through suppressed exasperation and wounded sensibility, furious against
an adversary, whom he stifles with the multiplied and tenacious threads
of his web, but still more redoubtable to himself than to his enemies,
soon caught in his own meshes,[4138] believing that France and the
universe conspire against him, deducing with wonderful subtlety the
proofs of this chimerical conspiracy, made desperate, at last, by his
over-plausible romance, and strangling in the cunning toils which, by
dint of his own logic and imagination, he has fashioned for himself.

With such weapons one might accidentally kill oneself, but one is
strongly armed. Rousseau was well equipped, at least as powerful as
Voltaire; it may be said that the last half of the eighteenth century
belongs to him. A foreigner, a Protestant, original in temperament, in
education, in heart, in mind and in habits, at once misanthropic and
philanthropic, living in an ideal world constructed by himself, entirely
opposed to the world as it is, he finds himself standing in a new
position. No one is so sensitive to the evils and vices of actual
society. No one is so affected by the virtues and happiness of the
society of the future. This accounts for his having two holds on the
public mind, one through satire and the other through the idyll.--These
two holds are undoubtedly slighter at the present day; the substance
of their grasp has disappeared; we are not the auditors to which it
appealed. The famous discourse on the influence of literature and on the
origin of inequality seems to us a collegiate exaggeration; an effort
of the will is required to read the "Nouvelle Heloise." The author is
repulsive in the persistency of his spitefulness or in the exaggeration
of his enthusiasm. He is always in extremes, now moody and with knit
brows, and now streaming with tears and with arms outstretched to
Heaven. Hyperbole, prosopopaeia, and other literary machinery are too
often and too deliberately used by him. We are tempted to regard him
now as a sophist making the best use of his arts, now as a rhetorician
cudgeling his brains for a purpose, now as a preacher becoming excited,
that is to say, an actor ever maintaining a thesis, striking an attitude
and aiming at effects. Finally, with the exception of the "Confessions"
his style soon wearies us; it is too studied, and too constantly
overstrained. The author is always the author, and he communicates
the defect to his personages.