of varnishing it with description, and to some extent,
though naturally to a lesser one than if it had been fiction pure and
simple, "lacing" it, in both senses of the word, with dialogue.
Commonplace (but not the best commonplace) taste often cries "Oh! if
this were only true!" The wiser mind is fain sometimes--not often, for
things are not often good enough--to say, "Oh! if this were only
_false_!"

[Sidenote: The ambiguous position of _Emile_.]

But if a severe auditor were to strike the _Confessions_ out of
Rousseau's novel-account to the good, on the score of technical
insufficiency or disqualification, he could hardly refuse to do the same
with _Emile_ on the other side of the sheet. In fact its second title
(_de l'Education_), its opening remarks, and the vastly larger part of
the text, not only do not pretend to be a novel but frankly decline to
be one. In what way exactly the treatise, from the mere assumption of a
supposed "soaring human boy" named Emile, who serves as the victim of a
few _Sandford-and-Merton_-like illustrations, burgeoned into the romance
of actual novel-kind with Sophie in the Fifth Book, and the purely
novel-natured, but unfinished and hardly begun, sequel of _Emile et
Sophie ou Les Solitaires_, it is impossible to say. From the sketch of
the intended conclusion of this latter given by Prevost[363] it would
seem that we have not lost much, though with Rousseau the treatment is
so constantly above the substance that one cannot tell. As it is, the
novel part is nearly worthless. Neither Emile nor Sophie is made in the
least a live person; the catastrophe of their at first ideal union might
be shown, by an advocate of very moderate skill, to be largely if not
wholly due to the meddlesome, muddle-headed, and almost inevitably
mischievous advice given to them just after their marriage by their
foolish Mentor; and one neither finds nor foresees any real novel
interest whatever. Anilities in the very worst style of the eighteenth
century--such as the story how Emile instigated mutiny in an Algerian
slave-gang, failed, made a noble protest, and instead of being impaled,
flayed, burnt alive, or otherwise taught not to do so, was made overseer
of his own projects of reformed discipline--are sufficiently
unrefreshing in fact. And the sort of "double arrangement" foreshadowed
in the professorial programme of the unwritten part, where, in something
like Davenant and Dryden's degradation of _The Tempes