II.

As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate what is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and particular literary robe.  And so we have to distinguish the external conditions under which a book like the New Heloisa is produced, from the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction rather than another.  We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when we insist on fixing our eyes on a few of the minutiae of construction, instead of patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable meanings; when we stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition, instead of advancing to the central elements of the writer’s character.

These incidents in the case of the New Heloisa we know; the sensuous communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency, the long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion for the too sage Julie of actual experience.  But the power of these impressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within.  An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, his own character’s victim or sport.  It is his whole system of impulses, ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready, into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him.  And this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his interpretation of the situation.  Much of the interest of the New Heloisa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of which the author himself was probably unconscious, of the general doctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound in writings of graver pretension.  Rousseau generally spoke of his romance in phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness.  It was in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than the weakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece.  That it was not so deliberately, only added to its effect.  The slow and musing air which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner of the Emilius.

Rousseau’s scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present to his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly described as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the supposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil institutions and social use might allow.  In this survey, however incoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes was the very last that was likely to escape Rousseau’s attention.  Hence it was with this that he began.  The Discourses had been an attack upon the general ordering of society,