al Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if
you consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper
breadth, is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to
it is given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the
wide-spreading oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool and
rational western temperament, but more often to the oriental after
lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road
to Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his
own nature,[156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of
intense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he
assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon
problem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his
head, revealed to him another universe. From the active effervescence
which thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which people saw
glittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium, but
of which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which would
probably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced to
wish to continue writing after the access was over. Inflamed by the
contemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to
his mind. His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future
happiness of the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it,
dictated to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a
moment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw
only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those who
dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of their
own."[157]

This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and
this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the
vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious
charlatan. He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an
enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage
and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt
against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in
a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive
expression. The last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its first
and more imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.

Ro