terests of
a greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly
always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau,
from the time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their
least agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the
expression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of
the essential goodness of nature and the importance of understanding
nature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses and
Emilius. "I would fain show to my fellows," he began, "a man in all
the truth of nature," and he cannot be charged with any failure to
keep his word. He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe
whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to
the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all,
considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and
pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and
peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified
assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who
would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense
subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to
come to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to
the glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any
case, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological
facts no less than the others. These are the first thing, and the
second, and the third also.

The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No
monk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous
self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when
the course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with
objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination.
The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of
composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would
never know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication
of his life and character against the infamies with which Hume and
others were supposed to be industriously blackening them. While he was
writing this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the
modes of English provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two
of the great people in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and
social correspondence with them. He wa