rticularly interesting
brother William, give the keynote much better than any more questionable
ecstasies. "Sensibility, so charming," was the pet affectation of the
period--an affectation carried on till it became quite natural, and was
only cured by the half-caricature, half-reaction of Byronism.

[Sidenote: The thing essentially French.]

The thing, however, was not English in origin, and never was thoroughly
English at all. The main current of the Sensibility novelists, who
impressed their curious morals or manners on all men and women in
civilised Europe, was French in unbroken succession, from the day when
Madame de la Fayette first broke ground against the ponderous romances
of Madeleine de Scudery, to the day when Benjamin Constant forged, in
_Adolphe_, the link between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century
romance, between the novel of sentiment and the novel of analysis.

[Sidenote: Its history.]

Of the relations to it of the greater novelists of the main century we
have already spoken: and as for the two greatest of the extreme close,
Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, they mix too many secondary purposes
with their philandering, and moreover do not form part of the plan of
the present volume. For the true Sensibility, the odd quintessence of
conventional feeling, played at steadily till it is half real, if not
wholly so, which ends in the peculiarities of two such wholesome young
Britonesses as Marianne Dashwood and Fanny Price, we must look
elsewhere. After Madame de la Fayette, and excluding with her other
names already treated, we come to Madame de Fontaines, Madame de Tencin
(most heartless and therefore naturally not least sentimental of women),
Madame Riccoboni, the group of lady-novelists of whom Mesdames de Souza
and de Duras are the chief, and, finally, the two really remarkable
names of Xavier de Maistre and Benjamin Constant. These are our
"documents." Even the minor subjects of this inquiry are pleasant pieces
of literary _bric-a-brac_; perhaps they are something a little more than
that. For Sensibility was actually once a great power in the world.
Transformed a little, it did wonderful things in the hands of Rousseau
and Goethe and Chateaubriand and Byron. It lingers in odd nooks and
corners even at the present day, when it is usually and irreverently
called "gush," and Heaven only knows whether it may not be resuscitated
in full force before some of us are dead.[406] For it has exactly