His Julie argues and descants for
twenty successive pages on dueling, on love, on duty, with a logical
completeness, a talent and phrases that would do honor to an academical
moralist. Commonplace exists everywhere, general themes, a raking fire
of abstractions and arguments, that is to say, truths more or less
empty and paradoxes more or less hollow. The smallest detail of fact, an
anecdote, a trait of habit, would suit us much better, and hence we of
to day prefer the precise eloquence of objects to the lax eloquence of
words. In the eighteenth century it was otherwise; to every writer this
oratorical style was the prescribed ceremonial costume, the dress-coat
he had to put on for admission into the company of select people. That
which seems to us affectation was then only proper; in a classic epoch
the perfect period and the sustained development constitute decorum,
and are therefore to be observed.--It must be noted, moreover, that this
literary drapery which, with us of the present day, conceals truth
did not conceal it to his contemporaries; they saw under it the exact
feature, the perceptible detail no longer detected by us. Every abuse,
every vice, every excess of refinement and of culture, all that social
and moral disease which Rousseau scourged with an author's emphasis,
existed before them under their own eyes, in their own breasts, visible
and daily manifested in thousands of domestic incidents. In applying
satire they had only to observe or to remember. Their experience
completed the book, and, through the co-operation of his readers, the
author possessed power which he is now deprived of. If we were to
put ourselves in their place we should recover their impressions. His
denunciations and sarcasms, the harsh things of all sorts he says of the
great, of fashionable people and of women, his rude and cutting tone,
provoke and irritate, but are not displeasing. On the contrary, after so
many compliments, insipidities and petty versification all this quickens
the blunted taste; it is the sensation of strong common wine after
long indulgence in orgeat and preserved citron. Accordingly, his first
discourse against art and literature "lifts one at once above the
clouds." But his idyllic writings touch the heart more powerfully than
his satires. If men listen to the moralist that scolds them they throng
in the footsteps of the magician that charms them; especially do women
and the young adhere to one who shows them