e reminds us by turns of Chateaubriand's
Rene and Rousseau's Bomston, both of whom Madame de Stael of course
knew; of Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, with whom she was very probably
acquainted; but most of no special, even bookish, progenitor, but of a
combination of theoretic deductions from supposed properties of man in
general and Englishman in particular. Of Englishmen in particular Madame
de Stael knew little more than a residence (chiefly in _emigre_ society)
for a short time in England, and occasional meetings elsewhere, could
teach her. Of men in general her experience had been a little
unfortunate. Her father had probity, financial skill, and, I suppose, a
certain amount of talent in other directions; but while he must have had
some domestic virtues he was a wooden pedant. Her husband hardly counted
for more in her life than her _maitre d'hotel_, and though there seems
to have been no particular harm in him, had no special talents and no
special virtues. Her first regular lover, Narbonne, was a handsome,
dignified, heartless _roue_ of the old _regime_. Her second, Benjamin
Constant, was a man of genius, and capable of passionate if inconstant
attachment, but also what his own generation in England called a
thorough "raff"--selfish, treacherous, fickle, incapable of considering
either the happiness or the reputation of women, theatrical in his ways
and language, venal, insolent, ungrateful. Schlegel, though he too had
some touch of genius in him, was half pedant, half coxcomb, and full of
intellectual and moral faultiness. The rest of her mighty herd of male
friends and hangers-on ranged from Mathieu de Montmorency--of whom, in
the words of Medora Trevilian it may be said, that he was "only an
excellent person"--through respectable savants like Sismondi and Dumont,
down to a very low level of toady and tuft-hunter. It is rather
surprising that with such models and with no supreme creative faculty
she should have been able to draw such creditable walking gentlemen as
the Frenchman Erfeuil, the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian
Castel-Forte; and should not have produced a worse hero than Nelvil. For
Nelvil, whatever faults he may have, and contemptible as his vacillating
refusal to take the goods the gods provide him may be, is, after all, if
not quite a live man, an excellent model of what a considerable number
of the men of his time aimed at being, and would have liked to be. He is
not a bit less life-like than By