ic
paradox which made a bitter enemy of the most powerful of French men of
letters. Besides these, the _Reveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire_, the
_Lettres de la Montagne_, and above all, the unique _Confessions_, have
to be reckoned. The last, like several of Rousseau's other works, did
not appear till after his death.

Of all the writers mentioned in this chapter the influence of Rousseau
on literature and on life was probably the largest. He was the direct
inspirer of the men who made the French Revolution, and the theories of
his _Contrat Social_ were closer at the root of Jacobin politics than
any other. His fervid declamation about equality and brotherhood, and
his sentimental republicanism, were seed as well suited to the soil in
which they were sown as Montesquieu's reasoned constitutionalism was
unsuited to it. Rousseau, indeed, if the proof of the excellence of
preaching is in the practice of the hearers, was the greatest preacher
of the century. He denounced the practice of putting infants out to
nurse, and mothers began to suckle their own children; he recommended
instruction in useful arts, and many an _emigre_ noble had to thank
Rousseau for being able to earn his bread in exile; he denounced
speculative atheism, urging the undogmatic but emotional creed of his
_Vicaire Savoyard_, and the first wave of the religious reaction was
set going to culminate in the Catholic movement of Chateaubriand and
Lamennais. But in literature itself his influence was quite as powerful.
He was not, indeed, the founder of the school of analysis of feeling in
the novel, but he was the populariser of it. He was almost the founder
of sentimentalism in general literature, and he was absolutely the first
to make word-painting of nature an almost indispensable element of all
imaginative and fictitious writing both in prose and poetry. Some of his
characteristics were taken up in quick succession by Goethe in Germany,
by Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand in France. Others were for
the time less eagerly imitated, and though Madame de Stael and her lover
Benjamin Constant did something to spread them, it was reserved for the
Romantic movement to develop them fully. It was singular, no doubt, and
this is not the place to undertake the explanation of the singularity,
that Rousseau, who detested most of the conclusions, and almost all the
methods of the Encyclopaedists, should be counted in with them, and
should have undoubtedly hel