e
feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality
of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and
equality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part of
the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised
bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. He
had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never
wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom
French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who
were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which
devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine
candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and
intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not
for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none
of us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages in
which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that
the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has
passed out from our hearts?

The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women,
but an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which
Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the
midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower
poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is
delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is
naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it
be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic
irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary
could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental
principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the
blameless Emilius, her lord.[324]

VI.

Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is
not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New
Heloisa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with
vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the
history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the
parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It
filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task.
It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure