The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours by the pictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find it more difficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities and simple pastimes which in the Letter to D’Alembert the patriot holds up to the admiration of his countrymen and the envy of foreigners.  The writer is in Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with a something from Charmettes.  Never before was there so attractive a combination of martial austerity with the grace of the idyll.  And the interest of these pictures is much more than literary; it is historic also.  They were the original version of those great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of fraternity during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have amused the cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy aspiration.  The fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise had then all fled, and the common people under Rousseauite leaders were doing the best they could to realise on the banks of the Seine the imaginary joymaking and simple fellowship which had been first dreamed of for the banks of Lake Leman, and commended with an eloquence that struck new chords in minds satiated or untouched by the brilliance of mere literature.  There was no real state of things in Geneva corresponding to the gracious picture which Rousseau so generously painted, and some of the citizens complained that his account of their social joys was as little deserved as his ingenious vindication of their hearty feeling for barrel or bottle was little founded.[353]

The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese for whom it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater nation that lay sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin.  Nowhere else among the writers who are the glory of France at this time, is any serious eulogy of patriotism.  Rousseau glows with it, and though he always speaks in connection with Geneva, yet there is in his words a generous breadth and fire which gave them an irresistible contagiousness.  There are many passages of this fine persuasive force in the Letter to D’Alembert; perhaps this, referring to the citizens of Geneva who had gone elsewhere in search of fortune, is as good as another.  Do you think that the opening of a theatre, he asks, will bring them back to their mother city?  No; “each of them must feel that he can never find anywhere else what he has left behind in his own land; an invincible charm must call him back to the spot that he ought never to have quitted; the recollection of their first exercises, their first pleasures, their first sights, must remain deeply graven in their hearts; the soft impressions made in the days of their youth must abide and grow stronger with advancing years, while a thousand others wax dim; in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all their cheerless magnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the depth of the wanderer’s soul, Ah,