have already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely little he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it.  He was touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by moral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre.  Instead of analysing a character, bringing its several elements into the balance, computing the more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its influence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or agitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air.  The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties of apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could only be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have left him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted sense.  A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more fatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the stupidity of man.  Stimulation in any form always meant distress to Rousseau.  The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him than the subtle inhalations of softened and close enveloping companionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectual equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day.  This is not the highest ideal of union that one’s mind can conceive from the point of view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned with the conditions of productive energy.  He only sought to live, to be himself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind of nature was the best supplement for his own.  As he said in an apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it,—­you never can cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man himself knows anything about it.[124] “By the side of people we love,” he says very truly, “sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere.  I lived with my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the universe."[125]

Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate than he was with Theresa.  There was no social disparity between the two.  She was a person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he.  And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks