considered, one of the most
passionately anarchical minds in the history of the race. The citizen
of Geneva, the lover of humanity, the advocate of liberty and
equality, was so scandalous an individualist that there has come to
breathe from the passage of his personality across the world an
intoxicating savour of irresponsible independence.

The most ingrained pursuer of his own path, the most intransigeant
"enemy of the people," would be able to derive encouragement in
his obstinate loneliness from reading the works of this philanthropist
who detested humanity; this reformer who fled from society; this
advocate of domesticity who deserted his children; this pietist who
worshipped the god of nature.

The man's intellect was so dominated by his sensualism that, even at
the moment he is eloquently protesting in favour of a regenerated
humanity living under enlightened laws, there emanates from the
mere physical rhythm of his sentences an anti-social passion, a
misanthropic self-worship, a panic terror of the crowd, which
remains in the mind when all his social theories are forgotten.

He is the grand example of a writer whose sub-conscious intimate
self contradicts his overt dogmas and creates a spiritual atmosphere
in which his own reforming schemes wither and vanish.

Rousseau is, from any moral or social or national point of view, a
force of much more disintegrating power than Nietzsche can ever be.
And he is this for the very reason that his sensual and sentimental
nature dominates him so completely.

From the austere Nietzschean watch-tower, this man's incorrigible
weakness presents itself as intrinsically more dangerous to the race
than any unscrupulous strength. The voluptuous femininity of his
insidious eloquence lends itself, as Nietzsche saw, to every sort of
crafty hypocrisy.

Rousseau's rich, subtle, melodious style--soft as a voice of a choir of
women celebrating some Euripidean Dionysus--flows round the
revolutionary figure of Liberty with an orgiastic passion worthy of
the backward flung heads, bared breasts and streaming hair of a
dance of Bassarids.

Other symbolic figures besides that of Liberty emerge above the
stream of this impassioned "Return to Nature." The figure of justice
is there and the figure of fraternity; while above them all the
shadowy lineaments of some female personification of the Future of
Humanity, crowned with the happy stars of the Age of Gold, looks
down upon the rushing