serious than mere caprice, and a good deal less serious
than genuine enthusiasm. The word expresses exactly the attitude of
French polite society in the eighteenth century to a vast number of
subjects, and, what is more, it helps to explain the _sensibilite_ which
dominated that society. The two terms mutually involve each other, and
_sensibilite_ stands to mere flirtation on the one hand, and genuine
passion on the other, exactly as _engouement_ does to caprice and
enthusiasm. People flirted admirably in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and the art was, I fancy, recovered in the nineteenth with
some success, but I do not think they flirted, properly speaking, in the
eighteenth.[414] Sensibility (and its companion "sensuality") prevented
that. Yet, on the other hand, they did not, till the society itself and
its sentiments with it were breaking up, indulge in anything that can be
called real passion. Sensibility prevented that also. The kind of
love-making which was popular may be compared without much fancifulness
to the favourite card-game of the period, quadrille. You changed
partners pretty often, and the stakes were not very serious; but the
rules of the game were elaborate and precise, and it did not admit of
being treated with levity.

[Sidenote: Some final words on the matter.]

Only a small part, though the most original and not the least remarkable
part, of the representation of this curious phenomenon in literature has
been attempted in this discussion. The English and German developments
of it are interesting and famous, and, merely as literature, contain
perhaps better work than the French, but they are not so original, and
they are out of our province. Marivaux[415] served directly as model to
both English and German novelists, though the peculiarity of the
national temperament quickly made itself felt in both cases. In England
the great and healthy genius of Fielding applied the humour cure to
Sensibility at a very early period; in Germany the literature of
Sensibility rapidly became the literature of suicide--a consummation
than which nothing could be more alien from the original conception. It
is true that there is a good deal of dying in the works of Madame de la
Fayette and her imitators. But it is quite transparent stage-dying, and
the virtuous Prince of Cleves and the penitent Adelaide in the _Comte de
Comminge_ do not disturb the mind at all. We know that, as soon as the
curtain has droppe