luptuous desire of his to lay
bare all his basest and meanest lusts, all his little tricks and devices
and vanities and envies and jealousies. This mania for self-exposure,
this frantic passion for self-laceration and self-humiliation is all of a
piece with the manner in which he seemed to enjoy being ill-used
and tyrannised over in his singular love-affairs.

More interesting still, and still more morbid, is that persecution
mania which seized him in his later days--the mania that all the
world loathed him and laughed at him and plotted to make a fool of
him. Though betrayed into using the popular phrase, "persecution
mania," I am myself inclined to resent, on Rousseau's behalf and on
behalf of those who temperamentally resemble him, this cool
assumption by the normal world that those whom it instinctively
detests are "mad" when they grow aware of such detestation.

There seems no doubt that certain human beings appear at intervals
on the world stage, whose sentient organisation, attuned to an
abnormal receptivity, renders them alien and antagonistic to the
masses of mankind.

They seem like creatures dropped upon the earth from some other
planet, and, do what they may, they cannot grow "native and endued
unto the element" of our terrestrial system. This difference in them
is not only irritating to the normal herd; it is also provocative of
bitter hostility in those among their contemporaries who are
themselves possessed of genius.

These other wooers of posterity feel outraged and piqued to the limit
of their endurance at having to contend in the same arena with an
antagonist who seems to obey no human rules. "A conspiracy of
silence" or of scandalous aspersions is almost instinctively set on
foot.

Rousseau's so-called mania of persecution can easily be explained.
There was morbidity; there was neurotic unwisdom, in the manner
in which he dealt with all these people. But he was probably
perfectly right in assuming that they came to hate him.

In his Confessions he does his best to make posterity hate him; and
in private life he must have been constantly, like one of those
strange self-lacerating persons in Dostoievsky, bringing to the front,
with shameless indecency, his vanities and jealousies, his weakness
and his manias. When he couldn't enjoy the society of some friendly
lady--and his friends were nearly always uneasy under the
infliction--he poured forth his childish petulances and his rare
imaginations