not be ruled by eloquent maxims and a series of logical and witty pamphlets. It is an error to suppose that man will discover his true interest anti pursue it ; and Mine. tie Stael, above all per sons, should have made large allowances for the influence of vanity and passion. She ad mires the British constitution ( which Miss Norris, by the way, intOrms us was at that time very little worth her notice), but in her at tempts to reproduce it for France she loses sight of all that tends to conciliate its con flicting elements, to secure the assistance of all classes of citizens in its support, anti to endow it with strength and vitality. Her best work is, perhaps, her " 4 iermany." In it she exhibits a more various and exten sive knowledge than in any of her other per formances, a sounder criticism, a happier style, a more playful fancy. and a deeper ap preciation of the great oldects of our creation. She was very imperfectly acquainted, we be lieve. with the German language, and hut slightly with its literature, through the medium of translations ; of its institutions and cus toms she could have had but a superficial knowledge : and in all these particulars the assistance of M. Schlegel might have been of service; but we think Miss Norris is at unnecessary pains to assure us that his help did not extend beyond. Persons who are familiar with his own works will not suspect him of having inspired those of Mine. de Stael. Her Corinne, the work by which she is now best known, is far less powerful than many of her other performances. The characters of the English hero and the two rivals tin• his love are unnatural : but they are worse—they are inconsistent and uninteresting ; the mo lives attributed to them are too absurd to have lever seriously influenced human beings, and THE PRESS. the manner iu which they act could not oven promote those irrational objects. The story is wild and improbable, and at the same time dull and uninteresting. The plot. absurd as it is. is evolved with no skill. and the minor cha racters are ill drawn and commonplace. The mixture of topog►aphical and anti►qua►ian lec tures with a romance on the passions is the least happy conception that ever entered the head of a Woillitll of genius. Male. de stacl, with a highly poetic imagination, was no poet : and the impromptu recitations of Corinne are writ ten in a style fit only fur a French version of the poems of Ossian : these defects, never theless, are redeemed with passages of une qualled eloquence, descripti (((( s of vast power, and the most refined and delic►►te observations on life and 111d1111C114. De!Pane is the work of the authoress which, upon the whole, we are inclined to pre fer to every other. It was written before Corinne, before she had travelled much, and before reflection and experience had sobered down the exuberances of a wild imagination. It sins against probability, we might almost say against possibility : it has faults against 1 good taste, good sense, gotal principle, and sound religion ; but it has a charm that no reader of sensibility can resist, a fascination that carries away the judgment captive and disarms criticism. The charm is not in the interest of the story, nor in the ingenuity of the separate incidents : it consists in the truth and force with which some of the characters are delineated, the eloquence of the intensest egotism, and the minuteness of its self-inves tigation. The defects of the story never for a moment diminish our interest. in the principal character, the generosity aunt selfdevotion of Pelphine enchant us, her good nature delights us. we are are iu love with her very defects, and we can only quarrel with her bad taste in bestowing such ardent affection on so poor a creature its the melodrionatic /donee. The " finesse with which the diameter of Mine. de Vernon is drawn exhibits the care ful observation with which it. was taken from the life : so perfect is the delineation that. we quite understand and almost share the irra tional affect . of the generous Delphine for her cold-hearted aunt worldly but most agreeable friend. We are ourselves under the spell of her fascinating and attractive indolence, and we sympathise in the grief of the heroine for her loss. It is said that this unamiable character was studied from the selfish Talley rand, during the period of the liaison between him and the authoress. The volatile libertine it is supposed had tired of the society of his iteColliplished but exacting mistress, and that he had manifested no tenderness towards her feelings or her vanity in the method by which he broke the chain. When helphine appeared he instantly recognised his own resemblance. We know not whether he was flattered or offended. lie delivered himself with the oracular brevity to which he was accustomed, but with more than his usual felicity. When asked if he had read the popular work in which it was believed that the authoress had sketched her own portrait in Delphine, as well as his in Mine. de Vernon, he replied he had not. "I do not like .fictinn," he added. "On in'', ryn'elle aeons a dernse tows les &nix en frinntes." Ilf Alitograph Letters ',armed by Tl►ou►os Moore to 31r. James Power. Lon- don: Puttick and Simpson. WE notieed these letters at the date of their side. and we return to the subject convinced. with the Quarterly, that here we have a supplementary volume to the already pro lix eorrespondence of Tom Moore. the junction between Lord John Russell as editor, and Moore as letter-writer, proved un fortunate, like all " eoalitions" between oppo site natures. A prosier work on a sparkling theme we never met than the so-called "life" of the witty Whig poet, and, suspecting that our readers have had more than enough of Moores letters, we will be brief in our extracts from those notes " unpublished" by Lord John Russell _ An author's letters to his publisher partake of less reserve than him writing to other parties, and the most interesting parts of this cata- 353 logue are the frank revelations of idooree difficulties. He thus describes, in 1827, the limited state of his wardrobe:— I am going to inflict upon you a tailoring commission for n►e. My former poor snip is a bankrupt (as I have learned by a demand upon me from his assignees fur pay ment 1. and I st accordingly proceed to break another. My only evening coat not being u► a state to stand a dinner by daylight. I must have ono ready fur toe when I vogue up. and what I want you to do i 4, to send the enclosed to Stager. in Pall Mall, and to take the tumble of calling then to know Mau him whether he can, without taking my measure. make a coat sufficiently well upon this pattern for me. He is Wiudiington Irvings tailor, and the only o►te I know anything of beyond my own..te. A coat that you'd •' not stand a dinner by daylight inust. we suppose, have been a gar ment of that fahliiim alluded to in Campbell's Exile of I•;rin :--'' •" I'he d.•w on his thin mho. w►u homy ►tnd chill." We find various allusions to " Barnes and the Times" in these notes. In one place he says:— Barnes. I see. hits not taken the hint about the pnff. li u►ust pluck up ►warragr gh to ask again. My neigh bour. colonel Napier, who hats gone to town, has under taken to make Jones .to his best in sonic design to which I can write. The ~ Colonel Napier " here mentioned is the eminent military historian. Some political stroke was, of course, being played in the letter spoken oaf:-- I want you for Napier to direet the ettelotwil blank letter to the editor of the (flu newmpaper, and have it pot in the IK►x at the °filee as soon as possible. While residing in France, on aceount of his Bermuda dittieultica, his friends endeavoured to obtain for him some lucrative literary em ployment, by connecting him with the editorial depniiments of the Rdinburfilt lieriew and the Time*. He writes to Power. in INV : This would be, I lerstaitel. between *oven and eight hundred a year to toe, mud would not take, I should think, more than a tlt's labour ont of every q u arter. • • • I have had also, wit h in these three clays, through Brougham, a propoMil wind* (though I cannot accept of it) flatters me exceedingly. It is that I *heath! replace the present powerfid editor of the Times (who is HO in writing the leading article for that paper. It was proposed to pay ins. at the lute of twelve hundred It year, ite. IVhat were the exact terms of his subsequent agreement with the 7'intes does not transpire ; but he writes, in Is'27 I trust I shall be able to get through this next liar, trithnnt flying anything mnre far the l'imrp, This, hotiimen mar. selves. I want to devote myaelf entirely to our Miscellany in! my Life of Byron. We are about to rut down our establishment to one woman own ant, whirl, will make a difference, I think, adequate to • • • in our wipe:mem —not so marl, from the aettial saving or what a servant I . IISIS, as from the impossibility of emnpany•krepiny which it will bring with it. Nothing, undoubtedly, was so honourable to Moore as the independence with which he toiled for his bread. Even with nll his in dustry and literary sureemm, his means were never adequate to his modenite expenditure. In this respeet. he resembled Southey, who had not twenty pounds to spare at n lime when Sir Hobert. Peel offered him a baronetcy. Even so late as Is:12, how strained M o ore was for a five•pound note, the following note to Power testifies : 1.. Union Club. Will you do nie a favour'? My yearly suhseription to my dub (where I live at least for AO per vent. cheaper and hiiter) is doe lo•day. It will hi a great loss to me to Ise excluded. Pray have the kindness to send mot per boarer, as I aru►not leave this at ',resent myself, M., for which you shall have t h e selection of cue or N et, if you wish, out of six songs which I shall bring y o u in the course of tmmorrow. fray strain a point for me this time. It has been rumoured in literary circles that Moore's countryman, " rather Prout," is pre paring a publication on the lift. and character of Moore. In the hope that the rumour may be true, we will defer till the subject is by this means fairly before us our own views of the character of Moore, and the peculiar qualities 41 his mind. But we cannot conclude this notice of the catalogue of " Power's Moore's Letters " with out expressing a regret at seeing this con fidential correspondence set up for sale in an auctioneer's room. As autographs they sold at an inconsiderable sum, and allusions, often the reverse of flattering, to various living parties abound in them. The letters of one actor written in confidence to a late editor of an evening contemporary were also catalogued for sale, and appear here in print, though much calculated to annoy. There can he but one opinion on so scandalous a breach of confi dence.