No man
who ever wrote English, except perhaps Mr. Ruskin, more habitually
mistook his own personal likes and dislikes, tastes and distastes, for
general principles, and this, it may be suspected, is the secret of all
merely eloquent writing. He hints at madness as an explanation of
Rousseau, and it is curious enough that Mr. Buckle was fain to explain
_him_ in the same way. It is not, we confess, a solution that we find
very satisfactory in this latter case. Burke's fury against the French
Revolution was nothing more than was natural to a desperate man in
self-defence. It was his own life, or, at least, all that made life dear
to him, that was in danger. He had all that abstract political wisdom
which may be naturally secreted by a magnanimous nature and a sensitive
temperament, absolutely none of that rough-and-tumble kind which is so
needful for the conduct of affairs. Fastidiousness is only another form
of egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the
narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake
it for what they are seeking. Burke's hatred of Rousseau was genuine and
instinctive. It was so genuine and so instinctive as no hatred can be but
that of self, of our own weaknesses as we see them in another man.
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