dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and who
supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack when
he declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race. We may
remember that the author of this philippic against love was at the very
moment brooding over the New Heloïsa, and was fresh from strange
transports at the feet of the Julie whom we know.

The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism from
the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the
church? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against their country ought
to be hung. The little flock are falling to devouring one another. This
arch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have been
guided by his brethren of the Encyclopædia, takes it into his head to
make a band of his own. He writes against the stage, after writing a bad
play of his own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub,
and instals himself therein to bark at his friends.[357] D'Alembert was
more tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little flock
should do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them. Jean
Jacques, he said, "is a madman who is very clever, and who is only
clever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor
to insult him."

Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a
proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. "I once," he said,
"possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no longer, and
wish for him no longer." To this he added in a footnote a passage from
Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword on a friend
there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words
to him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the
betrayal of a secret--these things banish friendship beyond return. This