n in its intrinsic quality.

The barbaric vulgarity of our commercial age is largely responsible
for the invidious slur cast upon any genuine critical psychology;
upon any psychology which frankly recognises the enormous
influence in literature exercised by normal or abnormal sexual
impulses.

Criticism of literature which has nothing to say about the particular
sexual impulse--natural or vicious, as it may happen--which drives a
writer forward, becomes as dull and unenlightening as theology
without the Real Presence.

Among the influences that obstruct such free criticism among us at
present may be noted Puritan fanaticism, academic professionalism
(with its cult of the "young person"), popular vulgarity, and that
curious Anglo-Saxon uneasiness and reticence in these things which
while in no sense a sign of purity of mind invokes an invincible
prejudice against any sort of straightforward discussion.

It is for these reasons that the art of criticism in England and
America is so childish and pedantic when compared with that of
France. In France even the most reactionary of critics--persons like
Leon Bloy, for instance--habitually use the boldest sexual
psychology in elucidating the mysterious caprices of human genius;
and one can only wish that the conventional inhibition that renders
such freedom impossible with us could come to be seen in its true
light, that is to say as itself one of the most curious examples of
sexual morbidity ever produced by unnatural conditions.

Rousseau is perhaps of all great original geniuses the one most
impossible to deal with without some sort of recognition of the
sexual peculiarities which penetrated his passionate and restless
spirit. No writer who has ever lived had so sensitive, so nervous, so
vibrant a physiological constitution. Nothing that he achieved in
literature or in the creation of a new atmosphere of feeling in Europe,
can be understood without at least a passing reference to the
impulses which pushed him forward on his wayward road.

As we watch him in his pleasures, his passions, his pilgrimages, his
savage reactions, it is difficult to avoid the impression that certain
kinds of genius are eminently and organically anti-social.

It is perhaps for this reason at bottom that the political-minded
Anglo-Saxon race, with its sturdy "good citizen" ideals, feels so
hostile and suspicious toward these great anarchists of the soul.

Rousseau is indeed, temperamentally