about this
meeting was that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint
Lambert had interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with
Diderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.[287]
Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor
short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to have
lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to
have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of
the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent
good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may
serve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, when
it no longer suits them to see one another.[288] It is at least certain
that in them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends
that he ever possessed.

III.

The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with
catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished
itself in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a
silent and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something
of acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous
process was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders.
This disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from
his infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing
man to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the
history of a life is the history of a body no less than that of a soul.
Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two factions of
moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuities
of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have been nothing
more than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We are not to
suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on no man's
malformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it is
folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena. In
firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little
endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he
endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed
from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form
which this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintly
nature,