This was one side of Rousseau’s reactionary tendencies.  Fortunately for the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in the general spirit of the age.  The aristocracy of sex was subjected to the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth.  The same feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and equality of opportunity between men and women.  All this was part of the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised bitterness.  It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions.  He had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will.  Such thoughts were not for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses.  Perhaps they are for none of us any more.  When we turn to modern literature from the pages in which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has passed out from our hearts?

The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women, but an idyll.  We have already seen the circumstances under which Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured around him, and in continual ecstasy.  As an idyll it is delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is naught.  The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau’s most energetic adversary could have desired.  The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the blameless Emilius, her lord.[324]

VI.

Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is not to be lightly counted.  Its value lies, as has been said of the New Heloisa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with vivid force to the reader.  It is one of the seminal books in the history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the parts than in the whole.  It touched the deeper things of character.  It filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task.  It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark