Corinne, Volume 1 | Page 2

Smith, when it appeared a few years earlier, as "this dismal trash which has nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic with gaping." The Whigs had not then taken up Madame de Stael, as they did afterwards, or it is quite certain that Mr Sydney would not have been allowed to exercise such Britannic frankness. Corinne met with gentler treatment from his friends, if not from himself. Sir James Mackintosh, in particular, was full of the wildest enthusiasm about it, though he admitted that it was "full of faults so obvious as not to be worth mentioning." It must be granted to be in more than one, or two important points a very great advance on Delphine. One is that the easy and illegitimate source of interest which is drawn upon in the earlier book is here quite neglected. Delphine presents the eternal French situation of the "triangle;" the line of Corinne is straight, and the only question is which pair of three points it is to unite in an honourable way. A French biographer of Madame de Stael, who is not only an excellent critic and an extremely clever writer, but a historian of great weight and acuteness, M. Albert Sorel, has indeed admitted that both Léonce, the hero of Delphine, who will not make himself and his beloved happy because he has an objection to divorcing his wife, and Lord Nelvil, who refuses either to seduce or to marry the woman who loves him and whom he loves, are equal donkeys with a national difference. Léonce is more of a "fool;" Lord Nelvil more of a "snob." It is something to find a Frenchman who will admit that any national characteristic is foolish: I could have better reciprocated M. Sorel's candour if he had used the word "prig" instead of "snob" of Lord Nelvil. But indeed I have often suspected that Frenchmen confuse these two engaging attributes of the Britannic nature.
A "higher moral tone" (as the phrase goes) is not the only advantage which Corinne possesses over its forerunner. Delphine is almost avowedly autobiographical; and though Madame de Stael had the wit and the prudence to mix and perplex her portraits and her reminiscences so that it was nearly impossible to fit definite caps on the personages, there could be no doubt that Delphine was herself--as she at least would have liked to be--drawn as close as she dared. These personalities have in the hands of the really great masters of fiction sometimes produced astonishing results; but no one probably would contend that Madame de Stael was a born novelist. Although Delphine has many more personages and much more action of the purely novel kind than Corinne, it is certainly not an interesting book; I think, though I have been reproached for, to say the least, lacking fervour as a Staelite, that Corinne is.
But it is by no means unimportant that intending readers should know the sort of interest that they are to expect from this novel; and for that purpose it is almost imperative that they should know what kind of person was this novelist. A good deal of biographical pains has been spent, as has been already more than once hinted, on Madame de Stael. She was most undoubtedly of European reputation in her day; and between her day and this, quite independently of the real and unquestionable value of her work, a high estimate of her has been kept current by the fact that her daughter was the wife of Duke Victor and the mother of Duke Albert of Broglie, and that so a proper respect for her has been a necessary passport to favour in one of the greatest political and academic houses of France; while another not much less potent in both ways, that of the Counts d'Haussonville, also represents her. Still people, and especially English people, have so many non-literary things to think of, that it may not be quite unpardonable to supply that conception of the life of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baroness of Stael-Holstein, which is so necessary to the understanding of Corinne, and which may, in possible cases, be wanting.
She was born on the 22nd of April 1766, and was, as probably everybody knows, the daughter of the Swiss financier, Necker, whom the French Revolution first exalted to almost supreme power in France, and then cast off--fortunately for him, in a less tragical fashion than that in which it usually cast off its favourites. Her mother was Suzanne Curchod, the first love of Gibbon, a woman of a delicate beauty, of very considerable mental and social faculties, a kind of puritanical coquette, but devoted to her (by all accounts not particularly interesting) husband. Indeed, mother and daughter are said to have been from a very early period jealous of