ght recrudescence of biographical interest may have
taken place in her, her works are little read, _Corinne_ is ranked next
to _De l'Allemagne_ as her greatest production; while as a work of form,
not of matter, as literature of power, not of knowledge, it has at last
a chance of enduring when its companion is but a historical
document--the record of a moment that has long passed away.

The advocates of the _milieu_ theory--the theory which will have it that
you can explain almost the whole of any work of art by examining the
circumstances, history, and so forth of the artist--have a better chance
with _Corinne_ than with many books, though those who disagree with them
(as I own that I do) may retort that this was precisely because Madame
de Stael in literature has little idiosyncracy, and is a receptive, not
a creative, force. The moment at which this book was composed and
appeared had really many of the characteristics of crisis and climax in
the life of the author. She was bidding adieu to youth; and though her
talents, her wealth, her great reputation, and her indomitable
determination to surround herself with admirers still made her a sort of
queen of society, some illusions at least must have been passing from
her. The most serious of her many passions, that for Benjamin Constant,
was coming, though it had not yet come, to an end. Her father, whom she
unfeignedly idolised, was not long dead. The conviction must have been
for some time forcing itself on her, though she did not even yet give up
hope, that Napoleon's resolve not to allow her presence in her still
more idolised Paris was unconquerable. Her husband, who indeed had long
been nothing to her, was dead also, and the fancy for replacing him with
the boy Rocca had not yet arisen. The influence of the actual chief of
her usual herd of lovers, courtiers, teachers, friends (to use whichever
term, or combination of terms, the charitable reader pleases), A.W.
Schlegel, though it never could incline her innately unpoetical and
unreligious mind to either poetry or religion, drove her towards
aesthetics of one kind and another. Lastly, the immense intellectual
excitement of her visits to Weimar, Berlin, and Italy, added its
stimulus to produce a fresh intellectual ferment in her. On the purely
intellectual side the result was _De l'Allemagne_, which does not
concern us; on the side of feeling, tinged with aesthetic philosophy, of
study of the archaic and the pictures