The French make the reading of the "Nouvelle Héloïse" one of the epochs
in the life of woman. According to its motto, "The mother will not
allow the daughter to read it," this critical act is by common consent
adjourned till after marriage, when, we suppose, it appears something in
the light of a Bill of Rights, a coming to the knowledge of what women
can do, if they will. But as all Julie's _divagations_ occur before
marriage, and as her subsequent life becomes a model of Puritanic duty
and piety, one does not understand the applicability of her example to
French life, in which this progress is reversed. In this, as in all
works of true genius, people of the most opposite ways of thinking
take what is congenial to themselves,--the ardent and passionate fling
themselves on the swollen stream of Saint Preux's stormy love, the
older and colder justify Julie's repentance, and the slow but certain
rehabilitation of her character. With all its magnificences, and even
with the added zest of a forbidden book, the "Nouvelle Héloïse" 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. "Émile," the "Contrat Social," and the rest of the
series succeeded each other in her studies; but she does not speak of