with anecdotes for light laughter,
for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and
contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing
or theatrical; too real to him! The contortions of a dying gladiator:
the crowded amphitheatre looks-on with entertainment; but the
gladiator is in agonies and dying.

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to
Mothers, with his _Contrat-social_, with his celebrations of Nature,
even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality,
struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to his
Time. As _he_ could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all that
defacement, degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost
heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, out
of the element of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and
Persiflage, there has arisen in that man the ineradicable feeling and
knowledge that this Life of ours is _true_; not a Scepticism, Theorem,
or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made that
revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken
out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,--as clearly as he
could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those
stealings of ribbons aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we
will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlements and
staggerings to and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for,
by a path he cannot yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One should
have tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he
will do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man.

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his
countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I
call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in
Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes
pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not
genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something _operatic_; a kind
of rosepink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is
universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has
something of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the present
astonishing convulsionary 'Literature of Desperation,' it is
everywhere abundant. That same _rosepink_ is not the right hue. Look
at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Sco