." Rousseau's
"Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current morality
in his age. Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs
are the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any
moral sensitiveness; and while Rousseau could not be accused of being
sensual, nor amorous and heartless as Goethe, he yet shows so crude a
moral state as to render him unwholesome to any person of ordinary
morals in the present day. His "Confessions," instead of being naive,
strike me as being distinctly and continuously coarse. A man and woman
who could give their children deliberately to be farmed out, deserting
them as an animal would not, and this with no sense of loss or
compunction, nor even with a sense of the inhumanity of such
procedure--such a man and woman tell us how free-love can degrade a
natively virtuous mind. Such was Rousseau; and his "Confessions" are
like himself, unblushing, because shameless. These books reflect their
respective ages, and are happily obsolete now. Such memoirs and
fictions in our day are unthinkable as emanating from respectable
sources; and if written would be located in vile haunts in the purlieus
of civilization. Gauged by such a test, the world is seen to be
better, and immensely better. We have sailed out of sight of the old
continent of coarse thinking, and are sailing a sea where purity of
thought and expression impregnate the air like odors. The old hero,
with his lewdness and rhodomontade, is excused from the stage. We have
had enough of him. Even Cyrano de Bergerac is so out of keeping with
the new notion of the heroic, that the translator of the drama must
apologize for his hero's swagger. We love his worth, though despising
his theatrical air and acts. We are done with the actor, and want the
man. And this new hero is proof of a new life in the soul, and,
therefore, more welcome than the glad surprise of the first
meadow-lark's song upon the brown meadows of the early spring.

A reader need not be profound, but may be superficial, and yet discover
that Jean Valjean is fashioned after the likeness of Jesus. Michael
Angelo did not more certainly model the dome of St. Peter's after
Brunelleschi's dome of the Duomo than Hugo has modeled his Valjean
after Christ. We are not necessarily aware of ourselves, nor of our
era, until something discovers both to us, as we do not certainly know
sea air when we feel it. I doubt if most men would r