of the Passions upon
the Happiness of Individuals and Nations (1796), were followed in
1800 by her elaborate study, _De la Litterature consideree dans ses
Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales_. Its central idea is that
of human progress: freedom, incarnated in republican institutions,
will assure the natural development of the spirit of man; a great
literature will be the offspring of progress and of freedom; and each
nation will lend its lights to other nations to illuminate the general
advance. Madame de Stael hoped to cast the spell of her intellect
over the young conqueror Bonaparte; Bonaparte regarded a political
meteor in feminine form with cold and haughty aversion. In 1802 the
husband, whom she had never loved, was dead. Her passion for Benjamin
Constant had passed through various crises in its troubled career--a
series of attractions ending in repulsions, and repulsions leading
to attractions, such as may be discovered in Constant's remarkable
novel _Adolphe_. They could neither decide to unite their lives, nor
to part for ever. Adolphe, in Constant's novel, after a youth of
pleasure-seeking, is disenchanted with life; his love of Ellenore
is that of one whose passions are exhausted, who loves for vanity
or a new indulgence of egoism; but Ellenore, whose youth is past,
will abandon all for him, and she imposes on him the tyranny of her
devotion. Each is the other's torturer, each is the other's
consolation. In the mastery of his cruel psychology Constant
anticipates Balzac.

Madame de Stael lightened the stress of inward storm by writing
_Delphine_, the story of a woman of genius, whose heroic follies bring
her into warfare with the world. The lover of Delphine, violent and
feeble, sentimental and egoistic, is an accomplice of the world in
doing her wrong, and Delphine has no refuge but death in the wilds
of America.[1]

[Footnote 1: In the first edition, Delphine dies by her own hand.]

In 1803 Madame de Stael received orders to trouble Paris with her
torrent of ideas and of speech no longer. The illustrious victim of
Napoleon's persecution hastened to display her ideas at Weimar, where
Goethe protected his equanimity, as well as might be, from the storm
of her approach, and Schiller endured her literary enthusiasm with
a sense of prostration. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, tutor to her
sons, became the interpreter of Germany to her eager and apprehensive
mind. Having annexed Germany to her empire, she ad