It is often lightly stated that the eighteenth century was an unemotional age.  What, it is asked, could be more frigid than the poetry of Pope?  Or more devoid of true feeling than the mockery of Voltaire?  But such a view is a very superficial one; and it is generally held by persons who have never given more than a hasty glance at the works they are so ready to condemn.  It is certainly true that at first sight Pope’s couplets appear to be cold and mechanical; but if we look more closely we shall soon find that these apparently monotonous verses have been made the vehicle for some of the most passionate feelings of disgust and animosity that ever agitated a human breast.  As for Voltaire, we have already seen that to infer lack of feeling from his epigrams and laughter would be as foolish as to infer that a white-hot bar of molten steel lacked heat because it was not red.  The accusation is untenable; the age that produced—­to consider French literature alone—­a Voltaire, a Diderot, and a Saint-Simon cannot be called an age without emotion.  Yet it is clear that, in the matter of emotion, a distinction of some sort does exist between that age and this.  The distinction lies not so much in the emotion itself as in the attitude towards emotion, adopted by the men of those days and by ourselves.  In the eighteenth century men were passionate—­intensely passionate; but they were passionate almost unconsciously, in a direct unreflective way.  If anyone had asked Voltaire to analyse his feelings accurately, he would have replied that he had other things to think about; the notion of paying careful attention to mere feelings would have seemed to him ridiculous.  And, when Saint-Simon sat down to write his Memoirs, it never occurred to him for a moment to give any real account of what, in all the highly personal transactions that he describes, he intimately felt.  He tells us nothing of his private life; he mentions his wife once, and almost apologizes for doing so; really, could a gentleman—­a duke—­dwell upon such matters, and preserve his self-respect?  But, to us, it is precisely such matters that form the pivot of a personality—­the index of a soul.  A man’s feelings are his very self, and it is around them that all that is noblest and profoundest in our literature seems naturally to centre.  A great novelist is one who can penetrate and describe the feelings of others; a great poet is one who can invest his own with beauty and proclaim them to the world.  We have come to set a value upon introspection which was quite unknown in the eighteenth century—­unknown, that is, until Rousseau, in the most valuable and characteristic of his works—­his Confessions—­started the vast current in literature and in sentiment which is still flowing to-day.  The Confessions is the detailed, intimate, complete history of a soul.  It describes Rousseau’s life, from its beginning until its maturity, from the most personal point of view, with no disguises or reticences of any kind.