The paradox is apparent now on every hand. It appears in the death of
the author of _La Formation Réligieuse de J.J. Rousseau_.[1] One of the
most distinguished of the younger generation of French scholar-critics,
M. Masson met a soldier's death before the book to which he had devoted
ten years of his life was published. He had prepared it for the press in
the leisure hours of the trenches. There he had communed with the
unquiet spirit of the man who once thrilled the heart of Europe by
stammering forgotten secrets, and whispered to an age flushed and
confident with material triumphs that the battle had been won in vain.
Rousseau, rightly understood is no consoling companion for a soldier.
What if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenary
beatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the Lake of
Bienne? What if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free but
is everywhere in chains? Let us hope that the dead author was not too
keenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice. His
death would have been bitter.

[Footnote 1: _La Formation Réligieuse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau_. Par
Pierre Maurice Masson. (Paris: Hachette. Three volumes.)]

From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. His method would speak
against it. Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of
the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate
to the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made.
He had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no
real history can be written. Chronology was meaningless to him because
he could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. With him ends
were beginnings. In the third _Dialogue_ he tell us--and it is nothing
less than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well--that his