t, and sometimes said, that the period of the
French Revolution and of the Napoleonic wars--extending as it does
strictly to more than a quarter of a century, while four decades were
more than completed before a distinct turn of tide--is, for France, the
least individual and least satisfactorily productive time in all her
great literature. And it is, to a large extent, true. But the loss of
individuality implies the presence of indiscernibility; and not to go
out of our own department, there are at least three writers who, if but
partially, cancel this entry to discredit. Of one of them--the lowest in
general literature, if not quite in our division of
it--Pigault-Lebrun--we have spoken in the last volume. The other
two--much less craftsmanlike novelists merely as such, but immeasurably
greater as man and woman of letters--remain for discussion in the first
chapter of this. In pure chronological order Chateaubriand should come
first, as well as in other "ranks" of various kinds. But History, though
it may never neglect, may sometimes overrule Chronology by help of a
larger and higher point of view: sex and birth hardly count here, and
the departmental primes the intrinsic literary importance.
Chateaubriand, too, was a little younger than Madame de Stael in years,
though his actual publication, in anything like our kind, came before
hers. And he reached much farther than she did, though curiously enough
some of his worst faults were more of the eighteenth century than hers.
She helped to finish "Sensibility"; she transformed "Philosophism" into
something more modern; she borrowed a good deal (especially in the
region of aesthetics) that was to be importantly germinal from Germany.
But she had practically nothing of that sense of the past and of the
strange which was to rejuvenate all literature, and which he had; while
she died before the great French Romantic outburst began. So let us
begin with her.[8]

[Sidenote: _Delphine._]

"This dismal trash, which has nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic
who has read it," was the extremely rude judgment pronounced by Sydney
Smith on Madame de Stael's _Delphine_. Sydney was a good-natured person
and a gentleman, nor had he, merely as a Whig, any reason to quarrel
with the lady's general attitude to politics--a circumstance which, one
regrets to say, did in those days, on both sides, rather improperly
qualify the attitude of gentlemen to literary ladies as well as to each
o