here could be no doubt that Delphine was herself--as she at least would
have liked to be--drawn as close as she dared. These personalities have
in the hands of the really great masters of fiction sometimes produced
astonishing results; but no one probably would contend that Madame de
Stael was a born novelist. Although _Delphine_ has many more personages
and much more action of the purely novel kind than _Corinne_, it is
certainly not an interesting book; I think, though I have been
reproached for, to say the least, lacking fervour as a Staelite, that
_Corinne_ is.

But it is by no means unimportant that intending readers should know the
sort of interest that they are to expect from this novel; and for that
purpose it is almost imperative that they should know what kind of
person was this novelist. A good deal of biographical pains has been
spent, as has been already more than once hinted, on Madame de Stael.
She was most undoubtedly of European reputation in her day; and between
her day and this, quite independently of the real and unquestionable
value of her work, a high estimate of her has been kept current by the
fact that her daughter was the wife of Duke Victor and the mother of
Duke Albert of Broglie, and that so a proper respect for her has been a
necessary passport to favour in one of the greatest political and
academic houses of France; while another not much less potent in both
ways, that of the Counts d'Haussonville, also represents her. Still
people, and especially English people, have so many non-literary things
to think of, that it may not be quite unpardonable to supply that
conception of the life of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baroness of
Stael-Holstein, which is so necessary to the understanding of _Corinne_,
and which may, in possible cases, be wanting.

She was born on the 22nd of April 1766, and was, as probably everybody
knows, the daughter of the Swiss financier, Necker, whom the French
Revolution first exalted to almost supreme power in France, and then
cast off--fortunately for him, in a less tragical fashion than that in
which it usually cast off its favourites. Her mother was Suzanne
Curchod, the first love of Gibbon, a woman of a delicate beauty, of very
considerable mental and social faculties, a kind of puritanical
coquette, but devoted to her (by all accounts not particularly
interesting) husband. Indeed, mother and daughter are said to have been
from a very early period jealous of each