this system of
reinforcing the novel beyond France, in Scott more particularly. It is
not out of place to remind the reader that even Rousseau (to whom Madame
de Stael owed so much) to some extent, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and
Chateaubriand to more, as far as what we may call scenery-guide-booking
goes, had preceded her. But for the "art," the aesthetic addition, she
was indebted only to the Germans; and almost all her French successors
were indebted to her.[20]

[Sidenote: The author's position in the History of the Novel.]

Although, therefore, it is hardly possible to call Madame de Stael a
good novelist, she occupies a very important position in the history of
the novel. She sees, or helps to see, the "sensibility" novel out, with
forcible demonstration of the inconveniences of its theory. She helps to
see the aesthetic novel--or the novel highly seasoned and even
sandwiched with aesthetics--in. She manages to create at least one
character to whom the epithets of "noble" and "pathetic" can hardly be
refused; and at least one other to which that of "only too natural," if
with an exceptional and faulty kind of nature, must be accorded. At a
time when the most popular, prolific, and in a way craftsmanlike
practitioner of the kind, Pigault-Lebrun, was dragging it through
vulgarity, she keeps it at any rate clear of that. Her description is
adequate: and her society-and-manners painting (not least in the _recit_
giving Corinne's trials in Northumberland) is a good deal more than
adequate. Moreover, she preserves the tradition of the great
_philosophe_ group by showing that the writer of novels can also be the
author of serious and valuable literature of another kind. These are no
small things to have done: and when one thinks of them one is almost
able to wipe off the slate of memory that awful picture of a turbaned or
"schalled" Blowsalind, with arms[21] like a "daughter of the plough,"
which a cruel tradition has perpetuated as frontispiece to some cheap
editions of her works.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Chateaubriand--his peculiar position as a novelist.]

There is perhaps no more difficult person to appraise in all French
literature--there are not many in the literature of the world--than
Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand. It is almost more difficult
than in the case of his two great disciples, Byron and Hugo, to keep his
personality out of the record: and it is a not wholly agr