it cover the claims of women to all the rights of citizenship.[356] From the nature of the case, however, it is impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter in dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and who supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack when he declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race.  We may remember that the author of this philippic against love was at the very moment brooding over the New Heloisa, and was fresh from strange transports at the feet of the Julie whom we know.

The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau’s schism from the philosophic congregation.  Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the church? asked Voltaire.  Deserters who fight against their country ought to be hung.  The little flock are falling to devouring one another.  This arch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have been guided by his brethren of the Encyclopaedia, takes it into his head to make a band of his own.  He writes against the stage, after writing a bad play of his own.  He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes’ tub, and instals himself therein to bark at his friends.[357] D’Alembert was more tolerant, but less clear-sighted.  He insisted that the little flock should do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them.  Jean Jacques, he said, “is a madman who is very clever, and who is only clever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor to insult him.”

Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a proclamation of his final breach with Diderot.  “I once,” he said, “possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no longer, and wish for him no longer.”  To this he added in a footnote a passage from Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword on a friend there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words to him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the betrayal of a secret—­these things banish friendship beyond return.  This was the end of his personal connection with the men whom he always contemptuously called the Holbachians.  After 1760 the great stream divided into two; the rationalist and the emotional schools became visibly antipathetic, and the voice of the epoch was no longer single or undistracted.

FOOTNOTES: 

[331] See above p. 149.

[332] Voltaire to Rousseau.  Aug. 30, 1755.

[333] Corr., i. 237.  Sept. 10, 1755.

[334] La Loi Naturelle.

[335] In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An Examination of Pope’s System, and Lessing the next year wrote a pamphlet to show that Pope had no system, but only a patchwork.  See Mr. Pattison’s Introduction to Pope’s Essay on Man, p. 12.  Sime’s Lessing, i. 128.

[336] Conf. ix. 276.