mall collection of such defilements from the New Heloisa
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. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloisa.
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 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
apostrophising 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!"[44] 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 realising for the honour of its ance