He is the grand example of a writer whose sub-conscious intimate self contradicts his overt dogmas and creates a spiritual atmosphere in which his own reforming schemes wither and vanish.
Rousseau is, from any moral or social or national point of view, a force of much more disintegrating power than Nietzsche can ever be. And he is this for the very reason that his sensual and sentimental nature dominates him so completely.
From the austere Nietzschean watch-tower, this man's incorrigible weakness presents itself as intrinsically more dangerous to the race than any unscrupulous strength. The voluptuous femininity of his insidious eloquence lends itself, as Nietzsche saw, to every sort of crafty hypocrisy.
Rousseau's rich, subtle, melodious style—soft as a voice of a choir of women celebrating some Euripidean Dionysus—flows round the revolutionary figure of Liberty with an orgiastic passion worthy of the backward flung heads, bared breasts and streaming hair of a dance of Bassarids.
Other symbolic figures besides that of Liberty emerge above the stream of this impassioned "Return to Nature." The figure of justice is there and the figure of fraternity; while above them all the shadowy lineaments of some female personification of the Future of Humanity, crowned with the happy stars of the Age of Gold, looks down upon the rushing tide.
"Oh, Liberty!" one can hear the voice of many heroic souls protesting, "Oh, Liberty—what things are done in thy name!"
For it is of the essential nature of Rousseau's eloquence, as it is of the essential nature of his temperament, that any kind of sensual abandonment, slurred over by rich orchestral litanies of human freedom, should be more than tolerated.
This Religion of Liberty lends itself to strange hypocrisies when the torrent of his imaginative passion breaks upon the jagged rocks of reality. That is why—from Robespierre down to very modern persons—the eloquent use of such vague generalisations as Justice, Virtue, Simplicity, Nature, Humanity, Reason, excites profound suspicion in the psychological mind.
From the antinomian torrent of this voluptuous anarchy the spirits of Epicurus, of Spinoza, of Goethe, of Nietzsche, turn away in horror. This is indeed an insurrection from the depths; this is indeed a breaking loose of chaos; this is indeed a "return to Nature." For there is a perilous intoxication in all this, and, like chemical ingredients in some obsessing drug these great vague names work magically and wantonly upon us, giving scope to all our weaknesses and perversities.
If I were asked—taking all the great influences which have moulded human history together—what figure, what personality, I would set up as the antipodal antagonist of the influence of Nietzsche, I would retort with the name of Rousseau.