Must one’s hopes and beliefs be thus tentative and provisional?  Must one walk through life, never fathoming the secret?  I have myself abundance of material comfort, health, leisure.  I know that for one like myself, there are hundreds less fortunate.  Yet happiness in this world depends very little upon circumstances; it depends far more upon a certain mixture of selfishness, tranquillity, temperance, bodily vigour, and unimaginativeness.  To be happy, one must be good-humouredly indifferent to the sufferings of others, and indisposed to forecast the possibilities of disaster.  The sadness which must shadow the path of such as myself, is the sadness which comes of the power to see clearly the imperfections of the world, coupled with the inability to see through it, to discern the purpose of it all.  One comforts oneself by the dim hope that the desire will be satisfied and the dream fulfilled; but has one any certainty of that?  The temptation is to acquiesce in a sort of gentle cynicism, to take what one can get, to avoid as far as possible all deep attachments, all profound hopes, to steel oneself in indifference.  That is what such men as my miller do instinctively; meanwhile one tries to believe that the melancholy that comes to such as Hamlet, the sadness of finding the world unintelligible, and painful, and full of shadows, is a noble melancholy, a superior sort of madness.  Yet one is not content to bear, to suffer, to wait; one clutches desperately at light and warmth and joy, and alas, in joy and sorrow alike, one is ever and insupportably alone.

April 9, 1889.

I have been reading Rousseau lately, and find him a very incomprehensible figure.  The Confessions, it must be said, is a dingy and sordid book.  I cannot quite penetrate the motive which induced him to write them.  It cannot have been pure vanity, because he does not spare himself; he might have made himself out a far more romantic and attractive character, if he had suppressed the shadows and heightened the lights.  I am inclined to think that it was partly vanity and partly honesty.  Vanity was the motive force, and honesty the accompanying mood.  I do not suppose there is any document so transparently true in existence, and we ought to be thankful for that.  It is customary to say that Rousseau had the soul of a lackey, by which I suppose is meant that he had a gross and vulgar nature, a thievish taste for low pleasures, and an ill-bred absence of consideration for others.  He had all these qualities certainly, but he had a great deal more.  He was upright and disinterested.  He had a noble disregard of material advantages; he had an enthusiasm for virtue, a passionate love of humanity, a deep faith in God.  He was not an intellectual man nor a philosopher; and yet what a ridiculous criticism is that which is generally made upon him, that his reasoning is bad, his knowledge scanty, and that people had better read Hobbes!  The very reason which made Rousseau so tremendous an influence was that his