gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation's
sake. M. Masson's three volumes leave us with the sense that their
author had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of
the momentous question whether Jean-Jacques was a person to whom it
might be applied with a prospect of discovery. No one who read Rousseau
with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter.
Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point. The Savoyard Vicar was
speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession of
faith with the words:--

'Je ne veux argumenter avec vous, ni meme de tenter vous convaincre;
il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicite de
mon coeur. Consultez le votre pendant mon discours; c'est tout ce
que je vous demande.'

To the extent, therefore, that M. Masson did not respond to this appeal
and filled his volumes with information concerning the books
Jean-Jacques might have read and a hundred other interesting but only
partly relevant things, he did the citizen of Geneva a wrong. The
ulterior motive is there, and the faint taste of a thesis in the most
modern manner. But the method is saved by the perception which, though
it sometimes lacks the perfect keenness of complete understanding, is
exquisite enough to suggest the answer to the questions it does not
satisfy. Though the environment is lavish the man is not lost.

It is but common piety to seek to understand Jean-Jacques in the way in
which he pleaded so hard to be understood. Yet it is now over forty
years since a voice of authority told England how it was to regard him.
Lord Morley was magisterial and severe, and England obeyed. One feels
almost that Jean-Jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive.
He would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was 'a rag
of metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism,' and he would
have whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his
_Dialogues_ described as the outpourings of a man with persecution
mania, he might have rebelled and muttered silently an _Eppur si muove_.
We see now that it was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, and
that precisely those _Dialogues_ which the then Mr Morley so powerfully
dismissed contain his plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction. To
his contention that he wrote his books to ease his own soul it might be
replied that their publication was a s