onviction--that the individual, now, on this
earth, and in himself, was the most important thing in the world.

This belief, no doubt, would have arisen in Europe, in some way or
other, if Rousseau had never lived; but it was he who clothed it with
the splendour of genius, and, by the passion of his utterance, sowed it
far and wide in the hearts of men. In two directions his influence was
enormous. His glowing conception of individual dignity and individual
rights as adhering, not to a privileged few, but to the whole mass of
humanity, seized upon the imagination of France, supplied a new and
potent stimulus to the movement towards political change, and produced a
deep effect upon the development of the Revolution. But it is in
literature, and those emotions of real life which find their natural
outlet in literature, that the influence of Rousseau's spirit may be
most clearly seen.

It is often lightly stated that the eighteenth century was an
unemotional age. What, it is asked, could be more frigid than the poetry
of Pope? Or more devoid of true feeling than the mockery of Voltaire?
But such a view is a very superficial one; and it is generally held by
persons who have never given more than a hasty glance at the works they
are so ready to condemn. It is certainly true that at first sight Pope's
couplets appear to be cold and mechanical; but if we look more closely
we shall soon find that these apparently monotonous verses have been
made the vehicle for some of the most passionate feelings of disgust and
animosity that ever agitated a human breast. As for Voltaire, we have
already seen that to infer lack of feeling from his epigrams and
laughter would be as foolish as to infer that a white-hot bar of molten
steel lacked heat because it was not red. The accusation is untenable;
the age that produced--to consider French literature alone--a Voltaire,
a Diderot, and a Saint-Simon cannot be called an age without emotion.
Yet it is clear that, in the matter of emotion, a distinction of some
sort does exist between that age and this. The distinction lies not so
much in the emotion itself as in the _attitude towards_ emotion, adopted
by the men of those days and by ourselves. In the eighteenth century men
were passionate--intensely passionate; but they were passionate almost
unconsciously, in a direct unreflective way. If anyone had asked
Voltaire to analyse his feelings accurately, he would have replied that
he had other thin