of such words as Justice, Liberty, Equality, Reason,
Nature, Love, self-idealising, self-worshipping, self-deceiving
prophets of magnetic genius give way to their weaknesses, their
perversities, their anti-social reactions, the vibrant nerves of the
great citizen of Geneva may still be felt, quivering melodiously;
touching us with the tremulousness of their anarchical revolt against
everything hard and stern and strong.

Suppose for a moment that Rousseau were the equivocal pernicious
influence, half-priest, half-pandar, half-charlatan, half-prophet of a
world-disintegrating orgy of sentiment, should I for one, I am
tempted to ask, close the gates of our platonic republic against him?

Not so! Let the world look to itself. Let the sheep-like crowd take
the risks of its docility. Let the new bourgeois tyrants cuddle and
cosset the serpent that shall bite them, as did the salon ladies of the
old regime.

No! Let the world look to itself and let progress look to itself.

There seems something exhilarating about this possible appearance
upon the earth of genuinely dangerous writers, of writers who
exploit their vices, lay bare their weaknesses, brew intoxicating
philtres of sweet poison out of their obsessions and lead humanity to
the edge of the precipice! And there is something peculiarly
stimulating to one's psychological intelligence when all this is done
under the anaesthesia of humanitarian rhetoric and the lulling
incantations of pastoral sentiment.

Rousseau is, in one very important sense, the pioneer of that art of
delicate egoism in which the wisest epicureans of our day love to
indulge. I refer to his mania for solitude, his self-conscious passion
for nature. This feeling for nature was absolutely genuine in him and
associates itself with all his amours and all his boldest speculations.

The interesting thing about it is that it takes the form of that vague,
intimate magical rapport between our human souls and whatever
mysterious soul lurks in the world around us, which has become in
these recent days the predominant secret of imaginative poetry.

Not that Rousseau carries things as far as Wordsworth or Shelley.
He is a born prose writer, not a poet. But for the very reason that he
is writing prose, and writing it with a sentimental rather than a
mystical bias, there are aspects of his work which have a simple
natural _personal_ appeal that the sublime imagination of the great
spiritual poets must necess