The attack on Rousseau, contained in many fulminating pages of the _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly_, is extravagant and unjust. We read it now with a certain indignation, tempered by a mild amusement. It should have been injured by its absurd denunciation of Frenchmen and of the French nation, in whom Burke saw little but a furious congeries of dancing-masters, fiddlers, and _valets-de-chambre_. But there were already in England, in the reaction of terror brought about by the French Revolution, many who were delighted to accept this grotesque perversion of the truth, and Burke, with all his powers of speech, all his knowledge of his countrymen, knew how to play upon the alarms and the ignorances of the English. He had, at all events, the dangerous gift of unqualified statement, and when he solemnly declared, as if by reluctant conviction, that "the writings of Rousseau lead directly to shameful evil" both in theory and practice, there were thousands only too ready to accept the warning.
We may observe, too, that Burke was the earliest English critic of weight who suggested that the exquisite literary art of Rousseau had its limitations. His remarks are worthy of being quoted at length, since they contain the germ of the English attitude through the whole of the nineteenth century:--
I have often wondered how he comes to be so much more admired and followed on the Continent than he is here. Perhaps a secret charm in the language may have its share in this extraordinary difference. We certainly perceive, and to a degree we feel, in this writer, a style glowing, animated, enthusiastic; at the same time that we find it lax, diffuse, and not in the best taste of composition; all the members of the piece being pretty equally laboured and expended, without any due selection or subordination of parts. He is generally too much on the stretch, and his manner has little variety. We cannot rest upon any of his works, though they contain observations which occasionally discover a considerable insight into human nature.
The attacks of Burke upon their idol were not accepted tamely by the Whigs, or by the Radical wing of their party, which included most of the intellectual men of the time. It was recognized that Burke spoke with excessive violence, and that his emotion was largely provoked by political apprehensions which were not shared by the more enlightened of his countrymen. It was easily pointed out that the great orator's objection to Rousseau was founded on a predilection for aristocracy, a dread of innovation, an abhorrence for abstract politics, rather than on a serious and philosophical consideration of Rousseau's contributions to literature. There were many indignant replies to his denunciation, the most effective being those contained in Sir James Mackintosh's famous _Vindiciæ Gallicæ_. Mackintosh, with less eloquence but far more knowledge, denied the responsibility of Rousseau for the excesses of the Revolution, and suggested that Burke had not made himself acquainted with the _Contrat Social_. Rousseau was vindicated as one of the immortal band of sages "who unshackled and emancipated the human mind," and he was assured a place in eternal glory, by the side of Locke and Franklin.