f his
unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies with
which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the
struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's
unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two
names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the
century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange
of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably
clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter,
that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their
methods were different, their training different, their points of view
different, and above all these things, their temperaments were different
by a whole heaven's breadth.

A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered
by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The
philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the
happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals
away their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into
the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the
sadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in
tendencies, which is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to
the divergence between them in all the fundamental conditions of
intellectual and moral life, then the variation which divided the
revolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly apart through
unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible
enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in
contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity,
vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say,
Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly
antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling
vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion of
knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of the
felicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophic
raiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless.
Still this can never make us forget that he was in his day and
generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because he awoke one
dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to awake
another set. Each