got all the evil that
was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful,
frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.[55] It may
be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in
her room, suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamber
of the hapless Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther
(1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, if
Saint Preux had not gone to see Julie take cream and cakes with her
children and her female servants. And perhaps the other and nobler
Charlotte of the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ (1809) would not have detained
us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie
had not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the
cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and
colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand
birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and Juan Fernandez.
There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightness
in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to those
who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New
Heloisa.[56] Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far above
such pieces in Goethe's two famous romances. They have a clearness
and spontaneous freshness which are not among the bountiful gifts of
Goethe. There are other admirable landscapes in the New Heloisa,
though not too many of them, and the minute and careful way in which
Rousseau made their features real to himself, is accidentally shown in
his urgent prayer for exactitude in the engraving of the striking
scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their old
love for one another.[57] "I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with
the Heloisa before me," said Byron, "and am struck to a degree I
cannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and
the beauty of their reality."[58] They were memories made true by long
dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenes
ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which the
tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave
suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain
pines, the waters of the lake, "the populous solitude of bees and
birds," as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And
they were always benign, standing in relief with the maligni