ROUSSEAU'S VISION 315 



this point and I will only quote one, perhaps the 

 most remarkable, from Rousseau's Nouvelle Helo'ise: 



But when, after a succession of agreeable airs, came those vast 

 bursts of inspiration which arouse, and which depict, the tur- 

 bulence of mighty passions, I lost in a moment all idea of music, 

 of imitation, of song : I seemed to hear voices of grief, of trans- 

 port, of despair: I seemed to gaze on weeping mothers, on 

 forsaken lovers, on fierce kings : and in the agitation of my mind 

 it was only by strenuous effort that I refrained from leaping to 

 my feet. 



Such impressions never can be felt by halves; either they are 

 violent to excess, or they are nothing; poor, weak, or limited 

 they cannot be; either the mind remains insensible, or it breaks 

 all bounds. For music is either the vain and empty babble of an 

 unknown tongue, or else a vast tempestuousness of passion which 

 sweeps away the soul. 



It is true that music is a **vast tempestuousness" — 

 to some of us, to those in fact who feel that it is so, 

 seeing that we are not all susceptible in the same 

 degree. The whole passage is true in a sense as con- 

 veying the feelings experienced to a reader. But 

 Rousseau was a literary person, an artist in words, 

 and not a naturalist bound to the literal truth, and 

 when in order to get his effect it was necessary to 

 invent, he invented. Thus his vision of weeping 

 mothers, forsaken lovers, and fierce kings, was all 

 an after-thought : all put in for the sake of the colour. 

 For there is this about music and its "vast tem- 

 pestuousness"; the expression due to its human 

 associations, without which it would tickle our 

 ears but not touch our hearts, is not a recollection 

 of vanished scenes and faces, or of anything definite, 

 anything imaged by the mind — the passions that 

 have swayed the soul on particular occasions and 



