waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find
the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean grip
is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fume
of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive a
part, that most of the spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it is
here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the firmament of the
spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high matters of will
and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind, and hurry to
the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innate
healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legend
of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, prevents
us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer
forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous,
if it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it
needs hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from
calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this
lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the
region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided
and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept
crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all
this. When the great art of life has been more systematically conceived
in the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold,
ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining those
pathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously studied, as
distinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worth
registering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to be
silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do
best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are
allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves