As the sentimentalist always takes a fanciful, sometimes an unreal, life
for an ideal one, it would be too much to say that Rousseau was a man of
earnest convictions. But he was a man of fitfully intense ones, as suited
so mobile a temperament, and his writings, more than those of any other
of his tribe, carry with them that persuasion that was in him while he
wrote. In them at least he is as consistent as a man who admits new ideas
can ever be. The children of his brain he never abandoned, but clung to
them with paternal fidelity. Intellectually he was true and fearless;
constitutionally, timid, contradictory, and weak; but never, if we
understand him rightly, false. He was a little too credulous of sonorous
sentiment, but he was never, like Chateaubriand or Lamartine, the lackey
of fine phrases. If, as some fanciful physiologists have assumed, there
be a masculine and feminine lobe of the brain, it would seem that in men
of sentimental turn the masculine half fell in love with and made an idol
of the other, obeying and admiring all the pretty whims of this _folle du
logis_. In Rousseau the mistress had some noble elements of character,
and less taint of the _demi-monde_ than is visible in more recent cases
of the same illicit relation.
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