stors the physiological
truth of the power of the will over the secretions.

The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are
accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New
Heloisa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full,
highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charm
in the source and original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no
widest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make
endurable. Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance
of fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets
turn graciously on the lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at
the feet of his mistress. Even Werther, stricken creature as he was,
yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be the
instrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares. Saint
Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation,
or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion. The slave
of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification. With
some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path to
happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes first like a
pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like a
pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.
Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in
comparison. Werther, again, at least represents a principle of
rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and he
retains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful. His
despair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed social
ambition.[45] He feels the world about him. His French prototype, on
the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of a
sensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own fevered
pulsation.

Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she
belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves
fortitude, self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a
certain point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the
New Heloisa could be said to have any moral intention, it is here
where women learn from the example of Julie's energetic return to
duty, the possibility and the satisfaction of bending character back
to comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from a moral point of
view, the rea