[Footnote 1:  La Formation Religieuse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Par
   Pierre Maurice Masson. (Paris:  Hachette.  Three volumes.)]

From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment.  His method would speak against it.  Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate to the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made.  He had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no real history can be written.  Chronology was meaningless to him because he could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself.  With him ends were beginnings.  In the third Dialogue he tell us—­and it is nothing less than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well—­that his works must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who would understand him.  Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than is imagined by those who take the parable called the Contrat Social for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie to history.  In himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grew younger with years.  He might be known as the man of the second childhood par excellence.  To the eye of history the effort of his soul was an effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a perspective of progress.  On his after-dinner journey to Diderot at Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so long was for him an unsubstantial word.  He beheld the soul of man sub specie aeternitatis.  In his vision history and institutions dissolved away.  His second childhood had begun.

On such a man the historical method can have no grip.  There is, as the French say, no engrenage.  It points to a certain lack of the subtler kind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly, perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years been imported into French criticism from Germany.  The Sorbonne has not, we know, gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation’s sake.  M. Masson’s three volumes leave us with the sense that their author had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of the momentous question whether Jean-Jacques was a person to whom it might be applied with a prospect of discovery.  No one who read Rousseau with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter.  Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point.  The Savoyard Vicar was speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession of faith with the words:—­

’Je ne veux argumenter avec vous, ni meme de tenter vous convaincre; il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicite de mon coeur.  Consultez le votre pendant mon discours; c’est tout ce que je vous demande.’

To the extent, therefore, that M. Masson did not respond