To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note.  Yet a tranquil appeal to the real history of one’s own strongest impressions may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which remoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once had.  This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that injustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the imaginary world of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal from the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another overtakes all men.  “Here,” he says, “was the term of the serenity of my childish days.  From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and I feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my infancy here comes to an end....  Even the country lost in our eyes that charm of sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed sombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its beauties from our sight.  We no longer tended our little gardens, our plants, our flowers.  We went no more lightly to scratch the earth, shouting for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown.”

Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the whole course of Rousseau’s life forbids us to pass this passionate description by as overcharged or exaggerated.  We are conscious in it of a constitutional infirmity.  We perceive an absence of healthy power of reaction against moral shock.  Such shocks are experienced in many unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come into contact with the sharp tooth of outer circumstance.  Indeed, a man must be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment.  But the urgent demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal relations with their fellows and the outer world.  A vehement objective temperament, like Voltaire’s, is instantly roused by one of these penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance.  A proud and collected soul, like Goethe’s, loftily follows its own inner aims, without taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of self-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments.  A sensitive and depressed spirit, like Rousseau’s or Cowper’s, finds itself without any of these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or oppression is the going out of a divine light.