ctly what
"snobbishness" is.[17] My Lord Nelvil has many faults and very few
merits, but among the former I do not perceive any snobbishness. He is
not in the least attracted by Corinne's popularity, either with the
great vulgar or the small, and his hesitations about marrying her do not
arise from any doubt (while he is still ignorant on the subject) of her
social worthiness to be his wife. He _is_ a prig doubtless, but he is a
prig of a very peculiar character--a sort of passionate prig, or, to put
it in another way, one of Baudelaire's "Enfants de la lune," who, not
content with always pining after the place where he is not and the love
that he has not, is constantly making not merely himself, but the place
where he is and the love whom he has, uncomfortable and miserable. There
can, I think, be little doubt that Madame de Stael, who frequently
insists on his "irresolution" (remember that she had been in Germany and
heard the Weimar people talk), meant him for a sort of modern Hamlet in
very different circumstances as well as times. But it takes your
Shakespeare to manage your Hamlet, and Madame de Stael was not
Shakespeare, even in petticoats.

[Sidenote: And the book's absurdities.]

The absurdities of the book are sufficiently numerous. Lord Nelvil, who
has not apparently had any special experience of the sea, "advises" the
sailors, and takes the helm during a storm on his passage from Harwich
to Emden; while these English mariners, unworthy professional
descendants of that admirable man, the boatswain of the opening scenes
of _The Tempest_, are actually grateful to him, and when he goes 'ashore
"press themselves round him" to take leave of him (that is to say, they
do this in the book; what in all probability they actually _said_ would
not be fit for these pages). He is always saving people--imprisoned
Jews and lunatics at a fire in Ancona; aged lazzaroni who get
caught in a sudden storm-wave at Naples; and this in spite of the
convenient-inconvenient blood-vessels which break when it is necessary,
but still make it quite easy for him to perform these Herculean feats
and resume his rather interim military duties when he pleases. As for
Corinne, her exploits with her "schall" (a vestment of which Madame de
Stael also was fond), and her crowning in the Capitol, where the crown
tumbles off--an incident which in real life would be slightly comical,
but which here only gives Nelvil an opportunity of picking it up--fo