ABSTRACT
Madame de Stael, temperamentally and intellectually a Rousseauist, in rejecting the restrictive principles revealed an expansive view of taste and of genius. She believed that creative genius should be effusive and the critical pursuit merely acquiescent. The first year of the nineteenth century was appropriately marked by the publication of Madame de Stael's Literature Considered in its Relations to Social Institutions. Chateaubriand, at variance with Madame de Stael on so many other points, agreed with her that men's characters had been profoundly transformed by the Revolution and that literature should reflect this transformation. It has been said that the role of Madame de Stael was to understand and make others understand, that of Chateaubriand to feel and teach others to feel; which is only another way of saying that Chateaubriand is more intimately related to romanticism than Madame de Stael.
