ice of art was
fostered in the early years of the nineteenth century by two eminent
writers--one a woman with a virile intellect, the other a man with
more than a woman's imaginative sensibility--by GERMAINE DE STAEL
and by Chateaubriand. The one exhibits the eighteenth century passing
into the nineteenth, receiving new developments, yet without a breach
of continuity; the other represents a reaction against the ideas of
the age of the philosophers. Both opened new horizons--one, by the
divinations of her ardent intelligence; the other, by his creative
genius. Madame de Stael interpreted new ideas and defined a new theory
of art. Chateaubriand was himself an extraordinary literary artist.
The style of the one is that of an admirable improvisator, a brilliant
and incessant converser; that of the other is at its best a miracle
of studied invention, a harmony of colour and of sound. The genius
of the one was quickened in brilliant social gatherings; a Parisian
_salon_ was her true seat of empire. The genius of the other was nursed
in solitude by the tempestuous sea or on the wild and melancholy moors.

Germaine Necker, born in 1766, daughter of the celebrated Swiss banker
and future minister of France, a child of precocious intelligence
and eager sympathies, reared amid the brilliant society of her
mother's _salon_, a girl whose demands on life were large--demands
of the intellect, demands of the heart--enamoured of the writings
of Rousseau, married at twenty to the Swedish Ambassador, the Baron
de Stael-Holstein, herself a light and an inspirer of the
constitutional party of reform in the early days of the Revolution,
in her literary work opened fresh avenues for nineteenth-century
thought. She did not recoil from the eighteenth century, but rather
carried forward its better spirit. The Revolution, as a social
upheaval, she failed to understand; her ideal was liberty, not
equality; and Necker's daughter was assured that all would be well
were liberty established in constitutional forms of government. A
republican among aristocrats, she was an aristocrat among
republicans. During the years of Revolutionary trouble, the years
of her flights from Paris, her returns, excursions, and retreats,
she was sustained by her zeal for justice, her pity for the oppressed,
and her unquenchable faith in human progress.

A crude panegyric of Rousseau, certain political pamphlets, an _Essai
sur les Fictions_, a treatise on the Influence