The
Greeks--those artists of the spoken or written word--were artificial by
the time of Ulysses, sophists by the time of Pericles, cunning,
rhetorical, and versed in all the arts of the courtier down to the end
of the lower empire. From the talent of the nation sprang its vices.
For a man to make his mark, like Rousseau by polemics, is to condemn
himself to perpetual exaggeration and conflict. Such a man expiates his
celebrity by a double bitterness; he is never altogether true, and he is
never able to recover the free disposal of himself. To pick a quarrel
with the world is attractive, but dangerous.
J. J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he who founded
traveling on foot before Toepffer, reverie before "Rene," literary botany
before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre,
the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political
discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the
science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De
Saussure. He made music the fashion, and created the taste for
confessions to the public. He formed a new French style--the close,
chastened, passionate, interwoven style we know so well. Nothing indeed
of Rousseau has been lost, and nobody has had more influence than he
upon the French Revolution, for he was the demigod of it, and stands
between Neckar and Napoleon.
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