Rousseau was in many
respects--as great pleaders always are--a man of the day, who must needs
become a mere name to posterity, yet he could not but have had in him
some not inconsiderable share of that principle by which man eternizes
himself. For it is only to such that the night cometh not in which no man
shall work, and he is still operative both in politics and literature by
the principles he formulated or the emotions to which he gave a voice so
piercing and so sympathetic.
In judging Rousseau, it would be unfair not to take note of the malarious
atmosphere in which he grew up. The constitution of his mind was thus
early infected with a feverish taint that made him shiveringly sensitive
to a temperature which hardier natures found bracing. To him this rough
world was but too literally a rack. Good-humored Mother Nature commonly
imbeds the nerves of her children in a padding of self-conceit that
serves as a buffer against the ordinary shocks to which even a life of
routine is liable, and it would seem at first sight as if Rousseau had
been better cared for than usual in this regard. But as his self-conceit
was enormous, so was the reaction from it proportionate, and the fretting
suspiciousness of temper, sure mark of an unsound mind, which rendered
him incapable of intimate friendship, while passionately longing for it,
became inevitably, when turned inward, a tormenting self-distrust.
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