There are some vices whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright atrocities, and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he confesses to a horrible assassination.  This morbid form of self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation.  And there is not much of it.  Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, and the egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustine or of Cardan.

These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau’s faults, or to raise the popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of a greater precision of criticism.  In England criticism has nearly always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau, from the time of Horace Walpole downwards.  The Confessions in their least agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the expression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of the essential goodness of nature and the importance of understanding nature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses and Emilius.  “I would fain show to my fellows,” he began, “a man in all the truth of nature,” and he cannot be charged with any failure to keep his word.  He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to the popular respect for nature and the natural man.  After all, considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed.  Intense subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to come to the same end.  The distance from Rousseau’s odious erotics to the glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far.  In any case, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological facts no less than the others.  These are the first thing, and the second, and the third also.

The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking.  No monk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous self-feeling.  But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when the course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination.  The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would never know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication of his life and character against the infamies with which Hume and others were supposed to be industriously blackening them.  While he was writing this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the modes of English provincial life,