After all it is to Rousseau himself even more than to his German or
English followers that one needs to turn for the best examples of
the all-pervasive conflict between the ideal and the actual. The
psychology of this conflict is revealed with special clearness in the
four letters that he wrote to M. de Malesherbes, and into which he has
perhaps put more of himself than into any other similar amount of his
writing. His natural indolence and impatience at the obligations and
constraints of life were, he avows to M. de Malesherbes, increased
by his early reading. At the age of eight he already knew Plutarch
by heart and had read “all novels” and shed tears over them, he adds
“by the pailful.” Hence was formed his “heroic and romantic taste”
which filled him with aversion for everything that did not resemble
his dreams. He had hoped at first to find the equivalent of these
dreams among actual men, but after painful disillusions he had come
to look with disdain on his age and his contemporaries. “I withdrew
more and more from human society and created for myself a society
in my imagination, a society that charmed me all the more in that I
could cultivate it without peril or effort and that it was always at
my call and such as I required it.” He associated this dream society
with the forms of outer nature. The long walks in particular that he
took during his stay at the Hermitage were, he tells us, filled with
a “continual delirium” of this kind. “I peopled nature with beings
according to my heart. … I created for myself a golden age to suit my
fancy.” It is not unusual for a man thus to console himself for his
poverty in the real relations of life by accumulating a huge hoard of
fairy gold. Where the Rousseauist goes beyond the ordinary dreamer is
in his proneness to regard his retirement into some land of chimeras as
a proof of his nobility and distinction. Poetry and life he feels are
irreconcilably opposed to each other, and he for his part is on the
side of poetry and the “ideal.” Goethe symbolized the hopelessness of
this conflict in the suicide of the young Werther. But though Werther
died, his creator continued to live, and more perhaps than any other
figure in the whole Rousseauistic movement perceived the peril of this
conception of poetry and the ideal. He saw phantasts all about him who
refused to be reconciled to the gap between the infinitude of their
longing and the platitude of their actual lot. Perhaps no country and
time ever produced more such phantasts than Germany of the Storm and
Stress and romantic periods--partly no doubt because it did not offer
any proper outlet for the activity of generous youths. Goethe himself
had been a phantast, and so it was natural in works like his “Tasso”
that he should show himself specially preoccupied with the problem
of the poet and his adjustment to life. About the time that he wrote
this play, he was, as he tells us, very much taken up with thoughts of