to this appeal and filled his volumes with information concerning the books Jean-Jacques might have read and a hundred other interesting but only partly relevant things, he did the citizen of Geneva a wrong.  The ulterior motive is there, and the faint taste of a thesis in the most modern manner.  But the method is saved by the perception which, though it sometimes lacks the perfect keenness of complete understanding, is exquisite enough to suggest the answer to the questions it does not satisfy.  Though the environment is lavish the man is not lost.

It is but common piety to seek to understand Jean-Jacques in the way in which he pleaded so hard to be understood.  Yet it is now over forty years since a voice of authority told England how it was to regard him.  Lord Morley was magisterial and severe, and England obeyed.  One feels almost that Jean-Jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive.  He would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was ’a rag of metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism,’ and he would have whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his Dialogues described as the outpourings of a man with persecution mania, he might have rebelled and muttered silently an Eppur si muove.  We see now that it was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, and that precisely those Dialogues which the then Mr Morley so powerfully dismissed contain his plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction.  To his contention that he wrote his books to ease his own soul it might be replied that their publication was a social act which had vast social consequences.  But Jean-Jacques might well retort that the fact that his contemporaries and the generation which followed read and judged him in the letter and not in the spirit is no reason why we, at nearly two centuries remove, should do the same.

A great man may justly claim our deference, if Jean-Jacques asks that his last work shall be read first we are bound, even if we consider it only a quixotic humour, to indulge it.  But to those who read the neglected Dialogues it will appear a humour no longer.  Here is a man who at the end of his days is filled to overflowing with bitterness at the thought that he has been misread and misunderstood.  He says to himself:  Either he is at bottom of the same nature as other men or he is different.  If he is of the same nature, then there must be a malignant plot at work.  He has revealed his heart with labour and good faith; not to hear him his fellow-men must have stopped their ears.  If he is of another kind than his fellows, then—­but he cannot bear the thought.  Indeed it is a thought that no man can bear.  They are blind because they will not see.  He has not asked them to believe that what he says is true; he asks only that they shall believe that he is sincere, sincere in what he says, sincere, above all, when he implores that they should listen to the undertone.  He has been ’the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart.’