d, they will get up again and go home to supper quite
comfortably. It is otherwise with Werther and Adolphe. With all the
first-named young man's extravagance, four generations have known
perfectly well that there is something besides absurdity in him, while
in Adolphe there is no extravagance at all. The wind of Sensibility had
been sown, in literature and in life, for many a long year, and the
whirlwind had begun to be reaped.[416]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Its importance here.]

This, however, is the moral side of the matter, with which we have not
much to do. As a division of literature these sentimental novels,
artificial as they are, have a good deal of interest; and in a _History_
such as the present they have very great importance. They are so
entirely different in atmosphere from the work of later times, that
reading them has all the refreshing effect of a visit to a strange
country; and yet one feels that they themselves have opened that
country for coming writers as well as readers. They are often
extraordinarily ingenious, and the books to which in form they set the
example, though the power of the writers made them something very
different in matter--_Julie_, _La Religieuse_, _Paul et Virginie_,[417]
_Corinne_, _Rene_--give their progenitors not a little importance, or at
least not a little interest of curiosity. Besides, it was in the school
of Sensibility that the author of _Manon Lescaut_ somehow or other
developed that wonderful little book. I do not know that it would be
prudent to recommend modern readers to study Sensibility for themselves
in the original documents just surveyed. Disappointment and possibly
maledictions would probably be the result of any such attempt, except in
the case of Xavier de Maistre and Constant. But these others are just
the cases in which the office of historical critic justifies itself. It
is often said (and nobody knows the truth of it better than critics
themselves) that a diligent perusal of all the studies and _causeries_
that have ever been written, on any one of the really great writers,
will not give as much knowledge of them as half an hour's reading of
their own work. But then in that case the metal is virgin, and to be had
on the surface and for the picking up. The case is different where tons
of ore have to be crushed and smelted, in order to produce a few
pennyweights of metal.

* * * * *

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