rm a
similar prelude to a long series of extravagances. The culmination of
them is that altogether possible-improbable visit to England, which
might have put everything right and does put everything wrong, and the
incurable staginess which makes her, as above related, refuse to see
Oswald and Lucile _together_ till she is actually in _articulo mortis_.

And yet--"for all this and all this and twice as much as all this"--I
should be sorry for any one who regards Corinne as merely a tedious and
not at all brief subject for laughter. One solid claim which it
possesses has been, and is still for a moment, definitely postponed; but
in another point there is, if not exactly a defence, an immense
counterpoise to the faults and follies just mentioned. Corinne to far
too great an extent, and Oswald to an extent nearly but not quite fatal,
are loaded (_affubles_, to use the word we borrowed formerly) with a
mass of corporal and spiritual wiglomeration (as Mr. Carlyle used
expressively and succinctly to call it) in costume and fashion and
sentiment and action and speech. But when we have stripped this off,
_manet res_--reality of truth and fact and nature.

[Sidenote: Compensations--Corinne herself.]

There should be no doubt of this in Corinne's own case. It has been said
from the very first that she is, as Delphine had been, if not what her
creatress was, what she would have liked to be. The ideal in the former
case was more than questionable, and the execution was very bad. Here
the ideal is far from flawless, but it is greatly improved, and the
execution is improved far more than in proportion. Corinne is not "a
reasonable woman"; but reason, though very heartily to be welcomed on
its rare occurrences in that division of humanity, when it does not
exclude other things more to be welcomed still, is very decidedly not to
be preferred to the other things themselves. Corinne has these--or most
of them. She is beautiful; she is amiable; she is unselfish; without the
slightest touch of prudery she has the true as well as the technical
chastity; and she is really the victim of inauspicious stars, and of the
misconduct of other people--the questionable wisdom of her own father;
the folly of Nelvil's; the wilfulness in the bad sense, and the weakness
of will in the good, of her lover; the sour virtue and _borne_
temperament of Lady Edgermond. Almost all her faults and not a few of
her misfortunes are due to the "sensibility" of her t