It was perhaps necessary, if anything is ever necessary, that this newly awakened interest in the individual mind should be accompanied by a new idealism to falsify it from the outset. However this may be, there can be small doubt that the result of this revolution was a new crop of conventionalities considerably less truthful and, as it seems to us to-day, more harmful than the old. Sentimentality had come to birth in a night. The newly discovered world was apparently too painful a spectacle to be faced, and to cover its nakedness new doctrines like “the perfectibility of man,” new angles of vision like those of Romanticism, had somehow to be invented. Fifty years were to pass before another honest work of the imagination, with one exception, could come to light in France; and the author of that exception, Laclos, is as interesting a commentary on the generation succeeding Rousseau as one can find. _Les Liaisons dangereuses_ is for its own or any other time an extraordinarily truthful book; the characters, as they express themselves in their letters, are not inhuman, but human monsters; not spotless, but only foolish innocents. The tragedy is moving in the modern way; you identify your feelings with those of the characters themselves. But Laclos was not satisfied with the book as it stands. He was a fervent disciple of Rousseau’s, and there appears to be little doubt that the book which exists was only intended to be a picture of the “false” society in which they, and we, live, and was to be followed by another showing what men and women would immediately be like if only they could live and act “naturally.” “_Le grand défaut de tous ces livres à paradoxes_,” said Voltaire of Rousseau, “_n’est-il pas de supposer toujours la nature autrement qu’elle n’est?_” _La nature telle qu’elle est_—such is to be the aim of the French nineteenth-century novelists if only they can see their opportunity. It must be confessed that several of them failed. An interest in psychology had been awakened, yet one compares _Les Misérables_ with _La Princesse de Clèves_ and may be excused for forgetting it. Throughout the first part of the century, at any rate, it seems as if the last thing a novelist ever asked himself was, “Would I or any reasonable creature act or feel like that?” Common-sense had gone by the board again, and “the fine,” “the noble,” “the proud,” “the pathetic,” and “the touching” held the stage.