vanced to the
conquest of Italy, and had her Roman triumph. England, which she had
visited in her Revolutionary flights, and Italy conspired in the
creation of her novel _Corinne_ (1807). It is again the history of
a woman of genius, beautiful, generous, enthusiastic, whom the world
understands imperfectly, and whom her English lover, after his fit
of Italian romance, discards with the characteristic British phlegm.
The paintings of Italian nature are rhetorical exercises; the
writer's sympathy with art and history is of more value; the
interpretation of a woman's heart is alive with personal feeling.
Madame de Stael's novels are old now, which means that they once were
young, and for her own generation they had the freshness and charm
of youth.

Her father's death had turned her thoughts towards religion. A
Protestant and a liberal, her spiritualist faith now found support
in the moral strength of Christianity. She was not, like Chateaubriand,
an epicurean and a Catholic; she did not care to decorate religion
with flowers, or make it fragrant with incense; it spoke to her not
through the senses, but directly to the conscience, the affections,
and the will. In the chapters of her book on Germany which treat of
"the religion of enthusiasm," her devout latitudinarianism finds
expression.

The book _De l'Allemagne_, published in London in 1813, after the
confiscation and destruction of the Paris edition by the imperial
police, prepared the way by criticism for the romantic movement. It
treats of manners, letters, art, philosophy, religion, interpreting
with astonishing insight, however it may have erred in important
details, the mind of Germany to the mind of France. It was a Germany
of poets, dreamers, and metaphysicians, loyal and sincere, but
incapable of patriotic passion, disqualified for action and for
freedom, which she in 1804 had discovered. The life of society
produces literature in France; the genius of inward meditation and
sentiment produces literature in Germany. The literature and art of
the South are classical, those of the North are romantic; and since
the life of our own race and the spirit of our own religion are infused
into romantic art, it has in it possibilities of indefinite growth.
Madame de Stael advanced criticism by her sense that art and
literature are relative to ages, races, governments, environments.
She dreamed of an European or cosmopolitan literature, in which each
nation, while retai