"Surely," cried Madame D'Anville, "you will allow De la Martine's poetry to be beautiful?"
"I allow it," said he, "to be among the best you have; and I know very few lines in your language equal to the two first stanzas in his 'Meditation on Napoleon,' or to those exquisite verses called 'Le Lac;' but you will allow also that he wants originality and nerve. His thoughts are pathetic, but not deep; he whines, but sheds no tears. He has, in his imitation of Lord Byron, reversed the great miracle; instead of turning water into wine, he has turned wine into water. Besides, he is so unpardonably obscure. He thinks, with Bacchus—(you remember, D'A—, the line in Euripides, which I will not quote), that 'there is something august in the shades;' but he has applied this thought wrongly—in his obscurity there is nothing sublime—it is the back ground of a Dutch picture. It is only a red herring, or an old hat, which he has invested with such pomposity of shadow and darkness."
"But his verses are so smooth," said Lady—.
"Ah!" answered Vincent.
"'Quand la rime enfin se trouve au bout des vers,
Qu'importe que le reste y soit mis des travers.'"
"Helas" said the Viscount D'A—t, an author of no small celebrity himself; "I agree with you—we shall never again see a Voltaire or a Rousseau."
"There is but little justice in those complaints, often as they are made," replied Vincent. "You may not, it is true, see a Voltaire or a Rousseau, but you will see their equals. Genius can never be exhausted by one individual. In our country, the poets after Chaucer in the fifteenth century complained of the decay of their art—they did not anticipate Shakspeare. In Hayley's time, who ever dreamt of the ascension of Byron? Yet Shakspeare and Byron came like the bridegroom 'in the dead of night;' and you have the same probability of producing—not, indeed, another Rousseau, but a writer to do equal honour to your literature."
"I think," said Lady—, "that Rousseau's 'Julie' is over-rated. I had heard so much of 'La Nouvelle Heloise' when I was a girl, and been so often told that it was destruction to read it, that I bought the book the very day after I was married. I own to you that I could not get through it."
"I am not surprised at it," answered Vincent; "but Rousseau is not the less a genius for all that: there is no story to bear out the style, and he himself is right when he says 'ce livre convient a tres peu de lecteurs.' One letter would delight every one—four volumes of them are a surfeit—it is the toujours perdrix. But the chief beauty of that wonderful conception of an empassioned and meditative mind is to be found in the inimitable manner in which the thoughts are embodied, and in the tenderness, the truth, the profundity of the thoughts themselves: when Lord Edouard says, 'c'est le chemin des passions qui m'a conduit a la philosophie,' he inculcates, in one simple phrase, a profound and unanswerable truth. It is in these remarks that nature is chiefly found in the writings of Rousseau: too much engrossed in himself to be deeply skilled in the characters of others, that very self-study had yet given him a knowledge of the more hidden recesses of the heart. He could perceive at once the motive and the cause of actions, but he wanted the patience to trace the elaborate and winding progress of their effects. He saw the passions in their home, but he could not follow them abroad. He knew mankind in the general, but not men in the detail. Thus, when he makes an aphorism or reflection, it comes home at once to you as true; but when he would analyze that reflection, when he argues, reasons, and attempts to prove, you reject him as unnatural, or you refute him as false. It is then that he partakes of that manie commune which he imputes to other philosophers, 'de nier ce qui est, et d'expliquer ce qui n'est pas.'"
There was a short pause. "I think," said Madame D'Anville, "that it is in those pensees which you admire so much in Rousseau, that our authors in general excel."