usseau's often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of the
ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy
moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and
disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his
sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong
enough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteen
years, _grande mortalis oevi spatium_. They threw him on to that turbid
sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from which,
let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in the
ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him. It
was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid
living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between
his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was
profoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was the
letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social
Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe.

Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though
full of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and
that of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and
the poorest in numbers and harmony. "For," as he justly adds, "the art
of writing is not learnt all at once."[158] The modern critic must be
content to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love as
this was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness,
would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination of
speculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on the
strength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among the
notables of an age that was full of them.[159] We ought to take in
connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse,
which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which
serve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because
in truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even
as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in
this wise:--

Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a
too elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of
conduct announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and