growth of errors, simplification of
social relations by equality, of literature and art by constant return
to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and thrift,--this is the
revolutionary process and ideal, and this is the secret of Rousseau's
hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken maze of
fallen systems.

* * * * *

The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides. It
has deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of
those who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous
men and our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constant
demands on the patience or pity of those who study his life. Yet in no
other instance is the common eagerness to condense all predication about
a character into a single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate.
If it is indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming,
classifying, at least it is well, in speaking of such a nature as his,
to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics,
and to be as sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of the
sympathies and faculties which together compose our power of spiritual
observation, is in a condition of free and patient energy. Any less open
and liberal method, which limits our sentiments to absolute approval or
disapproval, and fixes the standard either at the balance of common
qualities which constitutes mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommon
qualities which is divinity as in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloud
of blank incomprehensibleness those singular spirits who come from time
to time to quicken the germs of strange thought and shake the quietness
of the earth.

We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, in
reflecting that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has
given no thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn
children and trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it
was Rousseau who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for
one more of the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud,
it was truly said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of
thought, as we shall see, and he was only continuing work which others
had prepared. But he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in
Rousseau that polite Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faint
reverberation