wing of
persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is, it is true, a
monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value,
but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the
time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their
minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently
translated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The
important thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is
present, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far
more subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste would
have led us to expect. It is true, also, that Rousseau declared his
intention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually
became Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the two
great opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teaching
them the lesson of reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is
possible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the other
that it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel.[39]
This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau's mind while he
was writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed for
the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which he
was always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very pale
kind. It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had
so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided over
the composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it. In the
first part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly
not visible, and in the second part neither of the two contending
factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other.
Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian
dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the
wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.

French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Heloisa in France
except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly few
in this generation read it in our own country.[40] The action is very
slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
excited hum