f pomp or symbols, of an intermediary
between God and man." She was not so much a great writer as she was a
great thinker, or rather a discoverer of new thoughts. By instituting
a new criticism and by opening new literatures to the French, she
succeeded in emancipating art from fixed rules and in facilitating the
sudden growth of romanticism in France.

In her life, her great desire was to spread happiness and to obtain
it, to love and to be loved in return. In politics it was always the
sentiment of justice which appealed to her, in literature it was the
ideal. Sincerity was manifested in everything she said and did. Pity
for the misery of her fellow beings, the sentiment of the dignity of
man and his right to independence, of his future grandeur founded
on his moral elevation, the cult of justice, and the love of
liberty--such were the prevailing thoughts of her life and works.

Mme. de Stael's chief influence will always remain in the domain of
literature; she was the first French writer to introduce and exercise
a European or cosmopolitan influence by uniting the literatures of the
north and the south and clearly defining the distinction between them.
By the expression of her idea that French literature had decayed on
account of the exclusive social spirit, and that its only means of
regeneration lay in the study and absorption of new models, she
cut French taste loose from traditions and freed literature from
superannuated conventionalities. Also, by her idea that a common
civilization must be fostered, a union of the eastern and western
ideals, and that literature must be the common expression thereof,
whose object must be the amelioration of humanity, morally and
religiously, she gave to the world at large ideas which are only now
being fully appreciated and nearing realization. In her novels she
vigorously protested against the lot of woman in modern society,
against her obligation to submit everything to opinion, against the
innumerable obstacles in the way of her development--thus heralding
George Sand and the general movement toward woman's emancipation.
France has never had a more forceful, energetic, influential,
cosmopolitan, and at the same time moral, writer than Mme. de Stael.

The events in the life of George Sand had comparatively little
influence upon her works, which were mainly the expression of her
nature. As a young girl, she was strongly influenced by her mother, an
amiable but rather frivolo