Rousseau was of so fluid, so irresponsible a temperament that he never could be brought to take seriously, to take as anything but as suggestive subjects for eloquent diatribes, the practical and domestic relations between human beings in organised society.
He played lightly with these relations, he laughed over them and wept over them, he wrote impassioned and dithyrambic orations upon them. But they were not his real life. His real life was the life he lived with his music and his botany and his love affairs, the life of his dreamy wanderings from refuge to refuge among the woods and chateaux of France; the life of his delicate memories and wistful regrets; the life of his thrilling indescribable thoughts, half sensual and half spiritual, as he drifted along the lonely roads and under the silent stars, or sat staring at the fire-light in his Paris attic while the city roared about him.
No lonely introspective spirit, withdrawn from the crowd and hating the voices of the world, can afford to lose touch with the secret of Rousseau; with what his self-centred and impassioned existence really meant.
We need not tease ourselves with his pious speculations, with his philanthropic oratory or his educational proposals. These can be left to those who are interested in such things. What we find arresting and suggestive in him, after this lapse of years, is a certain quality of personal passion, a certain vein of individual feeling, the touch of which still has a living power.
How interesting, for example, is that voluptuous desire of his to lay bare all his basest and meanest lusts, all his little tricks and devices and vanities and envies and jealousies. This mania for self-exposure, this frantic passion for self-laceration and self-humiliation is all of a piece with the manner in which he seemed to enjoy being ill-used and tyrannised over in his singular love-affairs.
More interesting still, and still more morbid, is that persecution mania which seized him in his later days—the mania that all the world loathed him and laughed at him and plotted to make a fool of him. Though betrayed into using the popular phrase, "persecution mania," I am myself inclined to resent, on Rousseau's behalf and on behalf of those who temperamentally resemble him, this cool assumption by the normal world that those whom it instinctively detests are "mad" when they grow aware of such detestation.
There seems no doubt that certain human beings appear at intervals on the world stage, whose sentient organisation, attuned to an abnormal receptivity, renders them alien and antagonistic to the masses of mankind.
They seem like creatures dropped upon the earth from some other planet, and, do what they may, they cannot grow "native and endued unto the element" of our terrestrial system. This difference in them is not only irritating to the normal herd; it is also provocative of bitter hostility in those among their contemporaries who are themselves possessed of genius.
These other wooers of posterity feel outraged and piqued to the limit of their endurance at having to contend in the same arena with an antagonist who seems to obey no human rules. "A conspiracy of silence" or of scandalous aspersions is almost instinctively set on foot.
Rousseau's so-called mania of persecution can easily be explained. There was morbidity; there was neurotic unwisdom, in the manner in which he dealt with all these people. But he was probably perfectly right in assuming that they came to hate him.