ther. It is true that the author of _Corinne_ and of _Delphine_ itself
had been rather a thorn in the side of the English Whigs by dint of some
of her opinions, by much of her conduct, and, above all, by certain
peculiarities which may be noticed presently. But Sydney, though a Whig,
was not "a _vile_ Whig," for which reason the Upper Powers, in his later
years, made him something rather indistinguishable from a Tory. And that
blunt common sense, which in his case cohabited with the finest
_un_common wit, must have found itself, in this instance, by no means
at variance with its housemate in respect of Anne Germaine Necker.

There are many _worse_ books than _Delphine_. It is excellently written;
there is no bad blood in it; there is no intentional licentiousness; on
the contrary, there are the most desperate attempts to live up to a New
Morality by no means entirely of the Wiggins kind. But there is an
absence of humour which is perfectly devastating: and there is a
presence of the most disastrous atmosphere of sham sentiment, sham
morality, sham almost everything, that can be imagined. It was hinted in
the last volume that Madame de Stael's lover, Benjamin Constant, shows
in one way the Nemesis of Sensibility; so does she herself in another.
But the difference! In _Adolphe_ a coal from the altar of true passion
has touched lips in themselves polluted enough, and the result is what
it always is in such, alas! rare cases, whether the lips were polluted
or not. In _Delphine_ there is a desperate pother to strike some sort of
light and get some sort of heat; but the steel is naught, the flint is
clay, the tinder is mouldy, and the wood is damp and rotten. No glow of
brand or charcoal follows, and the lips, untouched by it, utter nothing
but rhetoric and fustian and, as the Sydneian sentence speaks it,
"trash."[9]

[Sidenote: The tone.]

In fact, to get any appropriate metaphorical description of it one has
to change the terminology altogether. In a very great line Mr. Kipling
has spoken of a metaphorical ship--

With a drogue of dead convictions to keep her head to gale.

Madame de Stael has cast off not only that drogue, but even the other
and perhaps commoner floating ballast and steadier of dead
_conventions_, and is trying to beat up against the gale by help of all
sorts of jury-masts and extemporised try-sails of other new conventions
that are mostly blowing out of the bolt-ropes. We said that Crebillon's
wo