Stendhal rather than Nietzsche; or they will be those whom the nineteenth century repudiated, like Swift and Voltaire. Fifty years hence, perhaps, Rousseau will again be contemporaneous; for the moment, his melancholies and his mysteries affect us alike with a vast irrelevance.
Rousseau in this connexion is, of course, something more than the prophet; it is the great Romantic movement which may revive and, changing its form to suit the circumstances, become as creative (or according to Pierre Lasserre as destructive) in the 'seventies of this century as it was in the Nineties of the last. And it is obviously something more than a man and his direct influence, it is the whole system of ideas and the whole way of feeling which clustered round the name of Rousseau that are incapable of affecting us just now. A notion is being carefully fostered (will it be a conspiracy?) that the most intelligent and the most striking works of the present decade merely repeat the attitudes of the Nineties; that Huxley is Beardsley, Joyce Huysmans, and Eliot, presumably, James Thomson. This attitude makes it easy to dismiss the present work of the creative spirit as an echo, but in addition to this injustice it is uncritical of the Nineties themselves which did not spring from the head of Jove nor descend hissing like Meteor into the sea. They are, in fact, as much and as valid an influence as any other period and to say that a thing is Nineties is as criticism no more valid than to say that it is biblical.
Yet the Nineties have a special relation to us because ours is the first creative period to be affected by them at a remove, and I think of no discrimination more necessary than that between the two times. The critic who sees the difference will be more just to the present and be able to distinguish those elements which are reasonably certain to carry over into the fourth (and intellectually decisive) period of this century. Roughly I propose Rousseau as a test. Let him be dipped as a little rod into the cloudy precipitate of the Nineties; whatever crystallizes around him is foreign to all that is specifically of the Twenties. It is possible that they are the very things for which the Nineties will in the long run be remembered; indeed if I am right in thinking that Rousseau as a spiritual leader is only temporarily discredited that is very likely to be the case. It happens that the other things—those which are not Rousseau—are at the moment significant.
