r a soldier.
What if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenary
beatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the Lake of
Bienne? What if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free but
is everywhere in chains? Let us hope that the dead author was not too
keenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice. His
death would have been bitter.

[Footnote 1: _La Formation Religieuse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau_. Par
Pierre Maurice Masson. (Paris: Hachette. Three volumes.)]

From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. His method would speak
against it. Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of
the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate
to the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made.
He had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no
real history can be written. Chronology was meaningless to him because
he could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. With him ends
were beginnings. In the third _Dialogue_ he tell us--and it is nothing
less than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well--that his
works must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who
would understand him. Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than
is imagined by those who take the parable called the _Contrat Social_
for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie to
history. In himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grew
younger with years. He might be known as the man of the second childhood
_par excellence_. To the eye of history the effort of his soul was an
effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a
perspective of progress. On his after-dinner journey to Diderot at
Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that
progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so
long was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld the soul of man _sub
specie aeternitatis_. In his vision history and institutions dissolved
away. His second childhood had begun.

On such a man the historical method can have no grip. There is, as the
French say, no _engrenage_. It points to a certain lack of the subtler
kind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly,
perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years been
imported into French criticism from Germany. The Sorbonne has not, we
know,