The faults of the novel indeed are those which impress themselves (as Mackintosh, we have seen, allowed) immediately and perhaps excessively.  M. Sorel observes of its companion sententiously but truly, “Si le style de Delphine semble vieilli, c’est qu’il a ete jeune.”  If not merely the style but the sentiment, the whole properties and the whole stage management of Corinne seem out of date now, it is only because they were up to date then.  It is easy to laugh—­not perhaps very easy to abstain from laughing—­at the “schall” twisted in Corinne’s hair, where even contemporaries mocked the hideous turban with which Madame de Stael chose to bedizen her not too beautiful head; at Nelvil’s inky cloak; at the putting out of the fire; at the queer stilted half-Ossianic, half-German rants put in the poetess’s mouth; at the endless mingling of gallantry and pedantry; at the hesitations of Nelvil; at the agonies of Corinne.  When French critics tell us that as they allow the good-humoured satire on the Count d’Erfeuil to be just, we ought to do the same in reference to the “cant Britannique” of Nelvil and of the Edgermond circle, we can only respectfully answer that we should not presume to dispute their judgment in the first case, but that they really must leave us to ours in the second.  As a matter of fact, Madame de Stael’s goody English characters, are rather like Miss Edgeworth’s naughty French ones in Leonora and elsewhere—­clever generalisations from a little observation and a great deal of preconceived idea, not studies from the life.

But this (and a great deal more that might be said if it were not something like petty treason in an introduction-writer thus to play the devil’s advocate against his author) matters comparatively little, and leaves enough in Corinne to furnish forth a book almost great, interesting without any “almost,” and remarkable as a not very large shelf-ful in the infinite library of modern fiction deserves remark.  For the passion of its two chief characters, however oddly, and to us unfashionably, presented, however lacking in the commanding and perennial qualities which make us indifferent to fashion in the work of the greatest masters, is real.  And it is perhaps only after a pretty long study of literature that one perceives how very little real passion books, even pretty good books, contain, how much of what at times seems to us passionate in them owes its appeal to accident, mode, and the personal equation.  Of the highest achievement of art—­that which avails itself of, but subdues, personal thought and feeling in the elaboration of a perfectly live character—­Madame de Stael was indeed incapable.  But in the second order—­that which, availing itself of, but not subduing, the personal element, keeps enough of its veracity and lively force to enliven a composite structure of character—­she has here produced very noteworthy studies.  Corinne is a very fair embodiment of the beauty which her