With all its magnificences, and even
with the added zest of a forbidden book, the "Nouvelle Heloise" would be
very slow reading for our youth of today. Its perpetual balloon voyage
of sentiment was suited to other times, or finds sympathy to-day
with other races. With all this, there is a great depth of truth and
eloquence in its pages,--and its moral, which at first sight would seem
to be, that the blossom of vice necessarily contains the germ of virtue,
proves to be this wiser one, that you can tell the tree only by its
fruits, which slowly ripen with length of life. As a novel, it is out of
fashion,--for novels have fashion; as a development of the individuality
of passion, it has perhaps no equal. Be sure that Aurore saw in it its
fullest significance. It was strange reading for the disciple of the
convent, but she had laid her bold hand upon the tree of the knowledge
of good and of evil. She was not to be saved like a woman, through
ignorance, but like a man, through the wisdom which has its heavenly and
its earthly side. "Emile," the "Contrat Social," and the rest of the
series succeeded each other in her studies; but she does not speak of
the "Confessions," a book most cruel to those who love the merits of the
author, and to whom the nauseating vulgarity of his personal character
is a disgust scarcely to be recovered from.
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