masked confessions and suppressed sighs, love-sickness expressed in a becomingly conventional manner. In Rousseau's eyes these mannerisms are as ridiculous as they are artificial. He prefers love, like everything else, in its natural state, and to him love in its natural state is a violent, irresistible passion. In his books we are very far removed from those scenes in Marivaux in which the kneeling lover never forgets to preserve a graceful attitude while pressing the tips of a glove to his lips. For all his chivalry and virtue, St. Preux is an electric battery charged with passion; the first kiss in the Grove of Clarens produces the shock, the conflagration of a thunderbolt; and when Julie, bending towards St. Preux and kissing him, swoons away, it is no coquettish faint of the days of the periwig, but the effect of the overwhelming might of passion upon a young and healthy child of nature. The second novelty in the book is the inequality in station of the hero and heroine. Julie is the daughter of a nobleman, St. Preux is a poor tutor, a plebeian. Here, as in the _Sorrows of Werther_, the passion of love is connected with the equality-loving plebeian's determination to make a name for himself. This is no chance connection, for passion creates equality, whereas love in fashionable society has a tendency to develop into gallantry. A third significant feature in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ is that, just as we have passion in place of gallantry and inequality of station in place of similarity of rank, we have also the moral conviction of the sanctity of marriage in place of that honour grounded on aristocratic pride and self-respect, which stood for virtue in fashionable literature. This word, Virtue, little in vogue until now, became with Rousseau and his school a watchword which was in perfect harmony with their other watchword, Nature; for to Rousseau virtue was a natural condition. Following the example of society, French literature had been making merry at the expense of marriage; Rousseau, therefore, defied the spirit of the times by writing a book in its honour. His heroine returns the passion of her lover, but marries another, to whom she remains faithful. Here, as in _Werther_, the lover proper loses the maiden, who is wedded to a Monsieur Wolmar (the Albert of _Werther_ and the Edward of Kierkegaard's _Diary of a Seducer_), a man as irreproachable as he is uninteresting. The moral conviction which is vindicated and glorified in Rousseau as Virtue, is the same as that which in Chateaubriand, under the influence of the religious reaction, takes the form of a binding religious vow.