wrote ballets, operas, comedies, and won an entrée to the salons of the great.

Here is another "pure" artist; and did you ever hear of him in that "pure" capacity? Did you know that Jean-Jacques had written ballets, operas and comedies? Could you name one of these works? Unless you are a specialist in literary history, you could not; and if Rousseau had followed that easy career, and kept his entrée to the Paris salons, you would never have heard his name. It was only when he became a propagandist that he earned world fame, and it is as a propagandist that we know him.

He was thirty-seven years old when Diderot, editor of the great "Encyclopedia," the Bible of the new learning in France, was put into prison for writing an atheistical pamphlet. Rousseau went to visit him and, while thus wrought up, he fell to thinking about the depraved state of society, and the causes thereof; he wrote an essay, and so was launched upon his career as maker of intellectual dynamite. He was pursued by the authorities, until he acquired a persecution complex; before he died he became convinced that everyone he knew was in a conspiracy to destroy him.

His first important book was "The Social Contract," a study of the state and its authority. What is the basis of sovereignty? What right has the state to command my obedience? The answer of Rousseau's time was that God had appointed a king to rule you, and if you disobeyed this king you were hanged, drawn and quartered, and later on roasted to eternity. Rousseau's thesis was that the basis of sovereignty is popular consent; the state is made by the general will, and lacking such sanction, no sovereignty exists. The opening words give the keynote of the book: "Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains." A study of history and anthropology convinces us that the first part of this statement is false; but that did not keep the words from becoming a revolutionary slogan.

The next important book was "The New Heloise," a love story written in the form of a series of letters. French women were rebelling against being sold in marriage; their natural desire to marry the man of their own choice was reaching a point dangerous to the old conven

tion. To be sure, Heloise obeyed her parents and married according to their command; but her sufferings were so moving that she was more effective as an inspirer of revolt than if she had herself revolted.

Then came another novel, "Emile, or The Sentimental Education"-that is to say, an education according to the dictates of the natural feelings. The physical and moral soundness of the infant Emile were based upon the fact that his mother suckled him, instead of turning him over to a wet nurse, according to the fashion of the great world of France. The child was raised in close contact with nature, and followed the dictates of those natural desires, which Rousseau believed were always wholesome and trustworthy. The youth was taught to work and be useful instead of being a culture parasite; and in due course a pure and beautiful maiden appeared to deserve his love. Today Rousseau's ideas of education are freely applied in the Ferrer schools; but in 1762 "Emile" was condemned by the Sorbonne, and burned by the common executioner, and its author was forced to flee to Switzerland, and finally to England.

In his later years of desolation Rousseau produced the story of his life, known as the "Confessions." His other works are not easy for us to read, but the "Confessions" will be read so long as man is interested in his own heart. Here for the first time in the history of our race a man of first-rate genius told the full truth about himself. A great deal of it is painful truth; we read it with dismay, and on the basis of it Rousseau's enemies have condemned him to infamy.

But never forget, we know these painful things because Rousseau tells them to us; if he had concealed them, or dressed them up to look romantic, then we should have had quite a different Rousseau in our minds. Many authors have done that, and live enthroned in our regard. But this man says to us: much as I care about myself— and I care a great deal-I care still more about enabling my fellowmen to understand reality. And that is the spirit in which we take the "Confessions." We realize that we are not dealing with one of those feeble natures which first commit offenses, and then find pleasure in talking about them; we are sharing life with a deeply serious man, who seeks in agony a cure for human ills.

I doubt if there has ever been a preacher of doctrine who delivered himself more completely to his enemies than Jean-Jacques. He tells us how, not knowing how to get his bread, he left his newly born children in care of a foundling asylum. This was a custom of the time; but as a rule those who followed the custom did not go away and write a book advising other people how to rear and educate their children! For such inconsistencies his critics ridiculed him unmercifully. And yet, in spite of all they could say, he became the trumpeter of the revolution, political, economic, and cultural, which was on the way in France. He remains in our time a trumpeter of the social revolution which is happening before our eyes.

That does not mean that we are blind to the fallacies and absurdities in his doctrines. We of today study education in the light of a mass of psychological knowledge, we study government in the light of historical and economic knowledge, we study the human soul in the light of biology, sociology, chemistry, psychoanalysis— a host of sciences whose very names were unknown to Rousseau. But how do we come to possess this knowledge? We possess it because Jean-Jacques, with the divination of a prophet and the fervor of a moral genius, proclaimed from the housetops the right of the human spirit to be free, and to face the facts of life, and to choose its path in accordance with its own happiness and health.

With any critic of Rousseau there is one question to be settled at the outset. Why do you quarrel with this man? Is it because you wish to correct his errors, and clear the way to his goal of liberty, equality, and fraternity? Or are you one of those who dread the torrent of new ideas and new feelings which Rousseau let loose upon the world? Is it your purpose to discredit the whole individualistic movement which he fathered, and to take us back to the good old days when children obeyed their parents, and servants obeyed their masters, and women obeyed their husbands, and subjects obeyed their popes and kings, and students in colleges accepted without question what their professors told them?

Says Mrs. Ogi: "I suspect that last phrase is meant for Professor Babbitt."

"It is wonderful," says her husband, "that he should have that name. A judgment of Providence, without

doubt!"

CHAPTER XLV

THE HARVARD MANNER

Let it be explained at the outset that we are setting out to discuss, not a character in a novel, but a living person, Irving Babbitt, professor of French literature in Harvard University; a scholar who has set himself one goal in life, to deliver America from the evil influence of Rousseau and "Rousseauism"-by which he means the whole modern cultural movement. He has published a stately volume, "Rousseau and Romanticism," three hundred and ninety-three pages, plus twenty-three pages of introduction, with an average of twelve quotations and citations per page, illustrating the follies, absurdities and monstrosities uttered or enacted by every man or woman who has at any time during the past hundred and seventyfive years ever thought a new thought, or tried an original experiment, or embodied an especially intense emotion in art form.

It makes a formidable catalogue. Because, you see, humanity proceeds by the method of trial and error; there is no other way to proceed. The pendulum of life swings. to one extreme, and then it swings to the other. Every movement has its lunatic fringe, people who show us where to stop; and what our Harvard professor has done is to make a whole book of these extravagances and insanities. He takes the fringe for the movement; and so, of course, it is easy for him to prove that the human spirit ought never to have been set free; it was a violation of "decorum." That is his favorite word, to which he comes back in every chapter. The rest of America has another name for it; we call it "the Harvard manner."

"Of course," says Mrs. Ogi, "you have to do up a Harvard Tory-that is fore-ordained. But I recall the lunatics I have met in the radical movement-not merely the harmless cranks, but the dangerous and hateful beasts! What Rousseau means to me is that I used to hear his praises sung by a man who has lived for twenty

years by seducing young girls and getting their money." Says Ogi: "If you are going to judge a wave by its scum, I shall have to make a study of the criminals of classicism: the horrors perpetrated by perfect gentlemen who respected the three unities, and wrote triolets, and wore exactly the right clothes. There will be a section in this volume devoted to Harvard University-see "The Goose-Step,' pages 62 to 91."

Says Mrs. Ogi: "Come back to Rousseau, and explain to us why a college professor should take so much trouble to kill a man who died a hundred and fifty years ago."

"The professor does not know why Rousseau is still alive, but I can tell him—because Rousseau's revolution is only half completed. The political part happened, and gave us-world capitalism! We aren't satisfied, and we are gathering our muscles for another leap, and all the world's Teries are hanging to our coat-tails, trying to hold us back. They dig out all the old mummies from their coffins, and dress them up and paint them to look like life, and set them up to cry warnings to us. Even Voltaire's 'l'Infame'! There is a clerical party in every country in Europe, and Catholic trade unions, called 'Christian Socialist,' to cheat the workers. In the United States there are the Knights of Columbus, and Tammany Hall, and parades of priests and cardinals up Fifth Avenue, generously financed by Wall Street. And naturally, in such a crisis the three unities and the rest of the classical tradition are not overlooked; so here comes our learned professor with his stately volume, to prove to us that Rousseau did not have the Harvard manner. The very same conspiracy, you see, that Rousseau faced during his life."

"The persecution complex?" asks Mrs. Ogi.

"Don't fool yourself; Rousseau actually was persecuted! And see what evidence he would have, if he were alive today, and could investigate this Babbitt case! The House of Morgan, on the corner of Broad and Wall streets, just across the way from the United States Treasury building; and the billion dollars which this House of Morgan made buying war supplies for the Allies; and the thirty billion dollars which the United States Treasury paid out to save the House of Morgan's