95

Common theory of Rousseau's madness 296

Preparatory conditions 297

Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence 299

The Confessions 301

His life at Wootton 306

Flight from Derbyshire 306

And from England 308

CHAPTER VII.

THE END.

The elder Mirabeau 309

Shelters Rousseau at Fleury 311

Rousseau at Trye 312

In Dauphiny 314

Return to Paris 314

The _Reveries_ 315

Life in Paris 316

Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him 317

An Easter excursion 320

Rousseau's unsociality 322

Poland and Spain 324

Withdrawal to Ermenonville 326

His death 326

ROUSSEAU.

CHAPTER I.

MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOISA.

The many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden in
such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period of
stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the
indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is
one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of
stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher
parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what
is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious
complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of
1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed
not only the New Heloisa, which is the monument of his fall, but the
Social Contract, which was the most influential, and Emilius, which
was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the productions of
the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor
light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true
that no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the
age of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years,
however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength and
incommunicable savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better
ordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart to
literature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that
comes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.

The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Heloisa
was