[369] I observe that I have not yet fulfilled the promise of saying something of Wolmar, but the less said of him the better. He belongs wholly to that latter portion which has been wished away; he is a respectable Deist—than which it is essentially impossible, one would suppose, for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy alike to imagine anything more uninteresting; and his behaviour to Saint-Preux appears to me to be simply nauseous. He cannot, like Rowena, "forgive as a Christian," because he is not one, and any other form of forgiveness or even of tolerance is, in the circumstances, disgusting. But it was Rousseau's way to be disgusting sometimes.
[370] We have spoken of his attempt at the fairy tale; qui Gomersal non odit in English verse, amet Le Lévite d'Ephraïm in French prose, etc. etc.
[371] He did not even, as Rousseau did with his human offspring, habitually take them to the Foundling Hospital—that is to say, in the case of literature, the anonymous press. He left them in MS., gave them away, and in some cases behaved to them in such an incomprehensible fashion that one wonders how they ever came to light.
[372] Carlyle's Essay and Lord Morley of Blackburn's book are excepted. But Carlyle had not the whole before him, and Lord Morley was principally dealing with the Encyclopédie.
[373] Especially as Génin, like Carlyle, did not know all. There is, I believe, a later selection, but I have not seen it.
[374] Even the long, odd, and sometimes tedious Rêve de D'Alembert, which Carlyle thought "we could have done without," but which others have extolled, has vivid narrative touches, though one is not much surprised at Mlle. de Lespinasse having been by no means grateful for the part assigned to her.
[375] The cleansing effect of war is an old cliché. It has been curiously illustrated in this case: for the first proof of the present passage reached me on the very same day with the news of the expulsion of the Germans from the village of Puisieux. So the name got "red-washed" from its old reproach.
[376] There really are touches of resemblance in it to Browning, especially in things like Mr. Sludge the Medium.
[377] The corporal's wound in the knee.
[378] Of course, there are exceptions, and with one of the chief of them, Xavier de Maistre, we may have, before long, to deal.