Although, therefore, it is hardly possible to call Madame de Stael a good novelist, she occupies a very important position in the history of the novel. She sees, or helps to see, the "sensibility" novel out, with forcible demonstration of the inconveniences of its theory. She helps to see the aesthetic novel--or the novel highly seasoned and even sandwiched with aesthetics--in. She manages to create at least one character to whom the epithets of "noble" and "pathetic" can hardly be refused; and at least one other to which that of "only too natural," if with an exceptional and faulty kind of nature, must be accorded. At a time when the most popular, prolific, and in a way craftsmanlike practitioner of the kind, Pigault-Lebrun, was dragging it through vulgarity, she keeps it at any rate clear of that. Her description is adequate: and her society-and-manners painting (not least in the _recit_ giving Corinne's trials in Northumberland) is a good deal more than adequate. Moreover, she preserves the tradition of the great _philosophe_ group by showing that the writer of novels can also be the author of serious and valuable literature of another kind. These are no small things to have done: and when one thinks of them one is almost able to wipe off the slate of memory that awful picture of a turbaned or "schalled" Blowsalind, with arms[21] like a "daughter of the plough," which a cruel tradition has perpetuated as frontispiece to some cheap editions of her works. * * * * * [Sidenote: Chateaubriand--his peculiar position as a novelist.] There is perhaps no more difficult person to appraise in all French literature--there are not many in the literature of the world--than Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand. It is almost more difficult than in the case of his two great disciples, Byron and Hugo, to keep his personality out of the record: and it is a not wholly agreeable personality. Old experience may perhaps attain to this, and leave to ghouls and large or small coffin-worms the business of investigating and possibly fattening on the thing. But even the oldest experience dealing with his novels (which were practically all early) may find itself considerably _tabuste_, as Rabelais has it, that is to say, "bothered" with faults which are mitigated in the _Genie du Christianisme_, comparatively (not quite) unimportant in the _Voyages_, and almost entirely whelmed in the _Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_. These faults are of such a complicated and various kind that the whole armour of criticism is necessary to deal with them, on the defensive in the sense of not being too much influenced by them, and on the offensive in the sense of being severe but not too severe on them. [Sidenote: And the remarkable interconnection of his works in fiction.]