and licentious love; it was not a passion, it was a pleasure. Rousseau represented it otherwise. Voltaire had created Candide and Cunigonde; Rousseau had created Julia and Saint Preux; and it is curious to remark the effect which these two contradictory lessons had on their contemporaries. The school of Voltaire preserved this indifference, which is consoled in thinking that, even in love, all is for the best in the best possible of worlds; but it borrowed from Rousseau the exaltation of Saint Preux; and what is remarkable, they made these two harmonize without making any great effort. The romantic passions succeeded to the good fortunes of profligates; but it was a change of the mode rather than a revolution in morals: they used high-sounding words and mean sentiments, moderate emotions and enthusiastic conversations.

Goëthe has not borrowed from Rousseau the passionate enthusiasm of his Werter; he seems also to have borrowed from the Nouvelle Héloïse something of the subject of his romance. Saint Preux loves Julia and does not marry her: so does Werter love Charlotte and does not marry her. But this love of another's wife places Saint Preux, as it does Werter, in a false position, although she is not guilty, and this situation cannot last long. Rousseau withdraws himself from this embarrassment by the sickness and the death of Julia: Goëthe by the suicide of Werter. A novelist* of our days, who is also of the school of Rousseau, seems to have sought in her romance of Jacques, if there was not another denouement possible to histories of this kind. But he has very soon felt, with the knowledge of the human heart which he almost always exhibits, that that was impracticable; and Jacques, the husband, after having endeavored, like Albert in Goëthe, not to offend too much the love of Octavia for Ferdinand; after having, like M. de Volmar, more patient still than Albert, admitted into his house the lover of his wife; after having conducted himself as if he were not her husband, and having done through systematic policy what others do from cowardice and baseness; Jacques, seeing that his situation is false and constrained, resolved to commit suicide. Thus the lover in Werter, the wife in Héloïse, and the husband in Jacques, die to escape their embarrassment. As in histories of this kind, among three persons there is evidently always one too many, and it becomes necessary to choose whom they will sacrifice, and * George Sand.

the choice changes according to times and tastes,-Goëthe and Rousseau sacrifice the lover or the wife; in our days, we sacrifice the husband.

This similarity between some of the events of the Héloïse and Werter is not, in our opinion, the most singular analogy between the two romances. There is another much more striking, which we will notice. In Werter and in Héloïse, in Emile and in the Confessions, there is a sensibility which, notwithstanding the exaltation of the language, partakes much more of the sensibility of the senses than of the soul; and it is in truth sensibility such as the eighteenth century understood it. Werter loves to hear Charlotte speak with emotion of the beautiful romance of Goldsmith, the Vicar of Wakefield; but he loves also to see the lips and the eyes which speak so well. When Charlotte, at the aspect of the country which becomes reanimated after the storm, is moved to tears, and exclaims, O Klopstock! Werter, immediately calling to mind the sublime ode which occupied his thoughts, weeps also; but he sheds tears upon the hand of Charlotte, "which he moistens with delicious tears." Fire runs in the veins of Werter when by chance his finger touches that of Charlotte. He loves Albert, who must marry Charlotte, because Albert is good, wise, and virtuous; and, nevertheless, he is unwilling to see him. Why? Because he is the husband of Charlotte. This idea spoils all the virtues of Albert. In fine, when his amorous despair commences, "Alas!" says he, "this void, this terrible void which I feel in my bosom ! I often think, if you could once,-only once press it against your heart, all this void would be filled."

This mixture of passionate sentiments and ardent emotions constitutes also the basis of the heroes of J. J. Rousseau, in his romances. It is Rousseau as he has described himself in his Confessions. The soul of Rousseau was noble and exalted; but his heart, to speak as the eighteenth century, was sensual: he thinks purely, he feels grossly. He was spiritual, but it was the spiritualism of a libertine age; and, in his Confessions, his love stories have this mixed character; they are at once exalted and brutal. It is perhaps for this very reason that they are so pleasing to youth; for they gratify at the same time the first ardors of the senses and the first enthusiasms of the soul.

This sensibility, half sensual and half moral, which we observe in Werter and in Rousseau, is a bad preservative against thoughts of suicide. "To be carnally-minded is death,” says St. Paul; "but to be spiritually-minded is life and peace." Pamela and Werter admirably exemplify, in our opinion, this verse of St. Paul. Pamela, who resists the passion of her master and the inclination of her own heart,-Pamela lives, by virtue of a strength of mind elevated by religion, above material emotions. To be spiritually-minded is life and peace. Werter, overcome by his passion-and a passion which borrows much from the ardor of the senses- -Werter dies; and it is his passion, it is his sensibility, which has become the mistress of his soul, which drives him to the commission of suicide.

But among the different passions which urge men to suicide, there are differences which it is well to remark, especially when we study the manner in which literature expresses and represents the idea of suicide; for on the expression of this idea and this emotion with which it inspires us, depends much of the passion which it gives birth to. We are more disposed to excuse the suicide which a strong and violent passion urges us to commit, and especially one of those passions which are common to all men, than the suicide which a particular passion or an exceptional malady produces. The more we are disposed to excuse, the more we are disposed to be affected; for there is always some approbation mingled with our pity. Thus Werter, who dies from love, affects us more than Chatterton, who dies from wounded pride and from a literary vanity, which, of all the vanities in the world, is the most sensitive, but for which the public has the least indulgence, because it is that with which it sympathizes the least.

But what is singular, and at the same time melancholy to notice, is that, in proportion as suicides are more numerous, it seems that the causes are less serious. People do not now kill themselves to defend their honor, as Pamela contemplated, or from love, like Werter. By cultivating our sensibility too assiduously, we have acquired too sensitive a temperament. We groan at the least touch; every movement becomes a shock, every scratch becomes a wound, and all opposition to our will becomes a cause of despair. The soul has

become a Sybarite; it can no longer even support the wrinkle of a rose-leaf.

His

This sickly sensibility, made keener by pride, constitutes the character of Chatterton, as he has been represented on the stage, and it is for this reason that his suicide affects us so little. Chatterton does not kill himself as a desperate lover, or as a Stoic. He kills himself because his vanity has been wounded, and because, instead of honoring his genius, the lord mayor of London advises him to abandon making verses, and offers to make him his valet-de-chambre. This would perhaps show that the lord mayor was a fool, but is not a sufficient reason why Chatterton should commit suicide. Would it not, indeed, be holding our life very cheap, to place it at the mercy of every fool whom we may happen to meet? suicide was caused by wounded pride. . "Damned country! the abode of scorn, be forever accursed!" exclaimed he, after having read a journal which pretended that he was not the author of his poems, and the letter in which the lord mayor offers to take him into his service. (Taking the vial of оріит.) "Oh my soul, I have sold you!-I redeem you with this." (He drinks the opium.) “Free from all! equal to all at present! Welcome first hour of repose that I have enjoyed! Last hour of my life, welcome dawn of an eternal day! Farewell humiliations, hatreds, sarcasms, uncertainties, anguishes, miseries, tortures of the soul, farewell! Oh, with happiness I bid you all farewell!"

Thus the calumny of a journal and the impertinence of a letter, are the motives of the suicide of Chatterton. When Cato killed himself, it was at least for more than that.

We e are aware, that the ingenious author of Chatterton has attached to his hero a theory with regard to the duties which society is obliged to fulfill towards poets. It must, when it discovers genius, sustain it, encourage it, and free it from the cares and embarrassments of life: in short, genius ought to have its civil list. We would cordially consent, and our contribution would be ready, if we could only know by what sign to recognize it. Does it show itself by the display of a sensitive vanity? by a quickness to be discouraged? by the abortion of its hopes? by the esteem of itself and a contempt for others? Alas! according to this account, genius runs the streets; and very foolish would he be who would make himself debtor, when he could, by puffing his own de

fects, become the creditor. We will attempt to describe the characteristics of genius; but it seems that genius has a mark too much forgotten in this age; a mark which characterized it formerly in an extraordinary manner. Patience and vitality are its essential elements. See Dante, Homer, Tasso, Milton,* and a host of others. They did not escape misfortune; they lived, nevertheless, because they had within them that strength which enabled them to bear the pains of life. God had not given them genius, as a light perfume escapes from a vial when it is shaken, but as a generous viaticum which sustains man during a long voyage. What! you have within you a divine and immortal thought, and cannot support the ennuis of life, the scorn of fools, the malignity of calumniators, the coldness of the indifferent! What! you walk with your head in the heavens, and you complain because an insect, concealed in the grass, stings your feet as you pass by!-Protect genius against its own infirmities and weaknesses, say some people.-But we distrust that genius which can only live in a hot-house; and we expect of this sickly plant, neither flowers which have perfume, nor fruit which have flavor. They say, that genius wants but two things: Life and revery, bread and time. Bread! God has said to man, that he should only eat of it by the sweat of his brow. Why should genius be dispensed from the law of labor, which is the law of God?" My work," says the genius, "is to dream." Alas! Revery is not a profession, which society can recognize and reward. It is wrong, say some; it is to genius that we are indebted for poetry, and poetry must have its price in the world. Yes; but it does obtain the best price which man can pay to man; it obtains glory. And see what admirable justice in this distribution which man makes of glory to great poets! Until the day when poetry leaps forth, grand and beautiful, from the long reveries of the poet, no one knows whether the dream would be barren or fruitful, and if there would remain to the man who awoke, any thing of the enchantments of the man who had slept.

* "And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things, not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that is praiseworthy."-MILTON.