by turns. At the time when Rousseau appeared, love was equally degraded through Latin-Epicurean immorality and through Germanic-Lutheran “morality.” What he did for love was the same that he would have done for the lungs, if in one of the boudoirs of those days, stuffy with perfumes and wax candles, he had thrown open the windows to the summer night, with its scent of productive earth and blossoming plants, dark masses of foliage and the star-sown sky. But Rousseau did not follow out the ideas that lay nearest to his own: that only love ought to constitute marriage; that only the development of the woman’s personality deepens love. Even Goethe, who after Rousseau carried the gleaming trail farther, by showing love as the mysterious fateful power of elective affinity, saw the happiness of love rather in the directness of woman’s nature than in its development. The French Revolution drew the consequences of Rousseau’s propositions also in the questions of love and woman; it made marriage civil and divorce free, but it did not give to woman the franchise; indeed, it did not even preserve the form of it which she had previously possessed. All the spirits influenced by Rousseau and the Revolution have since, in literature and in life, followed out love’s declaration of rights. In the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages, it was women, poets, and knights—the last under the name of social utopians—who took the lead in this. In Germany, it was first the romantic school, then “Young Germany,” which went foremost; in England, Shelley, Byron, Browning, and a number of other thinkers; in Norway, Camilla Collet and some great poets among the men. In France,—in the midst of the reaction which reintroduced indissoluble marriage,—Madame de Staël attacks this in _Delphine_. In the country of literary salons, it is attempted to prevent woman’s genius from acting as a social force—and through _Corinne_ and Coppet, Mme. de Staël makes it a universal force. Her confidence that honour for a woman can signify only a means of winning love; her complaint that life denies to the woman of genius the fulfilment of her most beautiful dream, love in marriage, were the prologue to innumerable tragedies during woman’s century. After her, came the followers of St. Simon and the rest of the social revolutionaries, and above all another of Rousseau’s spiritual daughters, the woman in whose veins all the blood was mingled which the Revolution had poured out on the scaffold and on the battle-field: blood of the mob, blood of the bourgeois, noble blood, royal blood! The courage of her nation to follow truth to its utmost consequences, the fervent faith of her childhood, the wistfulness of her blood, her soul’s longing for eternity, the volcanic ardour and ashes of her experiences—all this George Sand hurls forth in her indictment of the marriage upheld by Church and State, which to her was “lawful ravishing” and “prostitution under vows.” Long before her time, the