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residuum left behind by a personality of this kind, which to certain
natures becomes more sacred and suggestive than any of those
tedious speculations or literary theories about which the historians
may argue.

Most human beings--especially in these "centres of civilisation,"
which are more hideous than anything the sun has looked upon since
it watched the mammoths tusking the frozen earth or the
ichtheosauruses wallowing in the primeval mud--go through this life
blindly, mechanically, unconsciously, fulfilling their duties,
snatching at their pleasures, and shuddering at the thought of the end.

Few men and women seem really conscious of what it is to be alive,
to be alive and endowed with imagination and memory, upon this
time-battered planet. It needs perhaps the anti-social instincts of a
true "philosophic anarchist" to detach oneself from the absorbing
present and to win the larger perspective.

Rousseau was of so fluid, so irresponsible a temperament that he
never could be brought to take seriously, to take as anything but as
suggestive subjects for eloquent diatribes, the practical and domestic
relations between human beings in organised society.

He played lightly with these relations, he laughed over them and
wept over them, he wrote impassioned and dithyrambic orations
upon them. But they were not his real life. His real life was the life
he lived with his music and his botany and his love affairs, the life
of his dreamy wanderings from refuge to refuge among the woods
and chateaux of France; the life of his delicate memories and wistful
regrets; the life of his thrilling indescribable thoughts, half sensual
and half spiritual, as he drifted along the lonely roads and under the
silent stars, or sat staring at the fire-light in his Paris attic while the
city roared about him.

No lonely introspective spirit, withdrawn from the crowd and hating
the voices of the world, can afford to lose touch with the secret of
Rousseau; with what his self-centred and impassioned existence
really meant.

We need not tease ourselves with his pious speculations, with his
philanthropic oratory or his educational proposals. These can be left
to those who are interested in such things. What we find arresting
and suggestive in him, after this lapse of years, is a certain quality of
personal passion, a certain vein of individual feeling, the touch of
which still has a living power.

How interesting, for example, is that vo