ROUSSEAU. CHAPTER I. MONTMORENCY-THE NEW HELOÏSA. THE many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden in such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period of stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of 1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed not only the New Heloïsa, which is the monument of his fall, but the Social Contract, which was the most influential, VOL. II. B |