ed his personal honour
and the free justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and
his son was sent to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722),
under the care of a minister, "there to learn along with Latin all the
medley of sorry stuff with which, under the name of education, they
accompany Latin."[11] Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of his
intellectual instruction here, but he marks his two years' sojourn under
the roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in that fateful
acquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more important than
literary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the tree of nascent
experience, men usually keep strict silence. Rousseau is the only person
that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole world as a part of his own
biography the ignoble circumstances of the birth of sensuality in
boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while he told of the
playmate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, which
waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find
the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean grip
is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fume
of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive a
part, that most of the spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it is
here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the firmament of the
spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high matters of will
and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind, and hurry to
the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innate
healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legend
of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, prevents
us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer
forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous,
if it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it
needs hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from
calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this
lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the
region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided
and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept
crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all
th