It is written with great art.  Rousseau’s style, like his matter, foreshadows the future; his periods are cast in a looser, larger, more oratorical mould than those of his contemporaries; his sentences are less fiery and excitable; though he can be witty when he wishes, he is never frivolous; and a tone of earnest intimate passion lingers in his faultless rhythms.  With his great powers of expression he combined a wonderful aptitude for the perception of the subtlest shades of feeling and of mood.  He was sensitive to an extraordinary degree—­with the sensitiveness of a proud, shy nature, unhardened by the commerce of the world.  There is, indeed, an unpleasant side to his Confessions.  Rousseau, like most explorers, became obsessed by his own discoveries; he pushed the introspective method to its farthest limits; the sanctity of the individual seemed to him not only to dignify the slightest idiosyncrasies of temperament and character, but also, in some sort of way, to justify what was positively bad.  Thus his book contains the germs of that Byronic egotism which later became the fashion all over Europe.  It is also, in parts, a morbid book.  Rousseau was not content to extenuate nothing; his failings got upon his nerves; and, while he was ready to dilate upon them himself with an infinite wealth of detail, the slightest hint of a reflection on his conduct from any other person filled him with an agony and a rage which, at the end of his life, developed into madness.  To strict moralists, therefore, and to purists in good taste, the Confessions will always be unpalatable.  More indulgent readers will find in those pages the traces of a spirit which, with all its faults, its errors, its diseases, deserves something more than pity—­deserves almost love.  At any rate, it is a spirit singularly akin to our own.  Out of the far-off, sharp, eager, unpoetical, unpsychological eighteenth century, it speaks to us in the familiar accents of inward contemplation, of brooding reminiscence, of subtly-shifting temperament, of quiet melancholy, of visionary joy.  Rousseau, one feels, was the only man of his age who ever wanted to be alone.  He understood that luxury:  understood the fascination of silence, and the loveliness of dreams.  He understood, too, the exquisite suggestions of Nature, and he never wrote more beautifully than when he was describing the gentle process of her influences on the solitary human soul.  He understood simplicity:  the charm of little happinesses, the sweetness of ordinary affections, the beauty of a country face.  The paradox is strange; how was it that it should have been left to the morbid, tortured, half-crazy egoist of the Confessions to lead the way to such spiritual delicacies, such innocent delights?