Mme. de Stael had an indestructible faith in human reason, liberty, and justice; she believed in human perfection and in the hope of progress.  “From Rousseau, she received that passionate tenderness, that confidence in the inherent goodness of man.  Believing in an intimate communion of man with God, her religion was spirit and sentiment which had no need of 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 frivolous woman, and by her grandmother, a serious, cold, ceremonious old lady.  Calm and well balanced, and possessing an ardent imagination, she followed her own inclinations when, as a girl of sixteen, she was married to a man for whom she had no love.  After living an indifferent sort of life with her husband for ten years, they separated; and she, with her children, went to Paris to find work.