country house, and he passed weeks in her house in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on one occasion, "'tis true the king has a mistress, but who has not?-except the Duke of Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Geneviève, and is thoroughly despised in consequence, and rightly." Reeking disorder such as all this illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of the fair lake seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtue was lost in that simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by circumstances of mental pain and far circling distress, which banished the sin into a secondary place; and what remained to strike the imagination of the time were delightful pictures of fast union between two enchanting women, of the patience and compassionateness of a grave mother, of the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend. Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossness, could make a small collection of such defilements from the New Heloïsa without any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character, and so they came out in his work. Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of this kind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in the Confessions. They were not noticed at that day, when people's ears did not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.

A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that produced it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression, would have followed. To-day we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloïsa. A long story told in letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible and intolerable to us. We find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put far greater vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rousseau did, though he was not any less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions as Rousseau does not. Rousseau was absolutely without humour; that belongs to the keenly observant natures, and to those who love men in the concrete, not only humanity in the abstract. The pleasantries

1 Journal, iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857.)

of Julie's cousin, for instance, are heavy and misplaced. Thus the whole book is in one key, without the dramatic changes of Richardson, too few even as those are. And who now can endure that antique fashion of apostrophizing men and women, hot with passion and eager with all active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as if their passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable embodiment of fine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint Preux being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie dying, murmurs passionately, "What shall I now see in the same place of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my soul, in this same object who both caused and shared my transports! the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!" This rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more realistic taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of shedding tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a generation that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility, without realizing for the honour of its ancestors the physiological truth of the power of the will over the secretions.

The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New Heloïsa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full, highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charm in the source and original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no widest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make endurable. Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance of fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets turn graciously on the lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at the feet of his mistress. Even Werther, stricken creature as he was, yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be the instrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares. Saint Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation, or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion. The slave of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification. With some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path to happiness, his heart burns with

1 Nouv. Hél., III. xiv. 48.

sickly desire. He writes first like a pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like a pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two. Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in comparison. Werther, again, at least represents a principle of rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and he retains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful. His despair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed social ambition.' He feels the world about him. His French prototype, on the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of a sensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own fevered pulsation.

Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves fortitude, self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a certain point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the New Heloisa could be said to have any moral intention, it is here where women learn from the example of Julie's energetic return to duty, the possibility and the satisfaction of bending character back to comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from a moral point of view, the reader may wish that Julie had been less of a preacher, as well as less of a sinner. And even as sinner, she would have been more readily forgiven, if she had been less deliberate. A maiden who sacrifices her virtue in order that the visible consequences may force her parents to consent to a marriage, is too strategical to be perfectly touching. was said by the cleverest, though not the greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau, when one has renounced the charms of virtue, it is at least well to have all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow. In spite of this, however, Julie struck the imagination of the time, and struck it in a way that was thoroughly wholesome. The type taught men some respect for the dignity of women, and it taught women a firmer respect for themselves. It is useless, even if be possible, to present an example too lofty for the comprehension of an age.

1 E.g. Letters, 40-46.

As

2 Madame de Stael (1765-1817), in her Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de 7. 7. Rousseau, written when she was twenty, and her first work of any pretensions. Euv., i. 41. Ed. 1820.

At this moment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling France with impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine that France had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie ha almost the halo of saintliness.

We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess of preaching, the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It was said pungently enough by the wits of the time.1 Nothing that could be said on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760 and the Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such a pitch, that they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseau had drunk, they would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece of his handwriting, and vow that no woman of true sensibility could hesitate to consecrate her life to him, if she were only certain to be rewarded by his attachment.' The booksellers were unable to meet the demand. The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume, and the volume could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes shared the excitement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and bourgeois.3 Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball, who took the book up for half-an-hour until the time should come for starting; they

vous.

1 Nowhere more pungently than in a little piece of some half-dozen pages, headed, Prédiction tirée d'un vieux Manuscrit, the form of which is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about French music, Le petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda, though it seems to me to be superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few verses from the supposed prophecy of the man who should come-and of what he should do. "Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et plusieurs croiront en lui. Et il leur dira: Vous êtes des scélérats et des fripons, vos femmes sont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens vivre parmi Et il ajoutera, tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le pays où je suis né, et je n'habiterai jamais le pays où je suis né. Et il dira aussi qu'il est impossible d'avoir des mœurs, et de lire des Romans, et il fera un Roman; et dans son Roman le vice sera en action et la vertu en paroles, et ses personages seront forcenés d'amour et de philosophie. Et dans son Roman on apprendra l'art de suborner philosophiquement une jeune fille. Et l'Ecolière perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et elle fera avec son maître des sottises et des maximes. Et le bel Ami étant dans un Bateau seul avec sa Maitresse voudra le jetter dans l'eau et se précipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de la Philosophie et de la Vertu," and so on, humorously enough in its way.

2 See passages in Goncourt's La Femme au 18ième siècle, p. 380.

3 Musset-Pathay, ii. 361. See Madame Roland's Mém., i. 207.

read until midnight, and when informed that the carriage waited answered not a word, and when reminded by-and-by that it was two o'clock still read on, and then at four, having ordered the horses to be taken out of the carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and passed the remainder of the night in reading. In Germany the effect was just as astonishing. Kant only once in his life failed to take his afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the witchery of the New Heloisa. Gallantry was succeeded by passion, expansion, exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm is dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with better hopes for character. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first step towards kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and more fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in subjective broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled to the straight path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for others, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy of others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The women who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of whimpering introspection. The danger lay in the mischievous intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to this effusion.

The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many ways, marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the most perilous of reactionaries. So hard is it with the human mind, constituted as it is, to march forward a space further to the light, without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The great effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New Heloïsa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. One beautiful character, Vauvenargues (1715 -1747), had begun to teach the culture of emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness and moderation, as that "Great thoughts come from the heart." But he came too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no mark. Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs when men are beginning to feel the urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove with more powerful efforts, in the midst of all his herculean