s kept as near as possible to his high
original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the
doctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made
people any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they
ought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, is
still indispensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing that
man had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguine
emotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose in
idyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament,
that enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut out
the dogma of his fatal depravation. "How difficult a thing it is,"
Madame d'Epinay once said to him, "to bring up a child." "Assuredly
it is," answered Rousseau; "because the father and mother are not made
by nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up."[273] This
cynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It
was a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all
good and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching
true happiness knows no stint.

In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can
be made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed
the tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the
spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies
fulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is
the future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human
disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic.
Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in
conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two
mutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, and
society is the work of man. Yet man, who has engendered this corrupted
birth, is good and whole. The strain in the argument may be pardoned
for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Rousseau into
harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character into
finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to such
efforts both fervour and elevation. While others were content with
the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the
spirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith that
clothed education with the augustness and unction of religion. The
tra