inguished men of the day.
In fact, the only reason that he could have had for abusing Rousseau was
that he believed Rousseau deserved abuse. Whether he was right in
believing so is a very different question. Most readers, at the present
day, now that the whole noisy controversy has long taken its quiet place
in the perspective of Time, would, I think, agree that Diderot and the
rest of the Encyclopaedists were mistaken. As we see him now, in that
long vista, Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a
distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex, creature; and,
above all else, he possessed one quality which cut him off from his
contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them: he was
modern. Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth
century, he belonged to another world--to the new world of
self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy
and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of
Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart. Who
can wonder that he was misunderstood, and buffeted, and driven mad? Who
can wonder that, in his agitations, his perplexities, his writhings, he
seemed, to the pupils of Voltaire, little less than a frenzied fiend?
'Cet homme est un forcene!' Diderot exclaims. 'Je tache en vain de faire
de la poesie, mais cet homme me revient tout a travers mon travail; il
me trouble, et je suis comme si j'avais a cote de moi un damne: il est
damne, cela est sur. ... J'avoue que je n'ai jamais eprouve un trouble
d'ame si terrible que celui que j'ai ... Que je ne revoie plus cet
homme-la, il me ferait croire au diable et a l'enfer. Si je suis jamais
force de retourner chez lui, je suis sur que je fremirai tout le long du
chemin: j'avais la fievre en revenant ... On entendait ses cris jusqu'au
bout du jardin; et je le voyais!... Les poetes ont bien fait de mettre
un intervalle immense entre le ciel et les enfers. En verite, la main me
tremble.' Every word of that is stamped with sincerity; Diderot was
writing from his heart. But he was wrong; the 'intervalle immense,'
across which, so strangely and so horribly, he had caught glimpses of
what he had never seen before, was not the abyss between heaven and
hell, but between the old world and the new.

1907.

NOTES:

[Footnote 7: _Jean Jacques Rousseau: a New Criticism_, by Frederika
Macdonald. In two volumes. Chapman and Hall. 1906.]

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