But her chef-d'oeuvre is her study of Germany, De l'Allemagne, [Footnote: A.D.

1813.] which revealed the existence of a world of art and thought, unsuspected by the French public.

Within the next twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel were exerting their influence at Paris.

She did in France what Coleridge was doing in England for the knowledge of German thought.
Madame de Stael had raised anew the question which had been raised in the seventeenth century and answered in the negative by Voltaire: is there progress in aesthetic literature?
Her early book on Literature had clearly defined the issue.

She did not propose the thesis that there is any progress or improvement (as some of the Moderns had contended in the famous Quarrel) in artistic form.