Melancholy, trauma, and national character: Mme de Stael's considerations sur les principaux evenements de la revolution francaise.

Gidal, Eric

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTH BOOK OF WILLIAM COWPER'S TASK, "THE WINTER Morning Walk," the poet offers a paean to English liberties and an admonishment to his times by way of a conjectural history of negotiated rule and the contractual basis of British monarchy, a history he concludes with an emotive tribute to national character: Thee I account still happy, and the chief Among the nations, seeing thou art free, My native nook of earth! Thy clime is rude, Replete with vapours, and disposes much All hearts to sorrow, and none more than mine; Yet, being free, I love thee. (1)

In these fines and those that immediately surround them, Cowper locates his own melancholy as a feature of national character so as to rehearse a standard contrast between the free constitution of the English and the tyrannical institutions of the French, a contrast naturalized in terms of climate, temperament, and political culture: We love the man; the paltry pageant you. We the chief patron of the commonwealth; You the regardless author of its woes. We, for the sake of liberty, a king; You chains and bondage, for a tyrant's sake. Our love is principle, and has its root In reason, is judicious, manly, free; Yours, a blind instinct, crouches to the rod, And licks the foot that treads it in the dust. (5.348-56)

On a purely thematic level, these lines offer little originality. The contrast between a somber English liberty rooted in a gloomy climate and rational judgment and a vainglorious French servility reduced to instinct by a less demanding atmosphere and the studied pleasantries of wit and manners may be found in a host of writings on both sides of the Channel from at least the later decades of the seventeenth century. (2) Cowper's verses follow the lead of Thomson, Collins, and Gray in yoking the melancholic moralizing of the solitary wanderer to a defense of commercial and political liberty, legitimizing progressive history and constitutional monarchy in the language of national character. Under the aegis of melancholy, Cowper converts his elaborative poetics of retreat into a rhetoric of Parliamentary rights in studied allusions to the contentions between Fox and Pitt and the controversial interventions of the crown, what Cowper had come to deem a spirit of "Stuartism" in the reign of George III. (3) "The author hopes," he writes in a note to these lines, "that he shall not be censured for unnecessary warmth upon so interesting a subject. He is aware that it is become almost fashionable to stigmatize such sentiments as no better than empty declamation. But it is an ill symptom, and peculiar to modern times" (Poems 2: 220).

The verses which follow convert this "ill symptom" into a rhetorically unified set piece that paradoxically grounds a progressive historiography and aspirations to cosmopolitan freedom in the deterministic social theories of climate and national character. Cowper's melancholy, figured earlier in The Task as a retiring dismissal of artificial joys (1.435-90; 3.673-88) and a religious reflection on the vanities of worldly ambitions (3.261-69; 3.811-48), here provides a rhetoric of political freedom to repudiate tyranny both at home and abroad. Having identified despotism as more a temperament than an institution, his critique of George III's extensions of monarchical privilege transitions easily into a declamation against the Bastille: Ye horrid tow'rs, th'abode of broken hearts, Ye dungeons and ye cages of despair, That monarchs have supplied from age to age With music such as suits their sov'reign ears, The sighs and groans of miserable men! There's not an English heart that would not leap To hear that ye were fall'n at last, to know That ev'n our enemies, so oft employed In forging chains for us, themselves were free. (5.384-92)

Cowper's evocation of the Bastille as an emblem of tyranny was cited in turn by Fox in a speech of 1792 in repudiation of Burke over the question of penalties for Dissenters ("there was not an English heart which would not leap to hear that this monument of arbitrary power, this abode of wretchedness and despair, had now fallen" (4)), and this entire section from The Task (5.137-537) was reprinted by the radical writer and bookseller Daniel Isaac Eaton under the title of The Origin and Progress of Kings along with Richard Savage's 1735 anti-clerical satire, "The Progress of a Divine." (5) Though Cowper's more recent critics have tended to consider these lines a distractive digression from the book's associational progress from meditation on the forms of nature to anticipation of divine salvation, their rhetorical force and rational patriotism proved immediately compelling within the public debates of the 1790s. (6)

Cowper's conjunction of sorrowful vapours anal the "unadult'rate manners" of the English, "either starv'd by cold reserve / Or flush'd with fierce dispute," in opposition to "that humane address / And sweetness" which "politer France receives / From Nature's bounty" found an equally sympathetic reception in the writings of Mine de Stael who quotes Cowper's lines in her posthumously published Considerations sur les principaux evenements de la Revolution francaise (1818) in the chapter "De la liberte et de l'esprit public chez les Anglois" ["Of Liberty and Public Spirit among the English"]. "Ces vers sont d'un poete d'un admirable talent," she writes, "mais dont la sensibilite meme avoit altere le bonheur. Il se mouroit du mal de la vie; et, quand tout le faisoit souffrir, amour, amitie, philosophie, une patrie libre reveilloit encore dans son ame un enthousiasme que rien ne pouvoit eteindre" ["These verses are by a poet of admirable talents, but whose happiness was destroyed by his extreme sensibility. He was laboring under a mortal disease of melancholy; and when love, friendship, philosophy, everything added to his sufferings, a free country yet awakened in his soul an enthusiasm which nothing could extinguish"]. (7) Cowper offers Stael an exemplary refrain of what she earlier summarizes as the "refrains continuels" of her literary career: "la melancolie du nord, la perfectibilite de l'espece humaine, les muses romantiques, les muses germaniques" (419) ["the melancholy of the North, the perfectibility of the human species, the muses of romance, the muses of Germany" (514)], a concise articulation of the program of progressive Romanticism that informs Stael's novels, essays, and treatises. Her valorization of Cowper's melancholy supports her broader affirmation of the perennial contrast between the sanguine French and the melancholic English and enables her to redeem the disappointments of the French Revolution by locating a spirit of liberty still vibrant within European letters: "Les Francois ... sont frivoles," she writes, "les Anglois sont serieux; les Francois sont vifs, les Anglois sont graves; donc il faut que les premiers soient gouvernes despotiquement, et que les autres jouissent de la liberte" (512) ["The French ... are frivolous, the English serious; the French are quick, the English grave; the former, therefore, must be governed despotically, and the latter enjoy liberty" (632)]. Though such dichotomies would seem to preclude any hopes for her adoptive country, Stael deploys England here much as she had enlisted Germany five years earlier; namely, as a foil and provocation to the reactionary course of political events in France. Stael praises the philosophical quality of English literature and heralds a "second age" of English poetry in the works of Cowper, Rogers, Moore, Campbell, Scott, and Byron, poets who fuse sensibility and imagination with enthusiasm for nature and love of country. "Tandis que tout se degrade sur le continent, la source eternelle du beau jaillit encore de la terre libre" (551) ["While every thing on the Continent is in a state of degradation, the eternal fountain of beauty still flows from the land of freedom" (684)]. (8)

Stael's Anglophilia did not go unnoticed in Britain, particularly among those who had been inspired by De l'Allemagne (1810-13) and its program of social critique and nationalist aesthetics. In a striking instance of national self-emulation, Stael's reading of Cowper was quoted in turn by John Lockhart in the September 1818 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Eulogized repeatedly in the early issues of Blackwood's for her promotion of "religious faith and ... national history and character," Stael is praised by Lockhart for her own celebration of "the severe beauty of [English] institutions, the consequent firmness, dignity and generosity of the English character, as well as the varied strength and splendour of that literature which has been one of the noblest effects, and which is still one of the most powerful supporters of that character and those institutions." (9) Comparing her "meditative and enthusiastic spirit[]" to that of Rousseau and her defense of Marie Antoinette to "the still more energetic masterpiece of Burke," Lockhart promotes Stael as an oracle of British conservatism, emphasizing both her mistrust of speculative systems of government and her respect for the authority of institutions. He reads the Considerations in relation to Corinne as the tempering of an enthusiastic imagination and frames its historical reflections within Stael's own personal narrative of loss and maturation "by which her first ebullient and generous hatred of despotism came slowly and modestly to be subdued into a temperate and wise love of that authority which is according to the laws" (636). Quoting extensively from the third book of Wordsworth's Excursion ("Despondency") on the passage from Robespierre to Napoleon and his sonnet "November 1813" on Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig, Lockhart uses the occasion of eulogizing Stael to repudiate once more the follies of the French Revolution and to reaffirm the time-tested values of Europe's Christian heritage and "Gothic prejudices": "Let us rejoice in the memory of great and virtuous ages; let us not separate ourselves from our fathers, or be the robbers of our children" (648).

Cowper's melancholy repudiation of the inherited rights of kings and the tyrannical absolutism of the French monarchy is thus transformed into a reflective veneration of customary institutions and a valorization of the Bourbon restoration by way of a historical narrative and personal memoir whose overtly stated ambition is to promote the cause of freedom throughout the European continent and beyond. Such transformative appropriations highlight once again the malleability of the language of national character during the Romantic era and the shifting political agendas, theoretical logics, and bucolic conventions available for relating laws and mores through overlapping racial, environmental, climatological, institutional, and cultural frameworks. (10) But they also indicate the multivalent capacity of melancholy to serve as a social, political, and hence ethical category in poetic, biographical, and historical accounts of social disruption and redress. Just preceding the lines already quoted, Cowper bemoans men's craven admiration of ancient custom as itself a mode of melancholic stupor producing "servitude the worst of ills," which "because deliver'd down from sire to son, / Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing" (5.302-4). But Stael, following the lead of Walter Scott's lines in the first canto of Marmion memorializing Nelson, Pitt, and Fox, recasts such ancestral worship as a civic exercise of sentiment enacted within the walls of Westminster Abbey where "vous voyez les tombeaux de Pitt et de Fox a cote l'un de l'autre, et les memes larmes les arrosent" (543) ["you behold the tombs of Pitt and Fox beside each other, and the same tears bedew both" (673)]: Genius, and taste, and talent gone, For ever tomb'd beneath the stone, Where, taming thought to human pride The mighty chiefs sleep side by side. Drop upon Fox's grave the tear, 'Twill triche to his rival's bier. (Stael, Considerations 673)

We have become critically adept at registering such Burkean tableaux of cultural sentimentality in which an organic category of the nation is posited in memoriam as an object for melancholic identification. That such a tableau should be quoted approvingly in the pages of Blackwood's is unsurprising given the elegiac logic of its cultural program in which, as Ian Duncan has articulated it, "the aesthetic mode of representation, having banished doctrine as the source of piety, must replace it with a past emptied of positive social meaning--in short with death." (11) In the pages of Blackwood's the discourse of national character that supports so much of Stael's work is offered as a scientific affirmation of Tory politics, conjoining elegiac narrative and positive social science in the production of Romantic nationalism. Its early issues are filled with mournful poetry, much of it linked explicitly to Scottish locales, and its reviews, translations, and adaptations of the cultural criticism of Friedrich and A. W. Schlegel tap many of the same sources of German historicism that Stael had popularized in De l'Allemagne. But the conflation of Cowper and Scott in Stael's Considerations offers a more jarring conjunction and enables us to reflect on the political and cultural ambiguities of the post-Revolutionary moment during which melancholy was transformed from a republican mechanism of active liberation to a nationalist program of ritualized nostalgia or an aesthetic denominator of constrictive despair.

Stael's Considerations, alongside her earlier treatises, memoirs, and fiction, are worth revisiting in the context of British Romanticism both for her consistently national framing of its aesthetic maneuvers and for the insight her writings provide into Romantic melancholy as a feature of a decidedly sociological imagination. Contrary to Thomas Pfau's recent articulations of Romantic melancholy as "lucid inertia," a mood of abjection and negation perceivable in the formal mechanisms of post-Napoleonic lyric, Stael construes it as an empowering rhetorical strategy and reflexive category of political identification. (12) "La tristesse fait penetrer bien plus avant dans le caractere et la destinee de l'homme, que toute autre disposition de l'ame," she asserts in De la litterature (1800), and hence "convient beaucoup plus ... a l'esprit d'un peuple libre." (13) Stael's theoretical writings on the passions, literature, and national character persistently frame melancholy as the historical symptom by which a modern free society may examine the conditions of its own emergence, a model prescient, as William Reddy has suggested, of more recent work in the history of emotions. (14) Insofar as we follow Pfau in viewing melancholy as Stimmung--an inter-subjective and historically-contingent emotional condition that establishes a precondition for consciousness and discourse--Stael's writings allow us to recognize the degree to which Romantic social theorists had already conceptualized this nexus, though in terms more consonant with Leo Spitzer's articulation of Stimmung as the belated perception of the interanimation of language, feelings, and environment producing the spirit and forms of a modern culture. (15) For when we depart from the self-isolating maneuvers of lyric convention and consider the comparative programs of sociological narrative that motivated aesthetic and historical treatises alike during the revolutionary era, we discover not only an alternative model of cultural hermeneutics immanent to Romantic discourse, but a different rendition of melancholy itself, one that consistently attempts to mobilize its potentials for social critique and political action. (16) Drawing as much upon French social theory as German Idealism, Stael follows the insights of Montesquieu and Rousseau by relating melancholy to social institutions and historical contingencies, not as a surplus ennui marking a separation from the mechanisms of society, but as a symptom of personal autonomy and hence a catalyst to cultural reflection and social reform.

A specifically Anglicized melancholy provides Stael with an alternative resolution to the paroxysms of the French Revolution just as it had consistently offered a model of national liberty and civic virtue in her earlier writings. Her celebrations, in De la litterature, of the Ossianic literature of the North over the Homeric literature of the East as a "poesie melancolique" which "est la poesie la plus d'accord avec philosophie" [a "melancholy poetry ... which accords best with philosophy"] transposed the Christian emphasis on transcendence and "l'obscur passage de la vie a l'eternite" ["the dark passage to eternity"] to a cosmopolitan emphasis on freedom rooted in climate and topography and nurtured by institutions both political and cultural (4: 257-58/1: 275-76). "La poesie du Nord convient beaucoup plus que celle du Midi a l'esprit d'un peuple libre," she argues, for "l'independance etoit le premier et l'unique bonheur des peuples septentrionaux. Une certaine fierte d'ame, un detachement de la vie, que font naitre, et l'aprete du sol, et la tristesse du ciel, devoient rendre la servitude insupportable" (4: 260) ["The northern poetry was much more suitable than the eastern to the minds of a free people ... independence was the sole happiness of the northern nations, a certain haughtiness of soul, and indifference to life, which was inspired by their gloomy atmosphere and the rarity of their sun, would have rendered servitude insupportable" (1: 278)]. Sublime inspiration, be it religious, heroic, or civic, "il le doit au sentiment douloureux de l'incomplet de sa destinee" (4: 262) ["we owe to the painful sentiments of the imperfection of our nature" (1: 280)], and hence the spectral and tragic subjects of the English poets and dramatists in particular, and Shakespeare most of all, in tandem with the meditative qualities of the Protestant faith, infuse a spirit of philosophical reflection and political reform absent from the more material and allegorical Catholic imagination of the east. Celebrating the melancholy poetry of Gray, Goldsmith, Thomson, and Young, which "est d'accord avec la nature meme de notre etre, avec sa destinee" (4:316) ["perfectly accords with the nature of our being ... with its destiny" (1: 331)], Stael famously asks pourquoi les Anglois qui sont heureux par leur gouvernement et par leurs moeurs, ont une imagination beaucoup plus melancolique que ne l'etoit celle des Francois? C'est que la liberte et la vertu, ces deux grands resultats de la raison humaine, exigent de la meditation: et la meditation conduit necessairement a des objets serieux. (4: 316) [why the English, who are so happy in their government, and their customs and manners, should have so much more melancholy in their disposition than the French? It is, that liberty and virtue, the greatest result of the human reason, require meditation, and that meditation naturally conducts the mind to serious objects. (1: 332)]

Melancholy and the English constitution are intimately related in Stael's mind, a temperamental predilection and an institutional embodiment of a free society that nurtures liberty under the guidance of a sublime morality. As she argues in De l'Allemagne, "le culte de tous les sentiments eleves et purs est tellement consolide en Angleterre par les institutions politiques et religieuses, que les speculations de l'esprit tournent autour de ces imposantes colonnes sans jamais les ebranler" (11: 180) ["the cultivation of all pure and elevated sentiments is so consolidated in England, by political and religious institutions, that the skepticisms of genius revolve around these imposing columns without ever shaking them"]. (17)

As both a rhetorical device and a category of cultural analysis, melancholy, and its correspondent expressions of aesthetic sensibility, philosophical critique, and moral rectitude, provides both identity and authority in a post-revolutionary culture. In Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807), Stael promotes a vision of liberation by exposing the relativity of traditional customs even as her reflections on national character reaffirm the importance of those customs in the names of duty and sensibility. The consequent tension between cultural authority and personal autonomy that informs the novel's plot and descriptive rhetoric manifests itself in the melancholy characters of its two protagonists. Oswald's melancholy informs great acts of heroism and noble gestures of sensibility, but his eventual return to Scotland marks a necessary submission to public and domestic dignity. Corinne's female genius makes her anathema to the Scottish demands of subordination and hence her promotion of an adoptive Italian sensuality is at the same time a promotion of the power of female aesthetic expression, one that Scottish society must repudiate but that is left available to Stael's cosmopolitan readers. Corinne's sentimental conjunctions of aesthetic rapture, religious solemnity, heroic virtue, and rational critique accord not only with her cultural independence, but with the melancholic condition of modernity itself. "La douleur de nos temps modernes," Stael informs us regarding the history of the arts, "est ce qu'il y a de plus noble dans l'homme; et, de nos jours, qui n'auroit pas souffert n'auroit jamais senti ni pense" (8: 301) ["In our modern times ... grief is our noblest emotion, and in our day, he who has not suffered will have neither felt nor thought"]. (18) In De l'Allemagne, Stael joins this sentiment to more programmatic reflections on particular cities and states and to ethical and spiritual concerns of the modern condition, valorizing German literature and philosophy alongside English sentiments and institutions as the vanguard of a melancholic era destined to overthrow the false and repressive standards of Gallic neoclassicism. Stael locates melancholy as a social and historical phenomenon congruent with the rise of the modern nation state and as an aesthetic ideology of epistemological freedom and social critique.

In hindsight, it is possible to read Stael's theses regarding melancholy against the grain and to interpret her valorized categories of national character and historical progress as compensatory signs whose imperfections belie the traumatic residue of revolutionary violence. The affective rhetoric she deploys throughout her writings as a means of establishing sentimental authority would seem to contradict her repeated promotions of Stoic detachment, studious reflection, and benevolent action as the proper course of progressive Enlightenment, and the imperative intrusions of immediate events on the shape and content of her treatises--the Terror as a palpable subtext to De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (1796), Napoleonic persecution as the counterpoint to her literary and philosophical reflections in De l'Allemagne--suggest reading her celebrations of melancholy as an analytical alibi to protect her from confronting the full sorrows of the violent upheavals of her day. Analogously, we might construe the Considerations symptomatically through reference to the symbolic imperatives of biographical and national self-representation that occupy so much of the text. Peter Fritzsche places Stael at the beginning of a sequence of liberal historians--including Thiers, Mignet, Taine, and Barante--who "strained mightily to impose structure, pattern, and necessity onto the French Revolution and to narrate the great event in terms of a unifying and rational progress." (19) As Linda Orr reminds us, early histories of the Revolution "had to excise or assimilate into the logic of history the cup of blood, heads bobbing on pikes, and the slash of the guillotine." (20) And Marie-Helene Huet writes of the "troubled relationship between the need to remember and the desire for oblivion" characterizing early works such as Michelet's Histoire de la Revolution francaise (1847) in which "we can also witness the unspeakable end of the Revolution and the limits of historiography." (21) Hence paradigms of trauma, narrative, and history as theorized not only by Pfau but more extensively by Dominick LaCapra and Cathy Caruth would at first seem more germane than melancholy to an understanding of Stael's final work, given both its incessant conflation of familial and national tragedy and its reflective considerations of a problem Caruth has round in the later works of Freud, namely "what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness." (22)

Stael confronts the question of trauma and narratability explicitly in the text of the Considerations, and those confrontations suggest that we resist reading the work in purely symptomatic terms. She conflates private and public events, symbolic repetitions and affective responses, not as unwitting evasions but as reflexive rhetorical devices, indicating less repression and displacement than a strategic and quintessentially romantic affirmation of self and nation as categorical guarantors of epistemological and political autonomy. Her history conjoins personal sorrow and national elegy on almost every page, producing a particularly hybrid text that displays its affective conditions self-consciously for the repetition of traumatic disruption: (23) On ne peut s'empecher d'eprouver un profond sentiment de douleur, lorsqu'on se retrace les epoques de la revolution, ou une constitution libre auroit pu etre etablie en France, et qu'on voit non-seulement cet espoir renverse, mais les evenements les plus funestes prendre la place des institutions les plus salutaires. Ce n'est pas un simple souvenir qu'on se retrace, c'est une peine vive qui recommence. (263-64) [We cannot help feeling a sentiment of profound grief, on retracing the eras of a Revolution in which a free constitution might have been established in France, and on seeing not only that hope overturned, but the most distressing events taking the place of the most salutary institutions. It is not a mere recollection that we recall; it is a keen sensation of pain which revives. (299)]

Stael's witness to pain not only recalls her own participation in the events surrounding the revolution, but also highlights the degree that the writing itself enacts a repetitious response to trauma. As much a eulogy to her father as a history of the revolution, the work vacillates in the words of its own advertisement between "d'une part, les principaux evenements de la Revolution Francoise, et ... de l'autre, le tableau de l'Angleterre, comme une justification de l'opinion de M. Necker, relativement aux institutions politiques de ce pays" (59) ["on one hand, the principal events of the French Revolution, and ... on the other, a picture of England, as a justification of the opinion of M. Necker relative to the political institutions of that country" (5)]. As in Corinne, all events of the revolution, however traumatic, are given meaning in relation to the lost father and the idealized nation. Maintaining that "circonstances particulieres servent-t-elles a faire mieux connoitre l'esprit et le caractere des temps qu'on veut decrire" (59) ["circumstances of a private nature are conducive to a clearer knowledge of the spirit and character of the time we are about to describe" (5)], Stael reasons that "la meilleure maniere de juger des sentiments qui agitent les grandes masses, c'est de consulter ses propres impressions: on est sur de deviner, d'apres ce qu'on eprouve soi-meme, ce que la multitude ressentira; et c'est ainsi que les hommes d'une imagination forte peuvent prevoir les mouvements populaires dont une nation est menacee" (460) ["the best way of judging of the sentiments that actuate large masses is to consult one's own impressions. We are sure of discovering the feelings of the multitude by a reference to our own; and it is thus that men of ardent imaginations are able to foresee the popular movements with which a nation is threatened" (565)]. The traumas of the revolution, particularly the anarchic violence of the Terror and the tyrannical despotism of Napoleon, are thus reproduced both mimetically and affectively as a means of re-energizing emotional responses by which the significance of events may be registered in the mind of the reader. Rehearsing such traumas neither conveys isolating despair nor induces intellectual atrophy, but generates a historical and sociological imagination necessary for considering the causes and effects of political events.

Such moments in the Considerations as the recollection of her father's triumphant return to Paris following the stonning of the Bastille--" Qu'il me soit permis de m'arreter encore une fois sur ce jour, le dernier de la prosperite de ma vie qui cependant s'ouvroit peine devant moi" (168) ["Let me be permitted to dwell once more on this day, the last of pure happiness in my life, which, however, had hardly begun its course" (171-72)]--suggest the degree to which her narrative is motivated as much by recuperative desire as by despondent grief, as witnessed in the melodramatic eulogy which follows the narrative itself: Aimable et genereuse France, adieu! Adieu, France, qui vouliez la liberte, et qui pouviez alors si facilement l'obtenir! Je suis maintenant condamnee retracer d'abord vos fautes, puis vos forfaits, puis vos malheurs: des lueurs de vos vertus apparoitront encore; mais l'eclat meme qu'elles jetteront ne servira qu' mieux faire voir la profondeur de vos miseres. Toutefois vous avez tant merite d'etre aimee, qu'on se flatte encore de vous retrouver enfin telle que vous etiez dans les premiers jours de la reunion nationale. Un ami, qui reviendroit apres une longue absence, n'en seroit que plus vivement accueilli. (169) [Amiable and generous France, adieu! Adieu, France, which desired liberty, and which might then so easily have obtained it! I am now doomed to relate first your faults, next your crimes, and lastly your misfortunes: gleams of your virtues will still appear; but the light which they cast will serve only to show more clearly the depth of your miseries. Yet you have ever possessed such titles to be loved, that the mind still cherishes the hope of finding you what you were in the earliest days of national union. A friend returning after a long absence would be welcomed more kindly for the separation. (172)]

A passage such as this articulates the compulsory repetition but not the discursive evasion typically associated with traumatic narrative. Instead, Stael's performative historiography, by which, as Stefania Tesser has documented, authorial presence repeatedly inscribes events within a logic of exemplarity, articulates sublime abjection and elegiac idealization as discursively available and hence analytically productive responses to political catastrophe. (24) While traumatic repression and repetition prove a salient feature of Stael's text, they are contained by a melancholic claim for categorical understanding. "La revolution de France," Stael suggests from the beginning, "est une des grandes epoques de l'ordre social. Ceux qui la considerent comme un evenement accidentel, n'ont porte leurs regards ni dans le passe, ni dans l'avenir. Ils ont pris les acteurs pour la piece; et, afin de satisfaire leurs passions, ils ont attribue aux hommes du moment ce que les siecles avoient prepare" (63) ["The revolution of France is one of the grand eras of social order. Those who consider it as the result of accidental causes have reflected neither on the past nor on the future; they have mistaken the actors for the drama; and, in seeking a solution agreeable to their prejudices, have attributed to the men of the day that which had been in a course of preparation for ages" (17)]. Contrary to Burke's theatrical rhetoric of sentimental identification, Stael asks us to read for the plot, understanding the social drama in terms of national character and historical progress. The aim of the historian is neither to evade nor to succumb to trauma, but to rehearse affective experiences as a means of reflecting on the general patterns in social evolution that have produced them, what Michel Delon has characterized as a movement from "sideration" or stupefaction to "consideration," or an understanding of events from the standpoint of philosophical history. (25) Ever committed to both political justice and rational progress, Stael understands modern political revolution as belonging to "la troisieme epoque de la marche de l'ordre social, a l'etablissement du gouvernement representatif, vers lequel l'esprit humain s'avance de toutes parts" (69) ["the third era in the progress of social order--the establishment of representative government--a point towards which the human mind is directing itself from all parts" (25)]. Fusing a sensationalist epistemology with a faith in reason and emotion as guides to moral conduct, Stael exhibits an undying faith in human progress that explicitly echoes the optimistic martyrdom that concludes Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain (1794): "il nourrissoit cet espoir sous la hache des bourreaux, dans le moment meme ou sa propre destinee etoit perdue sans ressource" (305) ["this hope he nourished under the axe of the executioner, at the very moment when his own destiny was ruined without resource" (360)]. Stael's historiography develops an analogous optimism through a dynamic interchange between trauma and analysis. The events she confronts are disruptive and painful not simply because of their indiscriminate violence, but because of their apparently unprecedented nature. The subsequent task of the melancholic historian is not to give in to despair, but to use such trauma as the occasion for analysis through recourse to principles of social and political organization. (26)

In a remarkable passage, Stael approaches the incommensurable nature of the Terror as a provocation to reflection and examination: Les evenements que nous avons rappeles jusqu'a present ne sont que de l'histoire, dont l'exemple peut s'offrir ailleurs [she writes in consideration of the struggles between the monarchy and the National Assembly], mais un abime va s'ouvrir maintenant sous nos pas; nous ne savons quelle route suivre dans un tel gouffre, et la pensee se precipite avec effroi, de malheurs en malheurs, jusqu'a l'aneantissement de tout espoir et de toute consolation. Nous passerons, le plus rapidement qu'il nous sera possible, sur cette crise affreuse, dans laquelle aucun homme ne doit fixer l'attention, aucune circonstance ne sauroit exciter l'interet: tout est semblable, bien qu'extraordinaire; tout est monotone, bien qu'horrible; et l'on seroit presque honteux de soimeme, si l'on pouvoit regarder ces atrocites grossieres d'assez pres pour les caracteriser en detail. Examinons seulement le grand principe de ces monstrueux phenomenes, le fanatisme politique. (301) [The events which we have been recalling until this point have been the only kind of history for which we can find examples elsewhere. But an abyss is now about to open under out feet; we do hot know what course to pursue in such a gulf, and the mind leaps in fear from disaster to disaster, till it reaches the annihilation of all hope and of all consolation. We shall pass as rapidly as we can over this frightful crisis, in which there is no individual to fix attention, no circumstance to excite interest: all is uniform, though extraordinary; all is monotonous, though horrible; and we should be in some measure ashamed of ourselves, if we could contemplate these brutal atrocities sufficiently near to characterize them in detail. Let us only examine the great principle of these monstrous phenomena, political fanaticism. (354)]

The sublimity of the Terror, confronted as a mass of uniform repetition and indiscriminate horror, resists detailed representation, a mode of writing that, in its presumption of mastery, would expose both writer and reader to a sense of self loathing. Rather than fall mute before such an abyss, Stael moves to first principles, identifying political fanaticism as a sociological law and historical logic informing the otherwise "monstrueux phenomenes." She thereby reconnects the devotional fervor of the Terror with a longer history of religious fanaticism, both passions born out of the emotional repression necessitated by the inevitable contradictions of a tyrannical social order. (27) She considers both institutional corruptions and the legacy of superstition and arbitrary rule as moral corrosives bearing a large share of the blame for the detestable crimes of the Committee for Public Safety: "l'irritabilite d'une nation tres-vive portoit chacun a la jalousie envers son voisin, envers son superieur, envers son maitre; et tous les individus, non contens de dominer, s'humilioient les uns les autres" (303) ["the irritability of a nation, lively in the extreme, inclined each one to be jealous of his neighbour, of his superior, of his master; and all, not satisfied with ruling, labored for the humiliation of each other" (356)]. From first principies Stael derives first actions, promoting a political salvation in the face of ruin that mirrors the religious humility and communion she conceives as the archetype for more worldly, though no less sacred events; thus, "c'est en multipliant les rapports politiques entre les divers rangs, en leur donnant les moyens de se servir mutuellement, qu'on peut apaiser dans le coeur la plus horrible des passions, la haine des mortels contre leurs semblables, l'aversion mutuelle des creatures dont les restes doivent tous reposer sous la meme terre, et se ranimer en meme temps au dernier jour" (303) ["it is by multiplying political relations between different ranks, by giving them the means of serving each other, that we can appease in the heart the most horrible of passions--the hatred of human beings for their fellow men, the mutual aversion of creatures whose remains must all repose under the same earth and be together reborn at the last day" (356)]. Substituting the language of social engineering for the language of religious reform, Stael advocates a consideration of the passions in relation to institutional structures as a means both of understanding historical ideas and events and of working for social amelioration.

Stael repeatedly articulates the resistance of the events of the Terror to description or narration as a premise rather than an obstacle to such conceptualizations. The traumatic experience of both the original events and their recollection are thus made productive of reflective understanding: On ne sait comment approcher des quatorze mois qui ont suivi la proscription de la Gironde, le 31 mai 1793. Il semble qu'on descende comme le Dante de cercle en cercle, toujours plus bas dans les enfers.... Les faits se confondent a cette epoque, et l'on craint de ne pouvoir entrer dans une telle histoire, sans que l'imagination en conserve d'ineffacables traces de sang. L'on est donc force de considerer philosophiquement des evenements sur lesquels on epuiseroit l'eloquence de l'indignation, sans jamais satisfaire le sentiment interieur qu'ils font eprouver. (303) [We know not how to approach the fourteen months which followed the proscription of the Gironde on the 31st May, 1793. We seem as if we were descending, like Dante, from circle to circle, always lower in hell.... At this epoch, facts become confused, and we are afraid of being unable to enter into such a history without leaving on the imagination indelible traces of blood. We are therefore forced to take a philosophical view of events, on which the eloquence of indignation might be exhausted without satisfying the internal sentiment which they awaken. (357)]

As in the previous chapter on political fanaticism, her chapter on the Reign of Terror uses an expressive rhetoric of traumatic repetition to motivate categorical analysis, moving from confusion to eloquence and writing indignation with "ineffacables traces de sang." The detestable crimes of this period she blames almost uniformly not upon new-found liberation but upon the preceding "cent ans de superstition et d'arbitraire" ["century of superstition and arbitrary power"]: "Les fureurs des revoltes donnent la mesure des vices des institutions; et ce n'est pas au gouvernement qu'on veut avoir, mais a celui qu'on a eu long-temps, qu'il faut s'en prendre de l'etat moral d'une nation" (304) ["The fury of revolts supplies the measure of the vices of institutions; and it is not to the government which is wished for, but to that which has long existed, that we must ascribe the moral state of a nation" (358)]. In Stael's reading, the events of the Terror are themselves instances of traumatic repetition in which institutional injustices are reproduced by the very actors who claim to supplant them. Hence the recourse to personal experience becomes a melancholic antidote to the "superstition et d'arbitraire" that has plagued her time. Stael recounts many of the notable events of this period in shorthand--the election of Robespierre to the Committee of Public Safety, the executions of Marie Antoinette and the Girondin deputies, the condemnations of Malesherbes, Bailly, Condorcet, and Lavoisier, and the Festival of the Supreme Being--and briefly derends both the French army and the royalist fighters in the Vendee; but she closes her account of this period with lengthier anecdotes of her own involvement with emigrants sheltered at Coppet, a compositional move she again justifies in terms of a dynamic between personal trauma and philosophical understanding: Il est difficile de raconter ces temps horribles sans se rappeler vivement ses propres impressions: et je ne sais pas pourquoi l'on combattroit ce penchant naturel. Car la meilleure maniere de representer des circonstances si extraordinaires, c'est encore de montrer dans quel etat elles mettoient les individus au milieu de la tourmente universelle. (310) [It is difficult to relate the events of these horrible times without recalling one's own impressions in almost their original vivacity: and I know not why one should combat this natural inclination. For the best manner of representing such extraordinary circumstances is to show in what state they placed individuals in the midst of the universal tempest. (367)]

Her narratives of both successful and failed escapes serve both evidentiary and confessional functions in her evocation of revolutionary horror. In relating two brief narratives about those she saved--she gives the example of M. Achille du Chayla for whom she obtained false testimony as a Swiss resident--and those beyond her protection--she relates the death of the Abbe de Montmorency and his family--she emphasizes her own emotional states and those of their advocates and relatives in Geneva, culminating in a melancholic rendition of a sublime nature seemingly indifferent to the plight of humanity. "Le decouragement s'etoit empare de nous," she writes, "plus nous etions jeunes, moins nous avions de resignation: car dans la jeunesse surtout l'on s'attend au bonheur, l'on croit en avoir le droit; et l'on se revolte a l'idee de ne pas l'obtenir" (312) ["Dejection had seized us: the younger we were, the less resignation we had; for in youth especially we look for happiness, we think that we have a right to it, and we are shocked at the idea of not obtaining it" (369)]. But no sooner does Stael transfer the focus of impotent exile from revolutionary France to a natural world resistant to the pathetic fallacy then the scene is made prophetic of the fall of Robespierre and the apparent "cessation de la douleur" (312) ["cessation of sorrow" (370)]. Stael's gambit here is to convey the truth of these times through the emotional states of their survivors even as she reproduces those states through the melodramatic devices of her own narration. Trauma does not resist representation, but endorses and informs that representation for a melancholic historian whose "doom" as she puts it is to relive through subjective recollection the essential meaning of these events.

Confronting the equally traumatic spectacle of Napoleonic rule, Stael elevates melancholy beyond a principle of historical composition to a moral category of national character, drawing upon both the Ecclesiastical rejection of vanity and the Hippocratic geography of collective temperaments. Napoleon in her account is all cold irony and vainglory, bereft of noble enthusiasm for the great or beautiful and despising "la nation dont il vouloit les suffrages" (339) ["the nation whose votes he wished" (410)]. Talleyrand had assured the Directory "que le general Bonaparte detestoit le luxe et l'eclat, miserable ambition des ames communes, et qu'il aimoit les poesies d'Ossian, surtout parce qu'elles detachent de la terre" (340) ["that General Bonaparte detested luxury and splendor, the miserable ambition of vulgar souls, and that he loved the poems of Ossian, particularly because they detach us from the earth" (412)], but despite such melancholic credentials, Napoleon's great strength and his cardinal sin was a derisive dismissal of moral sentiments and general principles as little more than means of playing upon "l'instrument du pouvoir" (365) ["the instrument of power" (441)]. Akin to his professions of Islamic and Catholic creeds in Egypt and Rome, Napoleon's melancholy is revealed as pure calculation, part of his talent for "l'art d'eblouir les masses et de corrompre les individus" (353) ["the art of dazzling multitudes, and of corrupting individuals" (426)]. He embodies a distinctly modern mode of tyranny which is without principles or restraint, yet offers a promise of shelter in times of civil unrest. In an observation with unfortunate resonance with our own historical moment, Stael concludes that "son plan, pour parvenir a dominer la France, se fonda sur trois bases principales: contenter les interets des hommes aux depens de leurs vertus, depraver l'opinion par des sophismes, et donner a la nation pour but la guerre au lieu de la liberte" (365) ["his scheme for arriving at the dominion of France rested upon three principal bases--to satisfy men's interests at the expense of their virtues, to deprave public opinion by sophisms, and to give the nation war for an object instead of liberty" (441)]. Napoleon's rise to absolute power repeats in a new mode the very royal corruptions that had been eliminated by the revolution, and offers both royalists and republicans an imperfect object of consolation and a false promise of peace and stability after years of traumatic terror. Stael, however, claims for herself "une douleur que je pourrois appeler prophetique" (358) ["a grief which might be called prophetic" (431)] in learning of Napoleon's triumph, and the tears she sheds over liberty's betrayal authorize the critical reflections on general principles which Napoleon's mendacious manipulations obscure.

Stael once more conflates personal grief and political melancholy as she eulogizes her father and recounts his final days in reflexively recuperative rhetoric. "Je ne parlerois point du sentiment que m'a laisse la perte de mon pere," she writes, "si ce n'etoit pas un moyen de plus de le faire connoitre" (388) ["I would not speak of the feeling which the death of my father produced in me were it not an additional means of making him known" (474)]. Seeking to give his principles "la sanction de son caractere" ["the sanction of his character"], Stael's memorial valorizations reach an early emotional climax: J'ai plus de confiance encore aujourd'hui dans la moindre de ses paroles, que je n'en aurois dans aucun individu existant, quelque superieur qu'il put etre; tout ce que m'a dit M. Necker est ferme en moi comme le rocher; tout ce que j'ai gagne par moi-meme peut disparoitre; l'identite de mon etre est dans l'attachement que je garde a sa memoire. J'ai aime qui je n'aime plus; j'ai estime qui je n'estime plus; le flot de la vie a tout emporte, excepte cette grande ombre qui est la sur le sommet de la montagne, et qui me montre du doigt la vie a venir. (389) [I have even now more confidence in the least of his words, than I should have in any individual alive, however superior that individual might be. Everything that M. Necker has said is firm in me as a rock; what I have gained myself may disappear; the identity of my being consists in the attachment which I bear to his memory. I have loved those whom I love no more; I have esteemed those whom I esteem no more; the waves of life have carried all away, except this mighty shade whom I see upon the summit of the mountain, pointing out to me with its finger the life to come. (474)]

We might easily assess this passage in terms of sentimental excess and melancholic abjection, but in the context of her treatment of Napoleon and her larger historical project, such professions of memorial adoration provide a basis of legitimacy for her considerations on general principles and a contrast with the ironic dissimulation that Napoleon hoisted upon the French national character. We need not doubt the sincerity of her claim that "je ne dois de reconnoissance veritable sur cette terre qu'a Dieu et a mon pere" (389) ["I owe no real gratitude on earth but to Goal and my father" (474)] to see still how it establishes a rhetorical counterpoint to the false creeds of Napoleonic rule, uniting Necker's political principles of stable credit and representative government with divine sanction through sentimental registers proclaimed to be at the same time particular to Stael's heart and representative of the better natures of the French people. (28)

And this history is as much an appeal to those better natures as it is a vindication of her father, for, as Stael repeatedly argues, Napoleon's worst crime was the corruption of the national character through the promotion of luxury and deception in place of rational freedom and sober discourse. Such mechanisms found ready soil in the French nation, where "la beaute du climat, le gout de la societe, tout ce qui embellit la vie, a servi le pouvoir arbitraire, comme dans les pays du midi oU les plaisirs de l'existence suffisent a l'homme" (522) ["the beauty of the climate, the relish for society, all that embeilishes life operated in favor of arbitrary power, as in the countries of the South, in which the pleasures of existence are sufficient for man" (647)]. Recasting the longstanding contrast between the sanguine and the melancholic in terms of national character, Stael offers eloquent rehearsals of the political and temperamental associations common to eighteenth-century social theory. Repeatedly emphasizing the influence of institutions rather than climate upon the political and cultural temperaments of a nation--"ce sont les gouvernements arbitraires qui depravent les nations, et non les nations qui sont destinees par le ciel, les unes a toutes les vertus, les autres a tous les forfaits" (533) ["it is arbitrary government that depraves a nation, and not a decree of Heaven awarding every virtue to one, and every vice to another" (661)]--Stael constructs the French character under Napoleon as dominated by wit, levity, and emulation, potentially ennobling features distorted by despotic rule: Les Francois sont frivoles, parce qu'ils ont ete condamnes a un genre de gouvernement qui ne pouvoit se soutenir qu'en encourageant la frivolite; et, quant a la vivacite, les Francois en ont dans l'esprit bien plus que dans le caractere. Il y a, chez les Anglois, une impetuosite d'une nature beaucoup plus violente; et leur histoire en offre une foule de preuves.... Ils ont depose, tue, renverse plus de rois, plus de princes et plus de gouvernements que le rest le l'Europe ensemble; et cependant ils ont enfin obtenu le plus noble, le plus brillant et le plus religieux ordre social qui soit dans l'ancien monde. (512) [The French are frivolous because they have been doomed to a kind of government which could be supported only by encouraging frivolity; and as to quickness, the French possess it much more in the spirit than in the character. There exists among the English an impetuosity of a much more violent nature, and their history exemplifies it in a multitude of cases.... They have deposed, killed, overturned more kings, more princes, and more governments than the test of Europe together; and yet they have at last obtained the most noble, the most brilliant, and most religious order of society that exists in the Old World. (632-33)]

Qualifying such general distinctions, however, is Stael's faith that "tous les pays, tous les peuples, tous les hommes, sont propres a la liberte par leurs qualites differentes: tous y arrivent ou y arriveront a leur maniere" (512) ["every country, every people, every man are fit for liberty by their different qualities; all attain, or will attain it in their own way" (633)], so that her rehearsal of these national stereotypes is modified by a historical vision of social formations as essentially dynamic and evolving towards liberty, a vision reinforced by its setting within a narrative that itself purports to offer critical social theory as a mode of melancholic writing.

English melancholy--as exemplified in the Considerations by Cowper's bucolic repudiations of tyranny and Walter Scott's sentiments of memorial patriotism in Westminster Abbey--offers both the precondition and the fruitful consequence of political justice in which a sentimental love of the native land combines with a love of liberty to engender a political morality that infuses institutions and culture alike. "L'Angleterre est le seul des grands empires de l'Europe oU le dernier perfectionnement de l'ordre social, a nous connu, se soit accompli" (68) ["England is the only great European Empire that has yet attained what, in our present state of political knowledge, appears the perfection of the social order" (24)]--and this is due to its ability to translate the melancholic disposition of northern cultures into the social institutions of a modern nation state: "Les jures, les administrations de provinces et de villes, les elections, les journaux, donnent a la nation entiere une grande part d'interet dans la chose publique.... La pensee doit rester etrangere a des hommes qui n'ont point de droits; car, du moment qu'ils apercevroient la verite, ils seroient malheureux, et bientot apres revoltes" (546) ["The juries, the administrations of counties and towns, the elections, the newspapers give the whole nation a great share of interest in public affairs.... Reflection must remain a stranger to men who have no rights; since as soon as they perceive the truth, they must be first unhappy, and soon after filled with the spirit of revolt" (678)]. In the extensive account of English society, culture, and politics which comprises the final section of the Considerations--what Linda Orr well denominates Stael's De l'Angleterre--we find the provisional model for European society, one that Stael repeatedly insists is adaptable to every nation on the continent and which embodies the most stable form of political liberty. (29) Though she ascribes many of their free tendencies to a peculiarly northern combination of "l'austerite republicaine dans la vie domestique, et l'esprit de chevalerie dans les rapports de la societe (560) ["republican austerity in domestic life and a chivalrous spirit in the relations of society" (696)], as well as an extensive fixation upon mortality ("les morts ne sont point oublies dans cette contree oU lame humaine a toute sa beaute; et l'honorable constance qui lutte contre l'instabilite de ce monde, eleve les sentiments du coeur au rang des choses eternelles" [564]) ["The dead are not forgotten in that country, where the human soul possesses all its beauty; and that honorable constancy which struggles with the instability of this world exalts the feelings of the heart to the rank of things eternal" (701)], it is primarily the English model of constitutional monarchy that has elevated such noble sentiments in the English soul and that might have an analogous influence throughout Europe. "Cette chimere, car c'est ainsi qu'on a toujours appele le beau, est la, realisee sous nos yeux," she concludes, "Quel sentiment, quel prejuge, quel endurcissement de tete et de coeur, peut faire qu'en se rappelant ce que nous lisons dans notre histoire, on ne prefere pas les soixante annees [since the Battle of Culloden] dont l'Angleterre vient de nous offrir l'exemple?" (593) ["This chimera, for such whatever is sublime has always been called, stands there realized before our eyes. What feeling, what prejudice, what hardness of mind or heart can prompt us, in recalling what we have read in our history, not to prefer the sixty years of which England has given us an example?" (738)]. She cites Scott again here, this time from Waverley, as to the necessity of a reformed nobility, (30) and concludes that literature and religion will both embody and enable an ever-expanding liberation from despotism. Refuting those who claire that "apres les horreurs dont on a ete temoin ... personne ne veut plus entendre parler de liberte" (602) ["after the horrors which we have witnessed ... nobody now wishes to hear the name of liberty" (750)], she concludes her history with a reassertion of her faith that "tout un ordre de vertus, aussibien que d'idees, semble former cette chaine d'or decrite par Homere, qui, en rattachant l'homme au ciel, l'affranchit de tous les fers de la tyrannie" (606) ["one connected series of virtues and ideas seems to form that golden chain described by Homer, which in binding man to Heaven delivers him from all the fetters of tyranny" (755)].

Two modes of melancholy, then, run through Stael's Considerations. The first may be mapped through narratives of personal and collective trauma, a casting of events as both repetitious and without precedent, inevitable even as they are discrete, to which the historian must respond through a shame-filled turning away from particulars towards a meditation on first principles. The second may be mapped through categories of national character, a social configuration influenced by climate but primarily shaped by institutional mechanisms, religious beliefs, and cultural habits. In tandem, these two explicitly Rousseauvian models of confession and critique allow her to construct melancholy neither as a language of personal abjection nor as a premise for collective exclusion but rather as a motive for political resistance and philosophical reform. Just as Cowper moves in "The Winter Morning Walk" from sensible meditations on natural forms through a conjectural history of progressive liberation towards an assertive reliance on grace, Stael expresses her melancholy through a history of traumatic disruption and tyrannical rule which posits the English constitution and divinely inspired morality as the salvation of the European continent. Both writers conjoin associative descriptions and moral reflections under the mantles of sentimental memoir and national history and both deploy melancholy as a rhetorical premise and as a category of analysis. That Stael should find in Cowper a model not of poetic retreat but of patriotic enthusiasm and civic engagement suggests a model of Romantic melancholy whose premise and aims lie less in a purely aesthetic realm of an interiorized self than in an overtly and self-consciously public sphere of political and cultural critique. Contextualizing his lyrical abjection within a broader critical narrative of philosophical and institutional transformations, Stael applies a vision of melancholy as social discourse to a program for progressive change and, in so doing, converts the comparative reflections of the French Enlightenment into the programmatic ambitions of the Romantic age.

Stael's turn to England as an alternative resolution to the revolutionary aspirations for freedom spurred a revival of interest in her writings throughout the British press. (31) Anticipating the publication of the Considerations, an account in the Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature for September 1817 noted approvingly that "the unhappy results of the attempts of France to become free, turned her eyes to the only great nation of Europe which still maintains her liberty" (32) and a notice in the Monthly Review for February 1819 compared Stael as an historian to Hume and observed that "she is extremely anxious to improve the situation of the French, by making them profit from their dear-bought experience and the example of the English." (33) Byron captured the spirit of this fascination in a poetic "declension" he sent to John Murray in August of 1817: They're at this moment in discussion On poor De Stael's late dissolution-- Her book they say was in advance-- Pray Heaven! She tell the truth of France. (34)

But it was Scotch reviewers rather than English bards who eulogized Stael most extensively. In the Considerations, Stael herself had singled out for praise the Edinburgh literary reviews "ou des ecrivains faits pour etre illustres eux-memes, Jeffrey, Playfair, Mackintosh, ne dedaignent point d'eclairer les auteurs par les jugements qu'ils portent sur eux" (550-51) ["in which writers, formed to tender themselves illustrious, Jeffrey, Playfair, Mackintosh, do not disdain to enlighten authors by the opinions they pass on their works" (683)], thus aligning herself most directly with the Edinburgh Review, whose emphasis on Enlightenment models of political economy seem a natural fit with Stael's own emphasis on the logic of general principles in models of historical progress. Yet though Francis Jeffrey's review of the Considerations does much to augment this intellectual affiliation, it was John Lockhart's review in Blackwood's and the multiple eulogies to Stael in its pages that exemplify the new models of cultural nationalism by which Stael would be most prominently received. Given the traumatic effects of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars on Scottish cultural politics and the enormous space given in both reviews to debating their causes and consequences for modern European society, it is little wonder that they should take a strong interest in Stael's history nor that the reviews of her work should exemplify the ideological distinctions between the two publications, offering us one concluding means of assessing the political dimensions of Romantic melancholy. (35)

John Playfair had written an admiring review of Corinne in the Edinburgh Review for October of 1807, praising a narrative "as lively and affecting as her descriptions are picturesque and beautiful," even as he demurred from what he viewed as Stael's excessive emphasis on climate so as to advance his own comparison of modern Britain to ancient Rome where "the possession of liberty and laws, and, above all, the superiority which a man derives from having a share in the government of his country, has, in opposition to climate and situation, produced a greater resemblance of character." (36) Following the rise in interest in Stael's work during her visit to England in 1813-14, the Edinburgh Review published three reviews in 1813 of De la litterature, Reflexions sur le Suicide, and De l'Allemagne, all laudatory ("we look upon her as beyond all comparison the first female writer of her age") and singling out for praise what they deem her combination of a "systemizing spirit" with "moral enthusiasm" to say nothing of her admiration for England. (37) Jeffrey's review of the Considerations in the September 1818 issue of the Edinburgh Review is a bit more skeptical, deploying a subtle blend of eulogy and critique. (38) Framing the work as "the last, dying bequest of the most brilliant writer that has appeared in our days," Jeffrey is nonetheless uncomfortable with Stael's melancholic rhetoric, what he terms "her passion for effect," complaining that "she gives her history in abstracts, and her theories in aphorisms" so that the work might be construed as "a collection of striking fragments" which are too arbitrary in selection and abbreviated in description to serve the ends of either a contemporary or a philosophical history. (39) Nonetheless, Jeffrey finds the work to display "more original and profound observations--more new images--greater sagacity combined with higher imagination--and more of the true philosophy of the passions, the politics, and the literature of her contemporaries--than in any other author we can now remember" (275-76), and these strengths are mostly owing to Stael's melancholic tone. "She has great eloquence on all subjects," Jeffrey observes, "and a singular pathos in representing those bitterest agonies of the spirit in which wretchedness is aggravated by remorse, or by regrets that partake of its character" (276). Yet when extended to a principle of social analysis and a motive for future amelioration, this melancholic perspective provokes a less credulous response: "She makes passions and high sensibilities a great deal too indispensable; and varnishes over a1l her pictures too uniformly with the glare of an extravagant or affected enthusiasm. She represents men, in short, as a great deal more unhappy, more depraved and more energetic, than they are--and seems to respect them the more for it" (276). This generalization translates for Jeffrey into a naive extension of the English model for the emulation of the French nation, an extension premised in Jeffrey's mind upon an exaggerated sense of the possible influence of literature and culture on the improvement of national character and the eventual perfectibility of human society. Emphasizing the differences in France and England's political histories, Jeffrey expresses reservations as to the suitability of the English constitutional model for the French government and seems to predict an extended period of absolute rule by the restored Bourbon monarchy. "If these be the principles, not only upon which they act, but which they and their advocates avow, we know no constitution under which they can be free; and have no faith in the power of any new institutions to counteract that spirit of corruption by which, even where they have existed the longest, their whole virtue is consumed" (316).

A focus both more insular and more elegiac is assumed in the pages of Blackwood's in 1817 and 1818 where Stael is eulogized extensively and repeatedly in reviews of her work and in recollections of Coppet. John Lockhart bemoans that "the long dreaded but at last very sudden death of Madame de Stael, has recently taken one of its brightest ornaments from the literature of Europe," and analogously celebrates the Considerations ("composed during the intervals of disease,--in great part under the near expectation of death") as "a legacy worthy of being bequeathed by Madame de Stael, and of being received with the admiration of England, and the gratitude of France." (40) Letters from "an intimate and dear friend of Madame de Stael" in the November and December issues of that same year, eulogize Stael in analogous terms, constructing her life as a progress from domestic affections and natural enthusiasms to the "defence of justice or innocence" and "the studies and ... analysis of our age," a progress that leads inevitably both to admiration for the principles of the Revolution and despair at its "bloody march." (41) The letters follow her retreat with other emigrants from France to Coppet and the intellectual life that thrived in that exile. Conversations on the prospects for universal happiness and theatrical recitals of divine salvation occupy the recollections of this period, until Stael is compelled to leave, first for Germany, Russia, and Stockholm, then for England "to breathe the air of liberty, the only atmosphere indeed which agreed with her." The letters position the publication of De l'Allemagne in England in 1813 between Stael's experience of exile ("In our day, so many have experienced this misfortune, that its nature is fully understood") and her love of English institutions, character, and "that spirit which renders it almost as difficult to destroy liberty in England as to establish it elsewhere." (42) They frame the Bourbon restoration in similar consolatory terms by conflating personal loss and political melancholy so that Stael's return to France "seemed a recompense to humanity for a1l she had suffered": It was the nations of the north who came in their turn, as by a miracle, to establish the peace of the world, and to preserve its civilization. In those institutions which the King had just accorded to the wishes of France, she recognized the political principles in which she had been nursed, and the predominance of which she had, from the commencement of the revolution, sighed for in vain. (Dec. 1818: 279)

In this eulogy, Stael's final retreat to Coppet rearticulates this same logic of loss and recompense, one that emphasizes a melancholic restoration that is valorized specifically for its rejection of the present in adoration of the past: "She returned to inhabit that dwelling which time had rendered pleasant, and with which were associated the image and the remembrance of her father." Analogously, the eulogist's own experiences at Coppet are recalled as "the happiest of my life," and framed finally as a retreat of elevated repose: "The imagination was always occupied, and the soul experienced that happy feeling which inspires contempt for every thing base, and love for all that is noble" (Dec. 1818: 279). What Jeffrey bemoans in the Bourbon restoration as the final death knell of French aspirations to liberal institutions, Blackwood's celebrates as a more comprehensive restoration that promises to erase the very consciousness of loss in a spiritual return to the happiness of paternal embrace.

The writers at Blackwood's recast Stael's revolutionary principles within explicitly Wordsworthian strategies of narrative containment by which a deference to localized institutions and an affirmation of domestic affections compensates for the loss of enthusiastic passions and egalitarian principles. The more famous assessments of the British Romantics that occupy these same pages--the condemnation of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria as the uncontained speculations of a melancholic isolation, the excoriations of Hunt, Keats, and the Cockney school as an infection of manic frenzy followed by "drivelling idiocy" which might yet be amended by "time, firm treatment, and rational restraint," (43) its attacks upon the impieties of Shelley's Revolt of Islam and Alastor, and its celebrations of the works of Scott, Wordsworth and Byron more as social phenomena and expressions of a national character, than as isolated symptoms of individual temperaments--may thus be assessed in relation to the elegiac valorization of Stael as the originator of "the Natural History of Nations": "The sciences have always owed their origin to some great spirit"--Smith created political economy--Linnaeus, botany--Lavoisier, chemistry--and Madame de Stael has, in like manner, created the art of analyzing the spirit of nations, and the springs which move them" (Dec. 1818: 278). The conjunction of severity and strength in national literature, character, and institutions that Blackwood's embraces in Stael's thought was precisely the use to which John Wilson sought to mobilize Wordsworth's poetics of natural sensations in his famous letter of 1802, in which he asked, "may not the face of external nature through different quarters of the globe account for the dispositions of different nations? May not mountains, forests, plains, groves, and lakes, as much as the temperature of the atmosphere, or the form of government, produce important effects upon the human soul?" (44) Wordsworth begged off pursuing such speculations, (45) but, they forma dominant theme of Wilson's celebrations of the Lake School in the pages of Blackwood's, particularly of Wordsworth's poetic insight into "the manly integrity and substantial excellences of character that adorn his country, and which have so deep a root there, that, as Madame de Stael observes, they have never ceased to flourish even under the influence of speculative opinions, which would have withered them up elsewhere" (Dec. 1818: 258).

The profound links between melancholy and nationalism that define the Romantic heritage in a1l of its power and its catastrophe are well known. Melancholy, with its elegiac fetishes, devotional rites, and narcissistic withdrawals, offers an emotional and conceptual abode to displaced and disillusioned populations that has provided an often xenophobic and exclusionary vision of political identity, one in which an essentialized category of the nation grants historical and metaphysical sanction to the bonds of memory and the intolerance of disruption. That Stael's own reclamation of melancholy as an informed and productive response to violence and despotism should in turn be taken up by the more conservative cultural agendas of the early decades of the nineteenth century underscores not only her general influence on European letters in the post-Napoleonic era, but the degree to which her attempt to move from trauma to freedom by way of melancholic reflection helped to create a rhetoric of restoration that was not so easily contained. Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which did as much to spread the cult of cosmopolitan melancholy across a post-Napoleonic Europe as did any single work of literature, offers an alternative eulogy of Stael amidst the tombs of Santa Croce as the spirited incarnation of Corinne, who will "shed [her] eternal influence for the control and consolation of mankind." (46) The poet's melancholy tour of a continent rent by military and ideological upheavals mirrors the generic hybridity of the Considerations by conjoining personal confession, symbolic tropes, and political commentary in a vision at once historical and allegorical, one in which the emblems of melancholy persistently inform and in turn emerge from an extensive social and historical reflection. The provisional hope Byron holds out for the regeneration of freedom's seed, "sown deep, even in the bosom of the North" (4: 881) testifies as much to Stael's legacy as the Tory reclamations in Blackwood's. It helps to sustain a mode of critique that resorts neither to solipsistic retreat nor to transcendental escape, but makes of its historical moment a template for political and philosophical reflection. In Byron's paradigmatic Romantic melancholy, we perceive the union of despair and defiance that articulated national character by way of a paradoxically inspirational irony of resistance. (47)

University of Iowa

(1.) The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 2., ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 5.460-64, 473. All subsequent quotations from this work are given parenthetically in the text by book and line numbers.

(2.) See Eric Gidal, "Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment," Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.1 (2003): 23-45.

(3.) The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) 2: 215. W. B. Hutchings offers a more comprehensive and detailed consideration of Cowper's politics and poetry during this period in "William Cowper and 1789," The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 71-93. See also Tim Fulford, "Wordsworth, Cowper, and the Language of Eighteenth-Century Politics" in Thomas Woodman, ed., Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) 117-33.

(4.) The Speeches of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox in the House of Commons (London, 1815) 4: 427.

(5.) The Origin and Progress of Kings; a Poem; by the celebrated Mr. Cowper. And The Progress of a Divine (London, 1798?).

(6.) Vincent Newey, in his subtle and far-reaching reading of The Task, spends only a page and a half on these "promulgatory" lines (Cowper's Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment [Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982] 141-42), and Richard Feingold characterizes this "digression" as an intrusion which "adds little to the conclusions implicit in the mythical narrative" that "points only to the realm of grace, in which natural and political evils are transcended rather than resolved" (Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1978] 181-83).

(7.) Mme de Stael, Considerations sur la Revolution francaise, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Tallandier, 1983) 542. All quotations and citations from Stael's work in the main body of the text refer to this edition. All translations of the Considerations are taken from the newly revised edition of the 1818 English translation, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009) and cited by page number, in this instance, 673.

(8.) For the relation between the idealized vision of English culture presented in the Considerations and Stael's actual knowledge and encounters from her visit in 1813-14, see Beatrice W. Jasinski, "Madame de Stael, l'Angleterre de 1813-1814 et les 'Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise,'" Revue d'Histoire litteraire de la France 66.1 (1966): 12-24. For a thorough documentation of her Anglophilia throughout her career, see Robert Escarpit, L'Angleterre dans l'oeuvre de Madame de Stael (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1954).

(9.) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 3-17 (Sept. 1818): 633. For the authorship of this and other related articles in Blackwood's, my source has been Alan Lang Strout, A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood's Magazine 1817-1825 (Texas Technological College, Lubbock Library Bulletin 5 [1959]).

(10.) Roberto Romani provides an extensive analysis of these shifting ideological motivations, as well as a detailed chapter on Mme de Stael, in National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).

(11.) Ian Duncan, "Blackwood's and Romantic Nationalism" in David Finkelstein, ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition 1805-1930 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006) 83.

(12.) Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 23. In erudite readings of Keats's early Poems of 1817 and Heine's Buch der Lieder of 1827, Pfau perceives melancholy not as a thematic reference or subjective expression, but as what he calls "a psychohistorical phenomenon that attains legibility in the poetry's formal design (342)." Though edging closer to self-consciousness than paranoia or trauma, melancholy, in Pfau's argument, shares with these other "romantic moods" a resistance to reflexive awareness or thematic representation. Nonetheless, it may be perceived through a symptomatic reading of form as both the index and effacement of spiritual, political, and cultural tensions that both enable and disrupt societies at different historical moments. Pfau thus provides both a history of romantic interiority as a productive tension between spiritual ambition and cultural abjection and a model for a critical method that stresses Romanticism's capacity for immanent critique.

(13.) Stael, CEuvres completes (Paris, 1820) 4: 257, 260. Cited hereafter in the text by volume and page ["Depression of spirits leads us to penetrate deeper into the character and destiny of man than any other disposition of the mind" and hence is "much more suitable ... to the minds of a free people"]. English translation from A Treatise on Ancient and Modern Literature (London, 1803) 1: 275, 278, cited hereafter in the text.

(14.) William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). See in particular the second part, "Emotions in History: France 1700-1850" (141-314).

(15.) Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word "Stimmung" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1963).

(16.) Recent theoretical reflections on melancholy have come around to Stael's emphasis on social theory, construing melancholy in aggressively cultural and political terms. Literary and cultural theorists from Judith Butler, David Simpson, and Paul Gilroy to Anne Anlin Cheng and Jenny Edkins, while pursuing a variety of topics and socio-political agendas, concur in understanding melancholy both as a symptom of the ideological contradictions of the modern nation-state and as a potentially subversive position for radical critique, one that resists the consolations proffered by official narratives of reconciliation in favor of creative reclamations of memory and difference. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian aptly summarize the ambitions of this critical literature in their aspiration to generate "a politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary" ("Introduction: Mourning Remains" in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning [Berkeley: U of California P, 2003] 2). See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001); Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia UP, 2005); David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006).

(17.) Mme de Stael, Germany (London, 1813) 3: 19-20.

(18.) Mme de Stael, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 140. My brief assessment of Corinne is here indebted to the insights of William Ray, The Logic of Culture: Authority and Identity in the Modern Era (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

(19.) Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004) 46.

(20.) Linda Orr, Headless History: Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 21; cited in Fritzsche 46.

(21.) Marie-Helene Huet, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 100.

(22.) Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 5. Dominick LaCapra has written extensively on the relations between trauma and historiography, but I have benefited most from his theoretical reflections in Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001) and History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004). Simone Balaye provides a compelling account of the traumatic and despairing environment surrounding the composition of the Considerations in the sixth chapter of Madame de Stael: Lumieres et Liberte (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), "La Reconquete de la Liberte" (199-243). Linda Orr offers a precise account of the logic of Stael's familial and national conflations in "Outspoken Women and the Rightful Daughter of the Revolution: Madame de Stael's Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise" in Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992) 121-36. Deborah Jenson, while mostly silent on Stael, offers considerations of her own on the traumatic conflation of private life and public events in French Romanticism in Trauma and its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001).

(23.) The most complete study of the Considerations remains G. E. Gwynne, Madame de Stael et la Revolution Francaise: Politique, philosophie, litterature (Paris: Nizet, 1969) which positions the work in detailed relation to her lire and intellectual career as well as the works of her father and the Ideologues.

(24.) Stefania Tesser, "La Presence de l'auteur dans les Considerations sur la Revolution francaise de Madame de Stael," Annali di Ca' Foscari 31.1-2 (1992): 309-28; see also Stefania Tesser, "L'Inscription du moi dans le discours politique: Les Considerations sur la Revolution francaise," Cahiers staeliens 43 (1991): 29-44.

(25.) Michel Delon, "Germaine de Stael and Other Possible Scenarios of the Revolution" in Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo, eds. Germaine de Stael: Crossing the Borders (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991) 22-33. For a detailed contextualization of the theatrical metaphor in Stael's writings and contemporary reflections on the revolution, see Michel Delon, "La metaphore theatrale dans les Considerations sur la Revolution francaise" in Etienne Hofmann and Anne-Lise Delacretaz, eds., Le Groupe de Coppet et la Revolution francaise. Actes du quatrieme colloque de Coppet, 20-23 juillet 1988 (Paris: Jean Touzot, 1988) 163-73. Karyna Szmurlo reads the use of performative language in the Austinian sense in the Considerations as a means of asserting logical clarity over the obfuscations of the Terror and Napoleonic rule. Karyna Szmurlo, "Speech Acts: Germaine de Stael's Historiography of the Revolution" in Catherine R. Montfort, ed., Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1994) 237-52.

(26.) Here I follow Fritz Breithaupt's recent recuperation of pre-Freudian models of trauma in German Romanticism, in which he observes how early psychological theorists such as Karl Philip Moritz construe the relation between repetition and remembering as enabling rather than repressive. Trauma in early texts by Moritz and E. T. A. Hoffman provides a "condition of possibility" for the retrospective creation of an empowered and autonomous self, so that grief and repetition facilitate categorical understanding and self-identity, a process extendable in the case of Stael to a model of recuperative historiography. See Fritz Breithaupt, "The Invention of Trauma in German Romanticism," Critical Inquiry 32 (Autumn 2005): 77--101.

(27.) For the persistence and logic of the analogy between religious fanaticism and the excesses of the revolution in Stael's Considerations and subsequent histories, see Michel Delon, "La Saint-Barthelemy et la Terreur chez Mme Stael et les historiens de la Revolution aux XIXeme siecle," Romantisme 31 (1981): 49-62.

(28.) Simone Balaye has observed how the contrast between Necker and Napoleon serves as a secondary structure in the analytical logic of the Considerations and forms part of Stael's general appraisal of the role of individual genius in historical events. Simone Balaye, "La Revolution et ses personnages selon Madame de Stael," Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France 90.4-5 (1990): 631-40.

(29.) Linda Orr, "Outspoken Women" 131. See also Gwynne, Madame de Stael et la Revolution Francaise 234-61.

(30.) "Quant aux nobles qui sentent que les privileges de l'aristocratie doivent a present s'appuyer sur le despotisme que jadis ils servoient a limiter, on peut leur dire comme dans le roman de Waverley. 'Ce qui vous importe, ce n'est pas tant que Jacques Stuart soit roi, mais que Fergus Marc-Ivor soit comte.' L'institution de la pairie accessible au merite est pour la noblesse, ce que la constitution angloise est pour la monarchie. C'est la seule maniere de conserver l'une et l'autre; car nous vivons dans un siecle ou l'on ne concoit pas bien comment la minorite, et une si petite minorite, auroit un droit qui ne seroit pas pour l'avantage de la majorite" (601) ["As to the nobles who are convinced that the privileges of the aristocracy must now rest upon the despotism which they once were instrumental in limiting, we may say to them, as in the romance of Waverley: 'What concerns you is not so much whether James Stuart shall be King, as whether Fergus Mac Ivor shall be Earl.' The institution of a peerage accessible to merit is to nobility what the English constitution is to monarchy. It is the only mode of preserving either the one or the other: for we live in an age in which the world does not readily imagine that the minority, and a very small minority, can have a right which is not for the advantage of the majority" (748-49)].

(31.) Extensive information regarding Stael's reception in the British press throughout her career and after her death may be round in Robert Calvin Whitford, "Madame de Stael's Literary Reputation in England," University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 4 (1918): 1-62. Romani also discusses her reception in National Character 85-92. The reception of Stael's Considerations in the French press was extensive, but a topic outside the parameters of this study. See Jacques Godechot's introduction to his edition 32-41; Gwynne 272-83; and Frank P. Bowman, "La polemique sur les Considerations sur la Revolution francaise" in Hofmann and Delacretaz, Le Groupe de Coppet et la Revolution francaise 225-41. For one aspect of the German reception, see also in the same volume, Heinz Hamm, "La reception des Considerations sur la Revolution francaise dans les journaux litteraires allemands jusqu'aux decisions de Karlsbad" 243-52.

(32.) Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature 12.141 (Sept. 1817): 556.

(33.) Monthly Review 88 (Feb. 1819): 151.

(34.) Lord Byron, Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1973). These lines are cited in Whitford 46.

(35.) On the interpretative tendencies of the Edinburgh Review as a response to the crises instigated by the French Revolution and Napoleonic ambitions, see Jerome Christensen, "The Detection of the Romantic Conspiracy in Britain," South Atlantic Quarterly 95.3 (1996): 60327. Biancamaria Fontana traces in great detail the influence of events in France on the intellectual agendas of the Edinburgh Review in Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review 1802-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 11-45. Ian Duncan reads Francis Jeffrey's review of Stael's De la litterature as offering a sociological critique of literature's commoditization as part of a larger program to promote critical judgment as a cultural defense against the debasements of commercial society, Ian Duncan, "Edinburgh, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" in James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 45-64. See also J. H. Alexander, "Learning from Europe: Continental Literature in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine 1802-1825," The Wordsworth Circle 21.3 0990): 118-23. Alexander notes that the ideological competition between the two reviews is mirrored by their preferences for French and German literature respectively and compares the two primary reviews of the Considerations by Jeffrey and Lockhart as a study in the emergence, in the case of the latter, of a distinctively Romantic style of review. Jon P. Klancher places the critical vocabulary of both of these periodicals and others within the context of a burgeoning middle-class cultural self-identification in The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987) 47-75.

(36.) Edinburgh Review 11.21 (Oct. 1807): 183, 194.

(37.) Edinburgh Review 21.41 (Feb. 1813): 2-3. See also 21.42 (July 1813): 424-32, and 22.43 (Oct. 1813): 198-238.

(38.) This review has been considered in relation to a defensive reading of the Considerations by Midori Matsuno, "A propos d'un compte rendu critique paru dans The Edinburgh Review: Jugement d'un membre du parti Whig sur Les Considerations sur la Revolution francaise de Mme de Stael," Etudes de Langue et Litterature Francaises 68 (Mar 1996): 59-71.

(39.) Edinburgh Review 30.60 (Sept. 1818): 275.

(40.) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 3.18 (Sept. 1818): 633-34.

(41.) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 4.20 (Nov. 1818): 198.

(42.) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 4.21 (Dec. 1818): 278.

(43.) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 3.17 (August 1818): 519.

(44.) Included as an appendix in R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, eds., Lyrical Ballads (London: Routledge, 1991) 336.

(45.) See Wordsworth's letter to Wilson for 7 June 1802 in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) 1: 352-58, and also Preface to Lyrical Ballads: "In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time" (259).

(46.) Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) 2: 235.

(47.) A far more extensive treatment of the relation between Stael and Byron, one that stresses dissension on issues of irony and enthusiasm more than a kindred vision, may be found in Joanne Wilkes, Lord Byron and Madame de Stael: Born for Opposition (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999). I do not contest Wilkes' readings of Byron's response to the Considerations but wish to emphasize the affiliations between irony and enthusiasm that she discusses (174-76) and to frame their oppositions within the broader political divides of the post-Napoleonic era which find Byron and Stael in greater proximity.