is accidentally shown in his urgent prayer for exactitude in the engraving of the striking scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their old love for one another.[57] “I have traversed all Rousseau’s ground with the Heloisa before me,” said Byron, “and am struck to a degree I cannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their reality."[58] They were memories made true by long dreaming, by endless brooding.  The painter lived with these scenes ever present to the inner eye.  They were his real world, of which the tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave suggestion.  He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain pines, the waters of the lake, “the populous solitude of bees and birds,” as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality.  And they were always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or folly of the hurtful insect, Man.  He was never a manichaean towards nature.  To him she was all good and bounteous.  The demon forces that so fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible.  These were the compositions that presently inspired the landscapes of Paul and Virginia (1788), of Atala and Rene (1801), and of Obermann (1804), as well as those punier imitators who resemble their masters as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms of David.  They were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling for nature, and not the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated description of the literary pastoral.[59]

This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn between Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired.  The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, that the union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetry of nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau.[60] It only shows that the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second part of the New Heloisa, and his failure to identify Cowper’s allusion to the matinee a l’anglaise certainly proves that he had at any rate forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth in French literature.[61] The tendency to read Rousseau only in the Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which are constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record.  Rousseau assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done into splendid prose.  His pictures are full of social animation and domestic order.  He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in his Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found it in a household that was more, and not less, systematically disciplined than those of the common society around him.  The paradise in which his Julie moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and no less than an establishment of the best kind of the rural middle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere.  No most sentimental savage could have found it endurable, or could himself without profound transformation of his manners have been endured in it.  The New Heloisa ends by exalting respectability, and putting the spirit of insurrection to shame.  Self-control, not revolt, is its last word.