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management of _Corinne_ seem out of date now, it is only because they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 of what at times seems
to us passionate in them owes its appeal to accident, mode, and the
personal equation. Of the highest achievement of art--that which avails
itself of, but subdues, personal thought and feeling in the elaboration
of a perfectly live character--Madame de Stael was indeed incapable. But
in the second order--that which, availing itself of, but not subduing,
the personal element, keeps enough of its veracity an