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Bayle's Thoughts on the Comet, Rousseau's Emilius and Heloïsa, Helvétius's L'Esprit, and a thousand other forbidden pieces were in every library, both public and private. The Social Contract, printed over and over again in endless editions, was sold for a shilling under the vestibule of the king's own palace.
There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightness in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to those who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New Heloïsa. Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far above such pieces in Goethe's two famous romances.
Nature is here encouraged, not thwarted; little is left to the gardener; much to the intelligent and loving care of the mistress. The account of the garden covers many pages of the "New Heloisa," pages at once eloquent and interesting. Artificial as are many of its details, the letter is a plea for nature against artificiality.
This was why Voltaire, who was a son of the seventeenth century before he was the patriarchal sire of the eighteenth, could never thoroughly understand the author of the New Heloisa, or the author of the Père de Famille and Jacques le Fataliste. Such work was to him for the most part a detestable compound of vulgarity and rodomontade. Nothing living but this! But this is much and very much.
"I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with the Heloïsa 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." They were memories made true by long dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenes ever present to the inner eye.
The proofs of the New Heloïsa came through his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in the affairs relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrusted the whole matter to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confident that, in acting through persons of such authority and position, he should be protected against any unwitting illegality.
Rousseau wrote in the New Heloïsa very sagely that you should grant to the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits that the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot. Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather than to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see.
Much of the interest of the New Heloïsa 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 is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression would have followed. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloïsa.
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. It only shows that the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second part of the New Heloïsa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion to the matinée
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