n. Other people wrote
polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic
decorations. Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmost
depths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him either
ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing that
could attract much sympathy or much admiration. Though, as has been
pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies of
date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts
of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two
of the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental
reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet
when all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness
of what remains is made more evident with every addition to our
materials for testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's
life are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proved
delinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as
essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is
consistent with the general empire of sensation over untrained
intelligence.[375] As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard
to see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism.
And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to the
surface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less vicious
and debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with a
troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itself
perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two of
the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, and
are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some vices
whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright atrocities,
and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier
impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he
confesses to a horrible assassination. This morbid form of
self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which
clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation. And there is
not much of it. Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, and
the egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustine
or of Cardan.

These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise
the popular estimate of his character, but simply in the in