In his Confessions he does his best to make posterity hate him; and in private life he must have been constantly, like one of those strange self-lacerating persons in Dostoievsky, bringing to the front, with shameless indecency, his vanities and jealousies, his weakness and his manias. When he couldn't enjoy the society of some friendly lady—and his friends were nearly always uneasy under the infliction—he poured forth his childish petulances and his rare imaginations on the bosom, so to speak, of society in general; and society in general flung him back in wondering contempt.
His clever contemporaries would naturally, under the pressure of the moment, concentrate their critical attention upon the weakest part of his genius—that is to say upon his reforming theories and large world-shaking speculations—while the portion of him that interests us now would merely strike them as tiresome and irrelevant.
He grew more and more lonely as he neared his end. It might be said that he deserved this fate; he who refused to accept even the responsibility of paternity. But one cannot resist a certain satisfaction in noting how the high-placed society people who came to visit him as he sat in his attic, copying music for a livelihood, were driven from his door.
The great Sentimentalist must have had his exquisite memories, even then, as he sat brooding over his dull mechanical work, he whose burning eloquence about Liberty and Justice and Simplicity and Nature was already sowing the seed of the earthquake.
Queer memories he must have had of his early tramp life through the roads and villages of France; of his conversations with the sceptical Hume among the hills of Derbyshire; of his sweet romantic sojournings in old historic houses, and his strange passions and fatal loves. But the rarest of his memories must have been of those hours and days when, in the pastoral seclusion of some cherished hiding-place, he let the world go by and sank, among patient leaves and flowers that could not mock him, into his own soul and the soul of nature.
He has been hugely vituperated by evolutionary philosophers for his mania for the "age of gold" and his disbelief in progress.
One of his favourite themes that civilisation is a curse and not a blessing excited the derision of his best friends. Others said that he stole the idea. But we may be sure that as he copied his daily portion of music with the civilisation of the Salons clamouring unheeded around him, his mind reverted rather to those exquisite moments when he had been happy alone, than to all the triumphs of his genius.
He was just the type that the world would naturally persecute. Devoid of any sparkling wit, devoid of any charm of manner, singularly devoid of the least sense of proportion, he lent himself to every sort of social rancour. He was one of those persons who take themselves seriously, and that, in his world as in the world of our own time, was an unpardonable fault.
He loved humanity better than men and women. He loved nature better than humanity.
He was a man with little sense of humour and with little interest in other men. He lived for his memories and his dreams, his glimpses and his visions.