ty or
folly of the hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manichaean towards
nature. To him she was all good and bounteous. The demon forces that
so fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible. These were the
compositions that presently inspired the landscapes of _Paul and
Virginia_ (1788), of _Atala_ and _Rene_ (1801), and of _Obermann_
(1804), as well as those punier imitators who resemble their masters
as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms of David. They
were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling for nature, and not
the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated description of the
literary pastoral.[59]

This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn
between Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired.
The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, that
the union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetry
of nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau.[60] It only shows that
the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second
part of the New Heloisa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion
to the _matinee a l'anglaise_ certainly proves that he had at any rate
forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth
in French literature.[61] The tendency to read Rousseau only in the
Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which are
constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record. Rousseau
assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done
into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation and
domestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in
his Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found
it in a household that was more, and not less, systematically
disciplined than those of the common society around him. The paradise
in which his Julie moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and
no less than an establishment of the best kind of the rural
middle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No most
sentimental savage could have found it endurable, or could himself
without profound transformation of his manners have been endured in
it. The New Heloisa ends by exalting respectability, and putting the
spirit of insurrection to shame. Self-control, not revolt, is its last
word.

This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from Senancour,
Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph o