Corinne, Volume 1 | Page 5

of ?sthetics, of Italian history, and of the contrasted character of the chief European nations. Nelvil on his side is distracted between the influence of the beauty, genius, and evident passion of Corinne, and his English prejudices; while the situation is further complicated by the regulation discovery that Corinne, though born in Italy of an Italian mother, is, strictly speaking, his own compatriot, being the elder and lawful daughter of a British peer, Lord Edgermond, his father's closest friend. Nay more, he had always been destined to wed this very girl; and it was only after her father's second marriage with an Englishwoman that the younger and wholly English daughter, Lucile, was substituted in the paternal schemes as his destined spouse. He hears, on the other hand, how Corinne had visited her fatherland and her step-mother, how she had found both intolerable, and how she had in a modified and decent degree "thrown her cap over the mill" by returning to Italy to live an independent life as a poetess, an improvisatrice, and, at least in private, an actress.
It is not necessary to supply fuller argument of the text which follows, and of which, when the reader has got this length, he is not likely to let the _déno?ment_ escape him. But the action of Corinne gets rather slowly under weigh; and I have known those who complained that they found the book hard to read because they were so long in coming to any clear notion of "what it was all about." Therefore so much argument as has been given seems allowable.
But we ought by this time to have laid sufficient foundation to make it not rash to erect a small superstructure of critical comment on the book now once more submitted to English readers. Of that book I own that I was myself a good many years ago, and for a good many years, a harsh and even a rather unfair judge. I do not know whether years have brought me the philosophic mind, or whether the book--itself, as has been said, the offspring of middle-aged emotions--appeals more directly to a middle-aged than to a young judgment. To the young of its own time and the times immediately succeeding it appealed readily enough, and scarcely Byron himself (who was not a little influenced by it) had more to do with the Italomania of Europe in the second quarter of this century than Madame de Stael.
The faults of the novel indeed are those which impress themselves (as Mackintosh, we have seen, allowed) immediately and perhaps excessively. M. Sorel observes of its companion sententiously but truly, "Si le style de Delphine semble vieilli, c'est qu'il a été jeune." If not merely the style but the sentiment, the whole properties and the whole stage management of Corinne seem out of date now, it is only because they were up to date then. It is easy to laugh--not perhaps very easy to abstain from laughing--at the "schall" twisted in Corinne's hair, where even contemporaries mocked the hideous turban with which Madame de Stael chose to bedizen her not too beautiful head; at Nelvil's inky cloak; at the putting out of the fire; at the queer stilted half-Ossianic, half-German rants put in the poetess's mouth; at the endless mingling of gallantry and pedantry; at the hesitations of Nelvil; at the agonies of Corinne. When French critics tell us that as they allow the good-humoured satire on the Count d'Erfeuil to be just, we ought to do the same in reference to the "cant Britannique" of Nelvil and of the Edgermond circle, we can only respectfully answer that we should not presume to dispute their judgment in the first case, but that they really must leave us to ours in the second. As a matter of fact, Madame de Stael's goody English characters, are rather like Miss Edgeworth's naughty French ones in Leonora and elsewhere--clever generalisations from a little observation and a great deal of preconceived idea, not studies from the life.
But this (and a great deal more that might be said if it were not something like petty treason in an introduction-writer thus to play the devil's advocate against his author) matters comparatively little, and leaves enough in Corinne to furnish forth a book almost great, interesting without any "almost," and remarkable as a not very large shelf-ful in the infinite library of modern fiction deserves remark. For the passion of its two chief characters, however oddly, and to us unfashionably, presented, however lacking in the commanding and perennial qualities which make us indifferent to fashion in the work of the greatest masters, is real. And it is perhaps only after a pretty long study of literature that one perceives how very little real passion books, even pretty good books, contain, how much