The century advanced, and woman in German literature was and remained the superior being, the exalted being, the more loving being; it was always she who was the most energetic in love and who led the way to action. Compare the writings of Gutzkow and Spielhagen. It was woman who made man happy with the gift of her love, it was she who condescended to the worshipping man, while he rejoiced in her love without exactly understanding it. Woman stood upon a pedestal, indescribable, incomprehensible, she was “the exalted woman.” Some partial authors designated her in high-flown language as “sublime.” This sublime woman, whom men were made to worship with an ecstatic reverence, played a favourite part in the novels of second-rate authors and authoresses whose works were most popular in lending libraries. There was not the faintest trace of anything of this sort in Keller’s novels. There was no perverseness there, no amazement, no holding up of the hands in adoration. There were none of those strange moods which a man is said to respect although he cannot understand them, and which have provided a subject for many volumes, and problems for as many authors. In his representation of woman, Keller very nearly falls out of the frame of this sentimental period. What can be the cause of it? What was the sombre influence which failed to influence him, while it united the other writers of the different schools, the writers of the classical age, of young Germany and of the older period? Why is it that he is almost the only one in whom there lurks no trace of the bombast style or the high-flown phrases of the “storm and stress” and the eight-and-forty period? The answer to both these questions is the same. He is, so far as my knowledge extends, the only one among all the German writers of the century who has either wholly escaped from, or been completely unsusceptible to, the Rousseau epidemic in its various forms of inoculation. This undoubtedly proves Keller’s superiority to the other authors, both as an individual and as a man with regard to women. It was Rousseau who introduced the worship of woman into literature, and likewise her superiority, and her resemblance to man. There were, as we ascertain from reading Rousseau’s _Confessions_, not only psychological but also physiological reasons to account for this, and here the modern student of culture may find fresh ground for enquiry. Rousseau was the author who introduced something entirely new. It was Rousseau, the half Frenchman, who introduced the element of high-sounding sentimentality into a literature which had hitherto known nothing of it. It was Rousseau, the bourgeois with the character of a plebeian, who introduced a new class into literature, a class which had grown up in a time of revolution; it was he who introduced the feelings of a plebeian in relation to a woman of higher birth than himself.