Nobody, again, has had more than he upon
the nineteenth century, for Byron, Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, and
George Sand all descend from him.
And yet, with these extraordinary talents, he was an extremely unhappy
man--why? Because he always allowed himself to be mastered by his
imagination and his sensations; because he had no judgment in deciding,
no self-control in acting. Regret indeed on this score would be hardly
reasonable, for a calm, judicious, orderly Rousseau would never have
made so great an impression. He came into collision with his time: hence
his eloquence and his misfortunes. His naive confidence in life and
himself ended in jealous misanthropy and hypochondria.
What a contrast to Goethe or Voltaire, and how differently they
understood the practical wisdom of life and the management of literary
gifts! They were the able men--Rousseau is a visionary. They knew
mankind as it is--he always represented it to himself either whiter or
blacker than it is; and having begun by taking life the wrong way, he
ended in madness. In the talent of Rousseau there is always something
unwholesome, uncertain, stormy, and sophistical, which destroys the
confidence of the reader; and the reason is no doubt that we feel
passion to have been the governing force in him as a writer: passion
stirred his imagination, and ruled supreme over his reason.
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