cousin, for instance, are heavy and misplaced.  Thus the whole book is in one key, without the dramatic changes of Richardson, too few even as those are.  And who now can endure that antique fashion of apostrophising men and women, hot with passion and eager with all active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as if their passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable embodiment of fine general ideas?  We have not a single thrill, when Saint Preux being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie dying, murmurs passionately, “What shall I now see in the same place of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my soul, in this same object who both caused and shared my transports! the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!"[44] This rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more realistic taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of shedding tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a generation that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility, without realising for the honour of its ancestors the physiological truth of the power of the will over the secretions.

The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation.  Yet the New Heloisa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full, highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charm in the source and original of it.  Saint Preux is a personage whom no widest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make endurable.  Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance of fine phrases.  The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets turn graciously on the lover’s eagerness to offer every sacrifice at the feet of his mistress.  Even Werther, stricken creature as he was, yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be the instrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares.  Saint Preux’s egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation, or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion.  The slave of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification.  With some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path to happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire.  He writes first like a pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like a pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.  Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in comparison.  Werther, again, at least represents a principle of rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and he retains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful.  His despair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed social ambition.[45] He feels the world about him.  His French prototype, on the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of a sensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own fevered pulsation.