Hawthorne has admirably illustrated this in the
penance of Mr. Dimmesdale. With all the soil that is upon Rousseau, I
cannot help looking on him as one capable beyond any in his generation of
being divinely possessed; and if it happened otherwise, when we remember
the much that hindered and the little that helped in a life and time like
his, we shall be much readier to pity than to condemn. It was his very
fitness for being something better that makes him able to shock us so
with what in too many respects he unhappily was. Less gifted, he had been
less hardly judged. More than any other of the sentimentalists, except
possibly Sterne, he had in him a staple of sincerity. Compared with
Chateaubriand, he is honesty, compared with Lamartine, he is manliness
itself. His nearest congener in our own tongue is Cowper.
In the whole school there is a sickly taint. The strongest mark which
Rousseau has left upon literature is a sensibility to the picturesque in
Nature, not with Nature as a strengthener and consoler, a wholesome tonic
for a mind ill at ease with itself, but with Nature as a kind of feminine
echo to the mood, flattering it with sympathy rather than correcting it
with rebuke or lifting it away from its unmanly depression, as in the
wholesomer fellow-feeling of Wordsworth.
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