ll before it, we are never _shown_ it. It is
all "words, words." To speak of her love in the same breath with Julie's
is to break off the speech in laughter; to consider her woes and
remember Clarissa's is to be ready to read another seven or eight
volumes of Richardson in lieu of these three of Madame de Stael's.

And yet this lady could do something in the novel way, and, when the
time came, she did it.

[Sidenote: _Corinne._]

Between _Delphine_ and _Corinne_ Madame de Stael had, in the fullest
sense of a banal phrase, "seen a great of the world." She had lost the
illusions which the Duessa Revolution usually spreads among clever but
not wise persons at her first appearance, and had not left her bones,
as too many[12] such persons do, in the _pieuvre_-caves which the
monster keeps ready. She had seen England, being "coached" by
Crabb-Robinson and others, so as to give some substance to the vague
_philosophe-Anglomane_ flimsiness of her earlier fancy. She had seen
Republicanism turn to actual Tyranny, and had made exceedingly
unsuccessful attempts to captivate the tyrant. She had seen Germany, and
had got something of its then not by any means poisonous, if somewhat
windy, "culture"; a little romance of a kind, though she was never a
real Romantic; some aesthetics; some very exoteric philosophy, etc. She
had done a great deal of not very happy love-making; had been a woman of
letters, a patroness of men of letters, and--most important of all--had
never dismounted from her old hobby "Sensibility," though she had learnt
how to put it through new paces.

A critical reader of _Corinne_ must remember all this, and he must
remember something else, though the reminder has been thought to savour
of brutality. It is perfectly clear to me, and always has been so from
reading (in and between the lines) of her own works, of Lady
Blennerhassett's monumental book on her, of M. Sorel's excellent
monograph, and of scores of longer and shorter studies on and references
to her English and German and Swiss and French--from her own time
downwards, that the central secret, mainspring, or whatever any one may
choose to call it, of Madame de Stael's life was a frantic desire for
the physical beauty which she did not possess,[13] and a persistent
attempt, occasionally successful, to delude herself into believing that
she had achieved a sufficient substitute by literary, philosophical,
political, and other exertion.

[Sidenote: Its impr