been printed, when the whole edition was seized and destroyed by the
police, and the author was ordered to quit France within twenty-four
hours. All this, of course, was at the instance of Napoleon, who was by
no means above resenting the hostility of a lady author. But the
Minister of Police, General Savary, assumed the responsibility of the
affair; and to Mme. de Stael's remonstrance he wrote in reply: "It
appeared to me that the air of this country did not agree with you, and
we are not yet reduced to seek for models amongst the people you admire
[the Germans]. Your last work is not French." It was not, accordingly,
until 1813 that Mme. de Stael's suppressed work on Germany saw the light.

The only passages in it that need engage our attention are those in which
the author endeavours to interpret to a classical people the literature
of a Gothic race. In her chapter entitled "Of Classic and Romantic
Poetry," she says: "The word romantic has been lately introduced in
Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs
of the troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry
and Christianity." She mentions the comparison--evidently derived from
Schlegel's lectures which she had attended--of ancient poetry to
sculpture and modern to painting; explains that the French incline
towards classic poetry, and the English--"the most illustrious of the
Germanic nations"--towards "that which owes its birth to chivalry and
romance." "The English poets of our times, without entering into concert
with the Germans, have adopted the same system. Didactic poetry has
given place to the fictions of the Middle Ages." She observes that
simplicity and definiteness, that a certain corporeality and
externality--or what in modern critical dialect we would call
objectivity--are notes of antique art; while variety and shading of
colour, and a habit of self-reflection developed by Christianity
[subjectivity], are the marks of modern art. "Simplicity in the arts
would, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness and
abstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation.
Honour and love, valour and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished
the Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soul
could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes--that
romantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied."
Mme. de Stael's analysis he