Page:Madame de Staël (1887 Bella Duffy).djvu/133

Rh fell under the spell of the hostess. Byron himself some years later recorded how much more charming Madame de Staël was in her own house than out of it; and she seems to have possessed the art of dispensing her hospitality, which was royal, with as much grace as cordiality.

Among the new figures in these years at Coppet were Werner and Oehlenschläger. Both were poets and cursed with the irritability of the genus, so that their mutual exasperation was great, and Madame de Staël had some trouble to keep the peace between them. Sismondi in one of his letters described Werner as a man of many intellectual gifts, who considered himself the apostle of Love and bound to preach it in his wanderings through the world. Occasionally his utterances were a little puzzling to sober-minded people, who were too much taken aback by his mystical mixtures of passion, sentiment, and piety to be always ready with an answer.

Werner had had a Sturm und Drang period of extreme dissipation, had taken to Freemasonry, and imbibed, apparently, some of the ideas of the Illuminati; and, besides his mysticism in religion, inclined to socialism in politics. After all this vagueness of thought, joined to a highly impressionable and very vivid temperament, it is not surprising to learn that he eventually became a Roman Catholic priest and rose to great renown as a preacher.

Oehlenschläger has left a spiteful picture of Werner, with his nose full of snuff, discussing his esoteric doctrines in an execrable patois which was intended for French. Both poets, however, united in admiring and praising, almost worshipping, Madame de Staël, and she on her side seems to have cared little for any