In the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which have been discovered in Rousseau’s work fade away.  That famous confusion concerning ‘the natural man,’ whom he presents to us now as a historic fact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques, but in the minds of his critics.  The Contrat Social is a parable of the soul of man, like the Republic of Plato.  The truth of the human soul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history is irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal.  And as for the nature of this truth, ‘it is true so soon as it is felt.’  When the Savoyard Vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism of religious dogma, turned to the Gospel story with the immortal ’Ce n’est pas ainsi qu’on invente,’ he was only anticipating what Jean-Jacques was to say of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his work which could not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of its source.  We may call Jean-Jacques religious because we have no other word; but the word would be more truly applied to the reverence felt towards such a man than to his own emotion.  He was driven to speak of God by the habit of his childhood and the deficiency of a language shaped by the intellect and not by the soul.  But his deity was one whom neither the Catholic nor the Reformed Church could accept, for He was truly a God who does not dwell in temples made with hands.  The respect he owed to God, said the Vicar, was such that he could affirm nothing of Him.  And, again, still more profoundly, he said, ’He is to our souls what our soul is to our body.’  That is the mystical utterance of a man who was no mystic, but of one who found his full communion in the beatific dolce far niente of the Lake of Bienne.  Jean-Jacques was set apart from his generation, because, like Malvolio, he thought highly of the soul and in nowise approved the conclusions of his fellows; and he was fortunate to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call his madness (which was indeed only his flaming and uncomprehending indignation at the persecution inevitably meted out by those who have only a half truth to one who has the whole), because he enjoyed the certainty that his high appraisement of the soul was justified.

[MARCH, 1918.

The Poetry of Edward Thomas

We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruins with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of Edward Thomas.[2] They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a palimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more resonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be like a phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city.  There will be the triumphal arch standing proudly; the very tombs of the dead will seem to share its monumental magnificence.  Yet