listening to it and gazing on the dying poetess from his place in the crowd, is suffocated with emotion and finally faints. A few days later Corinne dies, her last act being to point with her diaphanous hand to the moon, which is partially obscured by a band of cloud such as she and Lord Nelvil had once seen when in Naples.
Even as a picture of Italy, Corinne leaves much to be desired. Madame de Staël's ideas of art were acquired. She had no spontaneous admiration even for the things she most warmly praised, and her judgments were conventional and essentially cold. Some of the descriptions are good in the sense of being accurate and forcibly expressed. But even in the best of them—that of Vesuvius—one feels the effort. Madame de Staël is wide-eyed and conscientious, but has no flashes of inspired vision. She can catalogue but not paint. A certain difficulty in saying enough on æsthetic subjects is rendered evident by her vice of moralising. Instead of admiring a marble column as a column, or a picture as a picture, she finds in it food for reflection on the nature of man and the destiny of the world. Some of her remarks on Italian character are extremely clever, and show her usual surprising power of observation; but they are generally superficial.
This was due, in part, to her system of explaining everything by race and political institutions, in part to her passion for generalization. Because Italians had produced the finest art and some of the finest music; because they had no salons and wrote sonnets; because they had developed a curiously systematic form of conjugal infidelity; finally, because they had no political liberty, Madame de Staël constructed a theory
