Delphine (review)

194 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 On this subject Cumberland may have been as confused as the best of them. His Sophian spokesman complains of European brides appearing tiie day after their wedding night, "without blushes, though ruffled with tiie inordinate first rites of impetuous love: and, still more strangely indelicate, instead of fanning the mysterious flame, by soft denials, and secret conjunctions, they occupy the same pallet openly, and nightly" (p. 68). The narrator finds it quite otherwise with his Sophian lover: "The transporting hours we enjoyed were greatly enhanced by the imagined secrecy of our appointments; and, although there is no doubt that the good family in which we resided, saw, and rejoiced at our union, they had the generosity to conceal from us the discovery" (p. 72). One suspects that Cumberland's preference for "secret conjunctions" was based on something other than concentrated thought on the subject of comparative ethics. Cumberland's novel has a certain value as a literary curiosity, since it is the work of a friend of William Blake. Bentley suggests that in writing part 1 of The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar Cumberland was influenced by Blake's thinking (p. xxxviixli ). It seems, however, that Cumberland's admiration for Blake was largely confined to his work as a graphic artist. In the British Library's copy of Cumberland's poems "Lewina the Maid of Snowdon" and "A Poem on the Landscapes of Great-Britain" (both printed in 1793 and, in this instance, bound together as a single volume), there is an inscription to the Rev. J. Eagles, written by Cumberland some time after 1810, in which he says "you are the only Poet I was ever acquainted with except S. Rogers" (i.e., Samuel Rogers). Cumberland seems to have decided not to publish part 1 of The Captive ofthe Castle ofSennaar in 1798 for fear of being prosecuted by the government on account of one provocative paragraph that might easily have been excised from the text, and Bentley suggests (p. xliv n. 10) that similar fears had led to the suppression of Blake's French Revolution in 1791. This suggestion, though not original, is not altogether plausible, and in 1798 Cumberland acted very naively in following tiie advice proffered by Henry Erskine that his provocative paragraph was "dangerous, under Mr. Pitt's maladministration." The Henry Erskine referred to (p. xliv) is presumably the Hon. Henry Erskine, leader of the Edinburgh bar, a man eminently qualified to give an opinion on the legal system and the prevailing political conditions in Scotland but almost totally ignorant of the very different legal position and political climate south of the border. But even if one is left unconvinced by Bentley's presentation of Blake and Cumberland as a pair of prophets forced to censor themselves for fear of government prosecution, any material that adds to what we know about William Blake's intellectual milieu is to be welcomed. A.D. Harvey London Germaine de Staël. Delphine. 2 vols. S. Balayé et L. Omacini, Edition critique; L. Omacini, L'Avant-texte: contribution à une étude de critique génétique. Textes littéraires français, n05 346, 386. Geneva: Droz, 1987, 1990. 1040, 575pp. SFr. 80, 90. The publication by Lucia Omacini of the surviving drafts of Delphine is an indispensable supplement to the critical edition brought out by the same editor and Simone Balayé, the doyenne of Staël-studien, in 1987. Together, the two volumes constitute a monumental contribution to our knowledge of a work that may one day, at least for those who are REVIEWS 195 not put off by its long-windedness, enjoy the canonical status in feminist literature that it once had for students of Romanticism. The virtues of volume 1 will already be familiar to most specialists. I shall simply recapitulate them as briefly as possible in order to focus thereafter on volume 2, half tiie size but double tiie value of its predecessor, in terms of new material and critical interest. Apart from the text (all 900-odd pages of it), the earlier volume contained an historical introduction, emphasizing the links between Delphine and Madame de Staël's life...