Corinne, Volume 1 | Page 5

Italy
and the Italians, by guiding him to all the great spectacles of Rome and
indeed of the country generally, and by explaining to him at great
length what she understands of the general theory of æsthetics, 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 _dénoûment_ 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