nd days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion
for the too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these
impressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within.
An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, his
own character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses,
ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready,
into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And
this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his
interpretation of the situation. Much of the interest of the New
Heloisa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of
which the author himself was probably unconscious, of the general
doctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound in
writings of graver pretension. Rousseau generally spoke of his romance
in phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness. It
was in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than the
weakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it was
not so deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and musing air
which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for
the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by
the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner
of the Emilius.

Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present
to his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly
described as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the
supposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil
institutions and social use might allow. In this survey, however
incoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes was the
very last that was likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was
with this that he began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the
general ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief that
society has done to human nature at large. The romance treated one set
of emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches the
whole emotional sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the field
was accompanied by a total revolution in the method. Polemic was
abandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, if
not in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation;
instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete dra