[253] Conf., viii. 221, etc.

CHAPTER VII.

THE HERMITAGE.

It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the Encyclopaedia and the Seven Years’ War had reproduced one of those scenes which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp of humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and with adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortification of flesh and solitude of spirit.  Those were the retreats of firm hope and beatified faith.  The hope and faith of the eighteenth century were centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of that epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled away from the impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of satisfied conviction and clear-eyed acceptance.  Only one of them—­Wordsworth, the poetic hermit of our lakes—­impresses us in any degree like one of the great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and about their feet.  The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the preacher who declared all the things that are under the sun to be vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things that are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the light of a celestial brightness to come.

Rousseau’s mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society and circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his native exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not leave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted.  The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure of a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the general tide of desire flowed more fully within him.  To be surrounded with the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but an essential condition to free intellectual energy.  Many a time, he says, when making excursions into the country with great people, “I was so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs, great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain of the shepherd’s songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of rouge and furbelows."[254] He was no anchorite proper, one weary of the world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one kind of life and a keen liking for another kind.  He thought he was now about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his inveterate error that one may efface years