which various movements
are interpreted by stringed and breathing instruments. If Rousseau
here is less of the prophet than in his other writings, he is more
of the great enchanter. Should a moral be drawn from the book, the
author would have us learn that nature has made man good, that society
has the skill to corrupt him, and finally that it is in his power
to refashion himself to such virtue as the world most needs and most
impatiently rejects.

The influence of Rousseau cannot easily be over-estimated. He
restored the sentiment of religion in an age of abstract deism or
turbid materialism. He inaugurated a moral reform. He tyrannised over
France in the person of his disciple Robespierre. He emancipated the
passions from the domination of the understanding. He liberated the
imagination. He caught the harmonies of external nature, and gave
them a new interpretation.[1] He restored to French prose, colour,
warmth, and the large utterance which it had lost. He created a
literature in which all that is intimate, personal, lyrical asserted
its rights, and urged extravagant claims. He overthrew the classical
ideal of art, and enthroned the _ego_ in its room.

[Footnote 1: Among writers who fostered the new feeling for external
nature, Ramond (1755-1827), who derived his inspiration, partly
scientific, partly imaginative, from the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees,
deserves special mention.]

II

The fermentation of ideas was now quickened by the new life of
passion--passion social and democratic as the days of Revolution
approached; passion also personal and private, which, welcomed as
a sacred fire, too often made the inmost being of the individual a
scene of agitating and desolating conflict.

The Abbe Raynal (1713-96) made his _Histoire des Deux Indes_ a
receptacle not only for just views and useful information, but for
every extravagance of thought and sentiment. "Insert into my book,"
he said to his brother philosophers, "everything that you choose
against God, against religion, and against government." In the third
edition appears a portrait of the author, posing theatrically, with
the inscription, "To the defender of humanity, of truth, of liberty!"
The _salons_ caught the temper of the time. Voltairean as they were,
disposed to set down Rousseau as an enthusiast or a charlatan, they
could not resist the invasion of passion or of sensibility. It mingled
with a swarm of incoherent ideas and gave them a new intensi