ROUSSEAU.




CHAPTER I.

MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOÏSA.


The many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden in
such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period of
stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the
indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is
one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of
stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher
parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what
is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious
complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of
1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed
not only the New Heloïsa, which is the monument of his fall, but the
Social Contract, which was the most influential, and Emilius, which
was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the productions of
the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor