ROUSSEAU

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOLUMES I. And II. 

LondonMACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITEDNEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY1905

_All rights reserved_

_First printed in this form 1886__Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_

VOL. I. 

NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

This work differs from its companion volume in offering something morelike a continuous personal history than was necessary in the case ofsuch a man as Voltaire, the story of whose life may be found in morethan one English book of repute. Of Rousseau there is, I believe, nofull biographical account in our literature, and even France has nothingmore complete under this head than Musset-Pathay's _Histoire de la Vieet des Ouvrages de J. J. Rousseau_ (1821). This, though a meritoriouspiece of labour, is extremely crude and formless in composition andarrangement, and the interpreting portions are devoid of interest. 

The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have been madeis that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published in 1825 byDalibon. In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from the originals, which had been deposited in the library of Neuchâtel by Du Peyrou, theletters addressed to Rousseau by various correspondents. These twointeresting volumes, which are entitled _Rousseau, ses Amis et sesEnnemis_, are mostly referred to under the name of their editor. 

_February_, 1873. 

 * * * * *

The second edition in 1878 was revised; some portions were considerablyshortened, and a few additional footnotes inserted. No further changeshave been made in the present edition. 

_January_, 1886. 

CONTENTS OF VOL. I. 

CHAPTER I. 

PRELIMINARY. PAGE

The Revolution 1Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor 2His distinction among revolutionists 4His personality 5

CHAPTER II. 

YOUTH. 

Birth and descent 8Predispositions 10First lessons 11At M. Lambercier's 15Early disclosure of sensitive temperament 19Return to Geneva 20Two apprenticeships 26Flight from Geneva 30Savoyard proselytisers 31Rousseau sent to Anncey, and thence to Turin 34Conversion to Catholicism 35Takes service with Madame de Vercellis 39Then with the Count de Gouvon 42Returns to vagabondage 43And to Madame de Warens 45

CHAPTER III. 

SAVOY. 

Influence of women upon Rousseau 46Account of Madame de Warens 48Rousseau takes up his abode with her 54His delight in life with her 54The seminarists 57To Lyons 58Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuchâtel, and elsewhere 60Through the east of France 62Influence of these wanderings upon him 67Chambéri 69Household of Madame de Warens 70Les Charmettes 73Account of his feeling for nature 79His intellectual incapacity at this time 83Temperament 84Literary interests, and method 85Joyful days with his benefactress 90To Montpellier: end of an episode 92Dates 94

CHAPTER IV. 

THERESA LE VASSEUR. 

Tutorship at Lyons 95Goes to Paris in search of fortune 97His appearance at this time 98Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice 100His journey thither and life there 103Return to Paris 106Theresa Le Vasseur 107Character of their union 110Rousseau's conduct towards her 113Their later estrangements 115Rousseau's scanty means 119Puts away his five children 120His apologies for the crime 122Their futility 126Attempts to recover the children 128Rousseau never married to Theresa 129Contrast between outer and inner life 130

CHAPTER V. 

THE DISCOURSES. 

Local academies in France 132Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse 133How far the paradox was original 135His visions for thirteen years 136Summary of the first Discourse 138-145Obligations to Montaigne 145And to the Greeks 145Semi-Socratic manner 147Objections to the Discourse 148Ways of stating its positive side 149Dangers of exaggerating this positive side 151Its excess 152Second Discourse 154Ideas of the time upon the state of nature 155Their influence upon Rousseau 156Morelly, as his predecessor 156Summary of the second Discourse 159-170Criticism of its method 171Objection from its want of evidence 172Other objections to its account of primitive nature 173Takes uniformity of process for granted 176In what the importance of the second Discourse consisted 177Its protest against the mockery of civilisation 179The equality of man, how true, and how false 180This doctrine in France, and in America 182Rousseau's Discourses, a reaction against the historic method 183Mably, and socialism 184

CHAPTER VI. 

PARIS. 

Influence of Geneva upon Rousseau 187Two sides of his temperament 191Uncongenial characteristics of Parisian society 191His associates 195Circumstances of a sudden moral reform 196Arising from his violent repugnance for the manners of the time 202His assumption of a seeming cynicism 207Protests against atheism 209The Village Soothsayer at Fontainebleau 212Two anedotes of his moral singularity 214Revisits Geneva 216End of Madame de Warens 217Rousseau's re-conversion to Protestantism 220The religious opinions then current in Geneva 223Turretini and other rationalisers 226Effect upon Rousseau 227Thinks of taking up his abode in Geneva 227Madame d'Epinay offers him the Hermitage 229Retires thither against the protests of his friends 231

CHAPTER VII. 

THE HERMITAGE. 

Distinction between the old and the new anchorite 234Rousseau's first days at the Hermitage 235Rural delirium 237Dislike of society 242Meditates work on Sensitive Morality 243Arranges the papers of the Abbé de Saint Pierre 244His remarks on them 246Violent mental crisis 247First conception of the New Heloïsa 250A scene of high morals 254Madame d'Houdetot 255Erotic mania becomes intensified 256Interviews with Madame d'Houdetot 258Saint Lambert interposes 262Rousseau's letter to Saint Lambert 264Its profound falsity 265Saint Lambert's reply 267Final relations with him and with Madame d'Houdetot 268Sources of Rousseau's irritability 270Relations with Diderot 273With Madame d'Epinay 276With Grimm 279Grimm's natural want of sympathy with Rousseau 282Madame d'Epinay's journey to Geneva 284Occasion of Rousseau's breach with Grimm 285And with Madame d'Epinay 288Leaves the Hermitage 289

CHAPTER VIII. 

MUSIC. 

General character of Rousseau's aim in music 291As composer 292Contest on the comparative merits of French and Italian music 293Rousseau's Letter on French Music 293His scheme of musical notation 296Its chief element 298Its practical value 299His mistake 300Two minor objections 300

CHAPTER IX. 

VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT. 

Position of Voltaire 302General differences between him and Rousseau 303Rousseau not the profounder of the two 305But he had a spiritual element 305Their early relations 308Voltaire's poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon 309Rousseau's wonder that he should have written it 310His letter to Voltaire upon it 311Points to the advantages of the savage state 312Reproduces Pope's general position 313Not an answer to the position taken by Voltaire 314Confesses the question insoluble, but still argues 316Curious close of the letter 318Their subsequent relations 319D'Alembert's article on Geneva 321The church and the theatre 322Jeremy Collier: Bossuet 323Rousseau's contention on stage plays 324Rude handling of commonplace 325The true answer to Rousseau as to theory of dramatic morality 326His arguments relatively to Geneva 327Their meaning 328Criticism on the Misanthrope 328Rousseau's contrast between Paris and an imaginary Geneva 329Attack on love as a poetic theme 332This letter, the mark of his schism from the party of the philosophers 336

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Born 1712Fled from Geneva _March_, 1728Changes religion at Turin _April_, "With Madame de Warens, including various intervals, until _April_, 1740Goes to Paris with musical schemes 1741Secretary at Venice _Spring_, 1743

Paris, first as secretary to M. Francueil, then { 1744 as composer, and copyist { to { 1756The Hermitage _April 9_, 1756Montmorency _Dec. 15_, 1757Yverdun _June 14_, 1762Motiers-Travers _July 10_, 1762Isle of St. Peter _Sept. _, 1765Strasburg _Nov. _, "Paris _December_, "Arrives in England _Jan. 13_, 1766Leaves Dover _May 22_, 1767Fleury _June_, "Trye _July_, "Dauphiny _Aug. _, 1768Paris _June_, 1770Death _July 2_, 1778

PRINCIPAL WRITINGS. 

Discourse on the Influence of Learning and Art PUBLISHED 1750Discourse on Inequality " 1754Letter to D'Alembert " 1758New Heloïsa (began 1757, finished in winter of 1759-60) " 1761Social Contract " 1762Emilius " 1762Letters from the Mountain " 1764Confessions (written 1766-70) { Pt. I 1781 { Pt. II 1788Rêveries (written 1777-78). 

 _Comme dans les étangs assoupis sous les bois, Dans plus d'une âme on voit deux choses à la fois: Le ciel, qui teint les eaux à peine remuées Avec tous ses rayons et toutes ses nueés; Et la vase, fond morne, affreux, sombre et dormant, Où des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement. _ HUGO. 

ROUSSEAU. 

CHAPTER I. 

PRELIMINARY. 

Christianity is the name for a great variety of changes which took placeduring the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of thinking andfeeling about their spiritual relations to unseen powers, about theirmoral relations to one another, about the basis and type of socialunion. So the Revolution is now the accepted name for a set of changeswhich began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in America, and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century; they hadbeen directly prepared by a small number of energetic thinkers, whosespeculations represented, as always, the prolongation of some old linesof thought in obedience to the impulse of new social and intellectualconditions. While one movement supplied the energy and the principleswhich extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman empire, theother supplies the energy and the principles which already once, betweenthe Seven Years' War and the assembly of the States General, savedhuman progress in face of the political fatuity of England and thepolitical nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction ofthe various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces tobe trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of humanintelligence stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing theirbeneficent results with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm. Faith in a divine power, devout obedience to its supposed will, hope ofecstatic, unspeakable reward, these were the springs of the oldmovement. Undivided love of our fellows, steadfast faith in humannature, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration towardsimprovement, and generous contentment in the hope that others may reapwhatever reward may be, these are the springs of the new. 

There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members ofthe revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from thepressure of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is oneset of doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants. Voltaire was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, andRousseau in a third, just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton, Robespierre, represented three different aspirations and as manymethods. Rousseau was the most directly revolutionary of all thespeculative precursors, and he was the first to apply his mind boldly tothose of the social conditions which the revolution is concerned by onesolution or another to modify. How far his direct influence wasdisastrous in consequence of a mischievous method, we shall have toexamine. It was so various that no single answer can comprehend anexhaustive judgment. His writings produced that glow of enthusiasticfeeling in France, which led to the all-important assistance rendered bythat country to the American colonists in a struggle so momentous formankind. It was from his writings that the Americans took the ideas andthe phrases of their great charter, thus uniting the native principlesof their own direct Protestantism with principles that were strictlyderivative from the Protestantism of Geneva. Again, it was his work morethan that of any other one man, that France arose from the deadly decaywhich had laid hold of her whole social and political system, and foundthat irresistible energy which warded off dissolution within andpartition from without. We shall see, further, that besides being thefirst immediately revolutionary thinker in politics, he was the moststirring of reactionists in religion. His influence formed not onlyRobespierre and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only Jacobinism, but theCatholicism of the Restoration. Thus he did more than any one else atonce to give direction to the first episodes of revolution, and force tothe first episode of reaction. 

There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought, nor an eye for the exigencies of practical organisation, but simplydepth and fervour of the moral sentiment, bringing with it theindefinable gift of touching many hearts with love of virtue and thethings of the spirit. The Christian organisations which saved westernsociety from dissolution owe all to St. Paul, Hildebrand, Luther, Calvin; but the spiritual life of the west during all these generationshas burnt with the pure flame first lighted by the sublime mystic of theGalilean hills. Aristotle acquired for men much knowledge and manyinstruments for gaining more; but it is Plato, his master, who moves thesoul with love of truth and enthusiasm for excellence. There is peril inall such leaders of souls, inasmuch as they incline men to substitutewarmth for light, and to be content with aspiration where they needdirection. Yet no movement goes far which does not count one of them inthe number of its chiefs. Rousseau took this place among those whoprepared the first act of that revolutionary drama, whose fifth act isstill dark to us. 

At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowingundiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way ofunderstanding life. The social changes desired by the various assailantsof the old order are only the expression of a deeper change in moralidea, and the drift of the new moral idea is to make life simpler. Thisin a sense is at the bottom of all great religious and moral movements, and the Revolution emphatically belongs to the latter class. Like suchmovements in the breast of the individual, those which stir an epochhave their principle in the same craving for disentanglement of life. This impulse to shake off intricacies is the mark of revolutionarygenerations, and it was the starting-point of all Rousseau's mentalhabits, and of the work in which they expressed themselves. His mindmoved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact that he dealtprincipally with government and education, the two great agencies which, in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers, surroundexternal life and internal character with complexity. Simplification ofreligion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors, simplification ofsocial relations by equality, of literature and art by constant returnto nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and thrift, --this is therevolutionary process and ideal, and this is the secret of Rousseau'shold over a generation that was lost amid the broken maze offallen systems. 

 * * * * *

The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides. Ithas deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational ofthose who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famousmen and our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constantdemands on the patience or pity of those who study his life. Yet in noother instance is the common eagerness to condense all predication abouta character into a single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate. If it is indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming, classifying, at least it is well, in speaking of such a nature as his, to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics, and to be as sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of thesympathies and faculties which together compose our power of spiritualobservation, is in a condition of free and patient energy. Any less openand liberal method, which limits our sentiments to absolute approval ordisapproval, and fixes the standard either at the balance of commonqualities which constitutes mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommonqualities which is divinity as in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloudof blank incomprehensibleness those singular spirits who come from timeto time to quicken the germs of strange thought and shake the quietnessof the earth. 

We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, inreflecting that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he hasgiven no thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlornchildren and trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, itwas Rousseau who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note forone more of the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud, it was truly said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein ofthought, as we shall see, and he was only continuing work which othershad prepared. But he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was inRousseau that polite Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faintreverberation from out of the vague and cavernous shadow in which thecommon people move. Science has to feel the way towards light andsolution, to prepare, to organise. But the race owes something to onewho helped to state the problem, writing up in letters of flame at thebrutal feast of kings and the rich that civilisation is as yet only amockery, and did furthermore inspire a generation of men and women withthe stern resolve that they would rather perish than live on in a worldwhere such things can be. 

CHAPTER II. 

YOUTH. 

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of oldFrench stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city ofrefuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither toestablish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before thefirst visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mothercity of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mothercity of the old. Three generations in a direct line separated JeanJacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and thefirst emigrant. [1] Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau familydates from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to haveexerted the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunctionwith the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizensof the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historiansthat out of three thousand families who composed the population ofGeneva towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardlyfifty who before the Reformation had acquired the position ofburgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus planted a colonyof foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with a new doctrine andnewer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of character andmanners. People declared they could recognise in the men of Genevaneither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor Swissgravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in government, a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries, which markedthem with a stamp unlike that of any other community. [2] Towards theclose of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and rudenesswas sensibly modified under the influence of the great neighbouringmonarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the rapiddecline of the Savoyard patois in popular use. The movement had not gonefar enough when Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners andspirit of his country their special quality and individual note. 

The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful, and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maidenname, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the mosttouching and pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fitbeginning of a life preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. "I cost mymother her life, " he wrote, "and my birth was the first of my woes. "[3]Destiny thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousnessawakens to the forces that have been set to work in our personality, launching us into the universe with country, forefathers, and physicalpredispositions, all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was borndying, and though he survived this first crisis by the affectionate careof one of his father's sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm anddisordered. 

Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from havingunlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from somewise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunatelycast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbidsensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility ofhis first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was areversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was anunderlying tendency of this kind. "Under a phlegmatic and cool air, "wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the inflammatoryeffects of the drama, "the Genevese hide an ardent and sensitivecharacter, that is more easily moved than controlled. "[4] And some ofthe episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might betaken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But IsaacRousseau's restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilioussense of personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were notcommon in Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and theprosperity of her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended inmodified form to the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectlyaffected by it. Before he was seven years old he had learnt from hisfather to indulge a passion for the reading of romances. The child andthe man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to oneanother in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in imaginary situations, until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a sense of theconditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry out in confusionthat he was the more childish of the two. 

The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in theyoung brain. "I had no idea of real things, " he said, "though all thesentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me byconception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, strikingme one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper, and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neitherreflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me. "[5] Thusthese first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all thatfollow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadeningthat sense of the actual relations of things to one another in theobjective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity. 

In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacquesand his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction ofhistory and biography. The romances had been the possession of themother; the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, herfather. Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's Historyof the Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseauthan the admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father duringthe hours of work, and read over again to himself during all hours, those stories of free and indomitable souls which are so proper tokindle the glow of generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end ofhis life; he read him in the late days when he had almost ceased toread, and he always declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author towhom he had never gone without profit. "[6] "I think I see my father now, "he wrote when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, "living by thework of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. Isee Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with thetools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receivinginstruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too littlefruit. "[7] This did little to implant the needed impressions of theactual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessivedegree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs theimagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within thestrait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at theage of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became thepersonage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported himwith sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice toheroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale ofScaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over ahot chafing-dish. [8]

Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down inample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon JeanJacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran awayinto Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmenfor ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child, [9] and hecommemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early yearswere surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by theside of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfyingcuriosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busyabout affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contentedinterest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. Theimpression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory tothe end; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair. The constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how hecherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, whichplaces it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which mostof us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentarinessof days. When the years came in which he might well say, I have nopleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion anddiseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could stilloften surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of hisaunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes. [10]

This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau inthe course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed thathe saw unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender hadkinsfolk in the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country ratherthan give way, in circumstances which compromised his personal honourand the free justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, andhis son was sent to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722), under the care of a minister, "there to learn along with Latin all themedley of sorry stuff with which, under the name of education, theyaccompany Latin. "[11] Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of hisintellectual instruction here, but he marks his two years' sojourn underthe roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in that fatefulacquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more important thanliterary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the tree of nascentexperience, men usually keep strict silence. Rousseau is the only personthat ever lived who proclaimed to the whole world as a part of his ownbiography the ignoble circumstances of the birth of sensuality inboyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while he told of theplaymate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, whichwaxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to findthe playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean gripis not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fumeof the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive apart, that most of the spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it ishere that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the firmament of thespirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high matters of willand conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind, and hurry tothe physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innatehealthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legendof the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, preventsus from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finerforces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innatehealthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous, if it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that itneeds hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain fromcalling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of thislifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in theregion of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aidedand abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has keptcrude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on allthis. When the great art of life has been more systematically conceivedin the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold, ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining thosepathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously studied, asdistinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worthregistering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to besilent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps dobest in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young areallowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open gravesof temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience, unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces ofthings, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies towhich the body condemns its high tenant, the soul. [12]

The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was theknowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual andexistent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken theteeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and noteven the most terrible punishment could wring from him an untrueconfession of guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrenceof falsehood, which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes nocredit, but in a furious and invincible resentment against the violentpressure that was unjustly put upon him. "Picture a character, timid anddocile in ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in itspassions; a child always governed by the voice of reason, always treatedwith equity, gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea ofinjustice, and who for the first time experiences an injustice soterrible, from the very people whom he most cherishes and respects! Whata confusion of ideas, what disorder of sentiments, what revolution inheart, in brain, in every part of his moral and intellectual being!" Hehad not learnt, any more than other children, either to put himself inthe place of his elders, or to consider the strength of the apparentcase against him. All that he felt was the rigour of a frightfulchastisement for an offence of which he was innocent. And theassociation of ideas was permanent. "This first sentiment of violenceand injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my soul, that all theideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me; and thissentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has taken suchconsistency, and become so disengaged from all personal interest, thatmy heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful action, justas much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read of thecruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of somevillain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard suchwretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed. . . . Thismovement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the profoundrecollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too fastbound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously. "[13]

To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, allthis may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet atranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest impressionsmay disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, whichremoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they oncehad. This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of thatinjustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in theimaginary world of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissalfrom the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or anotherovertakes all men. "Here, " he says, "was the term of the serenity of mychildish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, andI feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of myinfancy here comes to an end. . . . Even the country lost in our eyes thatcharm of sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemedsombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding itsbeauties from our sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, ourplants, our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the earth, shouting for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown. "

Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, thewhole course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionatedescription by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it ofa constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power ofreaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in manyunavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first comeinto contact with the sharp tooth of outer circumstance. Indeed, a manmust be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionallyobtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base andcynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many arepetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the urgentdemands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normalrelations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objectivetemperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of thesepenetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud andcollected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims, without taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want ofself-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive anddepressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without anyof these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty oroppression is the going out of a divine light. 

Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or threeyears with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learningsomething of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which heshowed special inclination. [14] It was a question whether he was to bemade a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as hisafter-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last ofthe three; "for I thought it a fine thing, " he says, "to preach. " Theuncle was a man of pleasure, and as often happens in suchcircumstances, his love of pleasure had the effect of turning his wifeinto a pietist. Their son was Rousseau's constant comrade. "Ourfriendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together, the simplest amusements were a delight. " They made kites, cages, bowsand arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitativespirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbedby excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by anItalian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets andcomposed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud anelegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blitheenergy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life inthe biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. Theseended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainlyfor the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from schoolwas the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All thisis an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom failsto touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if lifeshould have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way ofirony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greekdramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures. 

And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlierschooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed inGenevese youth in after years. "In my time, " he says admiringly, "children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion tokeep. . . . Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty, combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returnedhome sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if youwill, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve theircountry and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one dayof our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn outchildren at thirty. "[15]

Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's ownwords, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his lifeunhappily did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitablebalance of impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he usedto spend the day at Pâquis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of hisaunts, and who carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day Iwas in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; theirbrightness pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, andI was moving them up and down with much satisfaction along the smoothcylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it ahalf-quarter turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my twolongest fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tearthe nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back thewheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity ofconsternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought me to ceasemy cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I wastouched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the pond, where hehelped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. Heentreated me with tears not to accuse him; I promised him that I wouldnot, and Ï kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew theorigin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and formore than two months was unable to use my hand. But I persisted that alarge stone had fallen and crushed my fingers. "[16]

The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch ofsensibility in its concluding words. "I was playing at ball at PlainPalais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel overthe game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head astroke so well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashedmy brains out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation likethat of this poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he hadkilled me. He threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms, while his tears poured down his cheeks, and he uttered shrill cries. Ireturned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state ofconfused emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then hetried to stop the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our twohandkerchiefs were not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's; shehad a small garden hard by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight ofme in this condition; she kept strength enough to dress my wound, andafter bathing it well, she applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy, an excellent remedy much used in our country. Her tears and those of herson, went to my very heart, so that I looked upon them for a long whileas my mother and my brother. "[17]

If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable andeasy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women liefloundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in thefield of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in thediscipline of this primitive goodness. For character in a state ofsociety is not a tree that grows into uprightness by the law of its ownstrength, though an adorable instance here and there of rectitude andmoral loveliness that seem intuitive may sometimes tempt us into amoment's belief in a contrary doctrine. In Rousseau's case this seriousproblem was never solved; there was no deliberate preparation of hisimpulses, prepossessions, notions; no foresight on the part of elders, and no gradual acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in thefixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid zoneof our relations with other people. It was one of the most elementary ofRousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that it is theireducation by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant capacity forvirtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems never tohave sought much more deeply for proof of this, than the fact that hehimself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed to followwithout disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own temperament. Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the experiment tocomplete itself within these very rudimentary conditions. 

Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with areligious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, waspossessed also not only of probity but of religion as well. His threeaunts were all in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier atBossey, "although Churchman and preacher, " was still a sincere believerand nearly as good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was sohearty, so discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from beingwearied by the sermon, never came away without being touched inwardlyand stirred to make virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotionwas rather more tiresome, because she made a business of it. [18] Itwould be a distinct error to suppose that all this counted for nothing, for let us remember that we are now engaged with the youth of the onegreat religious writer of France in the eighteenth century. When aftermany years Rousseau's character hardened, the influences which hadsurrounded his boyhood came out in their full force and the historian ofopinion soon notices in his spirit and work a something which had nocounterpart in the spirit and work of men who had been trained in Jesuitcolleges. At the first outset, however, every trace of religioussentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was left unprotectedagainst the shocks of the world and the flesh. 

At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, butthat respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive andinsufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in allcountries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but wasignominiously dismissed by his master[19] for dulness and inaptitude;his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. Hewas next apprenticed to an engraver, [20] a rough and violent man, whoseems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction. The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch oftorpedo the whole being of a youth who had hitherto lived on puresensations and among those ideas which are nearest to sensations. Therewere no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau's universe. "The vilesttastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my simpleamusements, without even leaving the least idea behind. I must, in spiteof the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate. "The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritablesense, as the process, on its negative side, of counteracting theinborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say twodegrees, of the constitution in which the reflective part is weak. Thereare the men who live on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certainfulness of blood and active energy of muscle. There are others who do sopassively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The former bytheir sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world wherereflection is a first condition, still go far. The latter succumb, andas reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such aworld bring them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surroundedwith a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery. Rousseau had none of thisenergy which makes oppression bracing. For a time he sank. 

It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us intoexaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his lifeled him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which aredespicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. Hetold lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. Hecunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and ofusing his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time inidle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adultmoralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certainugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeedsthemselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far moreconsiderate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to createa kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what isactually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprenticebrought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness, untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices. The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smoulderingkind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certainsordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details whichRousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are theweb and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood tofull manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test theeducation of home and family, and they presage definitely what is tocome. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown for this shortspace, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn from theirfellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a littledust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silencewhich is not oblivion. 

After a time the character of Jean Jacques was absolutely broken down. He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by hismaster, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they wereterrible to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to anovermastering physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days toan end. He was now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comradesinto sports for which he had little inclination, though he admits thatonce engaged in them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyondthe others. Such pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, andon two occasions Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. Hismaster when he presented himself in the morning gave him such greetingas we may imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for asecond sin in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly alwaysdoes. "Half a league from the town, " says Rousseau, "I hear the retreatsounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the topof my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beatsviolently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and callout with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpostsentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched thoseterrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable lot whichthat moment was opening for me. "[21]

In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon, we underestimate the unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments asthis in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this willis inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to thefulfilment of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this, wrote the unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in thebosom of my religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, amild and peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformityof work which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I shouldhave been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, goodfriend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in mycondition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a lifeobscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefullyin the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate havebeen regretted as long as any memory of me was left. "[22]

As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individualorganisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible needseldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman whodeclares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity, and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages ofaberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of mostrespectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them outof this or that kingdom, of which in truth their own compositionfinally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in amother's womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen, which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of theeighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth intoa mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are somecommandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unableto obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give themso much grace that they are able to observe them. 

If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the dayand its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entiredelight. The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions ofromance were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of theirrealisation. He roamed for two or three days among the villages in theneighbourhood of Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in thecottages of friendly peasants. Before long his wanderings brought him tothe end of the territory of the little republic. Here he found himselfin the domain of Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been thetraditional foes of the freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau cameto the village of Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignonrecalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feudhad come to take new forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale thecity walls, the descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenthcentury were now intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the soulsof the descendants of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this timea systematic struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and theministers of Geneva, the former using every effort to procure theconversion of any Protestant on whom they could lay hands. [23] As ithappened, the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in thisgood work. [24] He made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of theheresies of Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave himsome dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for thenature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready forthe entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much. "I was toogood a guest, " writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, "tobe a good theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent, was such a triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushedto oppose so capital a host. "[25] So it was agreed that he should be putin a way to be further instructed of these matters. We may acceptRousseau's assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapidcomplaisance. He admits that any one who should have seen the artificesto which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, heargues, "flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it isoftener a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a manreceives us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that wegive way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil forgood. " He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was likethe coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends, without permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope morethan they mean to hold good. [26] Thereupon follow some austerereflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to hisfriends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of alldogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but tobelieve; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a manto their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and hisworldly interests. All this is most just; the occasion for such a strainof remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen toimpress us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking hisentertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months back. This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary elementof a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthyconsciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something, though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading. 

The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from theburning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, andcounted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whoseminutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21, 1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage, whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. Heexpected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnantof days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him aperson not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressingair, a fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read theletters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It wasdecided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to amonastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the trueChurch. At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faithand the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem ofshelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elatedwith vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades thegreat land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom hehad left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which hewas about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in allpossible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement whichhardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemedthe guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imaginedrustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams, bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade, voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, acharming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forwardwithout knowing whither. "[27] He might justly choose out this intervalas more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life. It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passivesensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy. 

The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youthfound himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a drearymonastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, whopass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain andItaly, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of beingsupported while the process of their conversion was going slowlyforward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversionwas begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of theparties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into thecircumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mischievouszeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollowand degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of themwas ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought upin the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lostthis abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments withwhich he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could notbear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of hispresent destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that theholy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit. ""The sophism which destroyed me, " he says in one of those eloquentpieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief thatexaggerates our condemnation, "is that of most men, who complain of lackof strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is onlythrough our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could bealways sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous. Butinclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on withoutresistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise thehazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which wecould easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwardsonly make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sinkinto the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? Butin spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made theetoo weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough toavoid falling into it. '"[28] So the hopeful convert did fall in, not ashappens to the pious soul "too hot for certainties in this our life, "to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible, butsimply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter. [29] The boywas clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to gooduse for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the greatReformation controversy which he had picked up at M. Lambercier's. Hewas careful not to carry things too far, and exactly nine days after hisadmission into the Hospice, he "abjured the errors of the sect. "[30] Twodays after that he was publicly received into the kindly bosom of thetrue Church with all solemnity, to the high edification of the devout ofTurin, who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributionsto the extent of twenty francs in small money. 

With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of theCatechumens thrust him out of their doors into the broad world. Theyouth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself atnight sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege ofresting in the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, herhusband, her five or six children, and various other lodgers. This roughawakening produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which, beneath all fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathywith the homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like acarter, and was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not preventRousseau from recognising her kindness of heart and her staunchreadiness to befriend. He passed his days in wandering about the streetsof Turin, seeing the wonders of a capital, and expecting some adventurethat should raise him to unknown heights. He went regularly to mass, watched the pomp of the court, and counted upon stirring a passion inthe breast of a princess. À more important circumstance was the effectof the mass in awakening in his own breast his latent passion for music;a passion so strong that the poorest instrument, if it were only intune, never failed to give him the liveliest pleasure. The king ofSardinia was believed to have the best performers in Europe; less thanthat was enough to quicken the musical susceptibility which is perhapsan invariable element in the most completely sensuous natures. 

When the end of the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, hetried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity onhim, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb andgrovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove herclient away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand notmagical. [31] Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the naturalfury of an Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for anyother cause than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds. 

The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love ofprincesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackeyor footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis hepassed three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay herewas marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormfuldiscussion. When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-colouredribbon was missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in hispossession. They asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that ithad been given to him by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house. In her presence and before the whole household he repeated his falsestory, and clung to it with a bitter effrontery that we may well calldiabolic, remembering how the nervous terror of punishment and exposuresinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, reallydenotes in the young an excruciating physical struggle, often so keenthat the victim clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacityand cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplinedsensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and atthis epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded hisapprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towardsdegeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was theslave of sensations which stained his days with baseness. "Never, " hesays, in his account of this hateful action, "was wickedness furtherfrom me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, itis contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was thecause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blamefrom myself on to the first object that presented itself. When I saw herappear my heart was torn, but the presence of so many people was toostrong for my remorse. I feared punishment very little; I only feareddisgrace, but I feared that more than death, more than crime, more thananything in the world. I would fain have buried myself in the depths ofthe earth; invincible shame prevailed over all, shame alone caused myeffrontery, and the more criminal I became, the more intrepid was I madeby the fright of confessing it. I could see nothing but the horror ofbeing recognised and declared publicly to my face a thief, liar, andtraducer. "[32] When he says that he feared punishment little, hisanalysis of his mind is most likely wrong, for nothing is clearer thanthat a dread of punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strongfeeling with him at this time. However that may have been, the sameover-excited imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led himinto so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties. It led himto conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen Marion inconsequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful thoughthaunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights hethought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime thatseemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before. [33]Thus the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet painof his gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side ofhis history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness. Rousseau expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse wouldserve as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction ofanother soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. Wemay, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possibleconsequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, butwere as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachfulspirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that thewhole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that wewho have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising atfurther length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boywho happened to grow up into a man of genius. [34]

After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret orcellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue, Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmonteseperson of quality. This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated himwith a certain unusual considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubtthe narrative. His son condescended to teach the youth Latin, andRousseau presumed to entertain a passion for one of the daughters of thehouse, to whom he paid silent homage in the odd shape of attending toher wants at table with special solicitude. In this situation he had, orat least he supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimateadvancement. But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure ofstability, and Rousseau's temperament in his youth was the archtype ofthe mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited him, [35] and as almostany incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness ofimaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count ofGouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects, the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quicklyinto mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination againwent over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, thestreams, began to absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicioussatisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought howfar more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own ageand taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stayother than as it might please them. "It would be madness to sacrificesuch a piece of good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow, difficult, doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one daybe realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour oftrue pleasure and freedom in youth. "[36]

On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that hewas dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began theirhomeward wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to whatthey should eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toyfountain; they hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred bythis wonder they should receive all that they might need. Their hopeswere not fulfilled. The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excusethem from their reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, andto their secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked, vagrancy was thus undisguised. They made their way by some means orother across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage wasundisturbed by any thought of a future. "To understand my delirium atthis moment, " Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darkerparts of his history than fits of vagrancy, "it is necessary to know towhat a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallestthings, and with what force it plunges into the imagination of theobject that attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque, the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea, and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it. "[37] Itwas this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau allthrough his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrantsensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; anardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads offirm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous anddiseased love of self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keeninterest for the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming ofdreams that were made to look like sanity by the close and speciousconnection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisseshappened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:--this was thetype of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards the autumnof 1729, reached Annecy, penniless and ragged, throwing himself oncemore on the charity of the patroness who had given him shelter eighteenmonths before. Few figures in the world at that time were less likely toconciliate the favour or excite the interest of an observer, who had notstudied the hidden convolutions of human character deeply enough to knowthat a boy of eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yethave it in him to say things one day which may help to plunge a worldinto conflagration. 

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Here is the line:--

Didier Rousseau. | Jean | ----------------------- | | David. Noah. | |Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean François. | | | -------------- | || JEAN JACQUES. Jean. Theodore. 

(_Musset-Pathay_, ii. 283. )

[2] Picot's _Hist. De Genève_, iii. 114. 

[3] _Conf. _, i. 7. 

[4] _Lettre à D'Alembert_, p. 187. Also _Nouv. Hél. _, VI. V. 239. 

[5] _Conf. _, i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. De Malesherbes, p. 356. 

[6] _Rêveries_, iv. P. 189. "My master and counsellor, Plutarch, " hesays, when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. _Corr. _, i. 265. 

[7] Dedication of the _Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité_, p. 201. (June, 1754. )

[8] _Conf. _, i. 1. 

[9] _Ib_, i. 12. 

[10] The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters toher (Madame Gonceru)--one in 1754 (_Corr. _, i. 204), another as lateas 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (_Oeuvr. Et Corr. Inéd. _, 392). 

[11] _Conf. _, i. 17-32. 

[12] See also _Conf. _, i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, _n. _ 2. 

[13] _Conf. _, i. 27-31. 

[14] _Conf. _, i. 38-47. 

[15] _Lettre à D'Alembert_(1758), 178, 179. 

[16] _Rêveries_, iv. 211, 212. 

[17] _Conf. _ 212, 213. 

[18] _Conf. _, ii. 102, 103. 

[19] M. Masseron. 

[20] M. Ducommun. 

[21] _Conf. _, i. 69. 

[22] _Conf. _, i. 72. 

[23] J. Gaberel's _Histoire de l'Église de Genève_ (Geneva, 1853-62), vol. Iii. P. 285. 

[24] There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, tothe effect that the Sieur de Pontverre "is attracting many young menfrom this town, and changing their religion, and that the public oughtto be warned. " (Gaberel, iii. 224. )

[25] _Conf. _, ii. 76. 

[26] _Conf. _, ii. 77. 

[27] _Conf. _, ii. 90-97. 

[28] _Conf. _, ii. 107

[29] See _Émile_, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born aCalvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, withoutresource, "changed his religion to get bread. "

[30] In the _Confessions_ (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make theperiod a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism(Gaberel's _Hist. De l'Église de Genève_, iii. 224), which has beenrecently published, shows that this is untrue: "Jean Jacques Rousseau, de Genève (Calviniste), entré à l'hospice à l'âge de 16 ans, le 12avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du mêmemois lui fut administré le saint baptême, ayant pour parrain le sieurAndré Ferrero et pour marraine Françoise Christine Rora (ou Rovea). "

A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up "for twomonths, " but this is not true even on his own showing. 

[31] Madame Basile. _Conf. _, ii. 121-135. 

[32] _Conf. _ ii. Ad finem. 

[33] _Conf. _, ii. 144. 

[34] Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7)makes the object of the theft a diamond, but there is really noevidence in the matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself. 

[35] Bacle, by name. 

[36] _Conf. _, iii. 168. 

[37] _Conf. _, iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situationis given in _Émile_, Bk. Iv. 125. 

CHAPTER III. 

SAVOY. 

The commonplace theory which the world takes for granted as to therelations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave the power andguidance of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a true accountof the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of temperament amongthe many types of men, in which it seems as if the elements of characterremain mere futile and dispersive particles, until compelled into unityand organisation by the creative shock of feminine influence. There aremen, famous or obscure, whose lives might be divided into a number ofepochs, each defined and presided over by the influence of a woman. Forthe inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions, for the constantit is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great decisivephases through which character has moved. 

Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort ofsusceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment wasneither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectualdemand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in which women sometimesexcel. It had neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy whichmakes close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom offaculty and completeness of work. There is a certain close and sicklyair round all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them. Weseem to move not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in thefiery flames of lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode ofthings not wholesome or manly. "I know a sentiment, " he writes, "whichis perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times moredelicious, which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very oftenapart from it. Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is morevoluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of the same sexcould be its object; at least I have been a friend, if ever man was, andI never felt this about any of my friends. "[38] He admits that he canonly describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostlyruled by elements that defy definition, and in Rousseau's case thesentiment which he could not describe was a paramount trait of hismental constitution. It was as a voluptuous garment; in it hisimagination was cherished into activity, and protected against thatouter air of reality which braces ordinary men, but benumbs anddisintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation asRousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, hischaracter might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling wasthe complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity. 

When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of breadand a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, thesensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold ofmanhood. This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights, was banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by theinfluence of a person who is one of the most striking types to be foundin the gallery of fair women. 

I. 

A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which deals with arather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is graceful, simple, andpathetic, painted the portrait of a creature for whom no moralist with areputation to lose can say a word; and we may, if we choose, foolourselves by supposing her to be without a counterpart in thebetter-regulated world of real life, but, in spite of both theseobjections, she is an interesting and not untouching figure to those wholike to know all the many-webbed stuff out of which their brothers andsisters are made. The Manon Lescaut of the unfortunate Abbé Prevost, kindly, bright, playful, tender, but devoid of the very germ of the ideaof that virtue which is counted the sovereign recommendation of woman, helps us to understand Madame de Warens. There are differences enoughbetween them, and we need not mistake them for one and the same type. Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because romance has fewerlimitations than real life; but if we think of her in reading ofRousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman tends tosoften our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten ourconception of a character that eludes the instruments of a commonplaceanalysis. [39]

She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early disagreedwith her husband, from whom she eventually went away, abandoning family, religion, country, and means of subsistence, with all gaiety of heart. The King of Sardinia happened to be keeping his court at a small town onthe southern shores of the lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madamede Warens to Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy, [40]gave a zest to the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport inthat great spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense ofthe reformed church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for thefaith of his house, conferred on the new convert a small pension forlife; but as the tongues of the scandalous imputed a less pure motivefor such generosity in a parsimonious prince, Madame de Warens removedfrom the court and settled at Annecy. Her conversion was hardly moreserious than Rousseau's own, because seriousness was no condition of herintelligence on any of its sides or in any of its relations. She wasextremely charitable to the poor, full of pity for all in misfortune, easily moved to forgiveness of wrong or ingratitude; careless, gay, open-hearted; having, in a word, all the good qualities which spring incertain generous soils from human impulse, and hardly any of those whichspring from reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Herreason had been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil'sstamp;[41] finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, alwayscold, argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, heattacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union ofthe sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect indifference, provided only that decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace ofmind of persons concerned be not disturbed. [42] This execrable lesson, which greater and more unselfish men held and propagated in grave booksbefore the end of the century, took root in her mind. If we acceptRousseau's explanation, it did so the more easily as her temperament wascold, and thus corroborated the idea of the indifference of what publicopinion and private passion usually concur in investing with suchenormous weightiness. "I will even dare to say, " Rousseau declares, "that she only knew one true pleasure in the world, and that was to givepleasure to those whom she loved. "[43] He is at great pains to protesthow compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessivesensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practicalobservation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxiousto prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which itsenergies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration orvolatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as lightor as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that ofMadame de Warens is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, whichbelongs to the other sort, but it is essentially bound up withsensibility, or readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry fromanother soul. It is the slow, brooding, smouldering nature, likeRousseau's own, in which we may expect to find the tropics. 

To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poorsoul like Madame de Warens is as if one should denounce flagrant wantof moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity wasincessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, andconfusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spentmuch time in search after secret elixirs and the like. "Quacks, takingadvantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantlyinfested her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces andchemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms which would have made herthe delight of the best societies. "[44] Perhaps, however, the toonotorious vagrancy of her amours had at least as much to do with herfailure to delight the best societies as her indiscreet passion foralchemy. Her person was attractive enough. "She had those points ofbeauty, " says Rousseau, "which are desirable, because they reside ratherin expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, asoft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could notsee a finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands. "[45] She was full oftricks and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soupand meats at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearlyswooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half anhour or so she took her first morsel. [46] On the whole, if we accept thecurrent standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever solittle flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient topeople with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence andcheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism orrapacious vanity. 

This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau wasdecisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certainbreaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738. It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. Heacquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as itwas, and his principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of thepoor and of the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal wasrevolutionised, and the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, ofgrandeur, of palaces, princesses, and a glorious career full in theworld's eye, were replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life, which never afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a frontplace in the imagination of literary Europe ever since. The notions oraspirations which he had picked up from a few books gave way to notionsand aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the scenes of actuallife into which he was thrown, and which found his character soft fortheir impression. In one way the new pictures of a future were asdissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had been, and thesensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a man tocompose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as the mental lifeamong the heroics of sentimental fiction had done. 

Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecywas the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender inhim, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked overgardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. "It wasthe first time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows. Always shut in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops andthe dull gray of the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty wasto me! It brightened all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted thelandscape among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as ifshe had brought it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in allpeacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among theflowers and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingledtogether in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, founditself more free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal ventamong these orchard gardens. "[47] Madame de Warens was the semi-divinefigure who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmoniousaccent. He had neither transports nor desires by her side, but existedin a state of ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing what. "I couldhave passed my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without aninstant of weariness. She is the only person with whom I never felt thatdryness in conversation, which turns the duty of keeping it up into atorment. Our intercourse was not so much conversation as aninexhaustible stream of chatter, which never came to an end until it wasinterrupted from without. I only felt all the force of my attachment forher when she was out of my sight. So long as I could see her I wasmerely happy and satisfied, but my disquiet in her absence went so faras to be painful. I shall never forget how one holiday, while she was atvespers, I went for a walk outside the town, my heart full of her imageand of an eager desire to pass all my days by her side. I had senseenough to see that for the present this was impossible, and that thebliss which I relished so keenly must be brief. This gave to my musing asadness which was free from everything sombre, and which was moderatedby pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which has always moved me to asingular degree, the singing of the birds, the glory of the weather, thesweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic dwellings in which myimagination placed our common home;--all this so struck me with a vivid, tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw myself as in an ecstasytransported into the happy time and the happy place where my heart, possessed of all the felicity that could bring it delight, without evendreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share joysinexpressible. "[48]

There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful nowand this delicious future. The harshness of circumstance is everinterposing with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen thefirst of all problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submittedto the observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens, [49] and his verdictcorresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years beforeRousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. Hepronounced that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if notthoroughly inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas, almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and thatthe honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece offortune to which he had any right to aspire. [50] So he was sent to theseminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began byconceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearancehappened to be displeasing to him. A second was found, [51] and thepatient and obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner ofhis new teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though theprogress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one caseas in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionablenessto physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced bypress of more urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's stronglysensuous quality retained, that he should have remembered, and thoughtworth mentioning years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers atthe seminary of Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as ofgingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the second had themost touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair hair andlarge blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that he wasone of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While atTurin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and benevolentpriest, [52] and uniting the two good men thirty years after he conceivedand drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar. [53]

Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupilwas not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he inintellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseauascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This wasone of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls notonly the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, thetemperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain localimpression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the oldtransports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one AdventSunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the stepsof the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass, nor a fair little abbé who played the violin in the choir. [54] Yet hewas in so dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither hisgood-will nor his assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, noteven music. His teacher, one Le Mâitre, belonged to that great class ofirregular and disorderly natures with which Rousseau's destiny, in theshape of an irregular and disorderly temperament of his own, soconstantly brought him into contact. Le Mâitre could not work withoutthe inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his passion for his art landedhim a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon him by the precentor ofthe cathedral of which he was choir-master, and left Annecy in a furtivemanner along with Rousseau, whom the too comprehensive solicitude ofMadame de Warens despatched to bear him company. They went together asfar as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician happened to fall into anepileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for help, informed thecrowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a moment when no one wasthinking about him, turned the street corner and finally disappeared, the musician being thus "abandoned by the only friend on whom he had aright to count. "[55] It thus appears that a man maybe exquisitely movedby the sound of bells, the song of birds, the fairness of smilinggardens, and yet be capable all the time without a qualm of misgiving ofleaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange place. It has ceasedto be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are done by people withan extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature. At themoment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and Madame deWarens. "It is not, " he says in words of profound warning, which manymen have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy dawn thatswell into huge purgatorial æons, --"it is not when we have just done abad action, that it torments us; it is when we recall it long after, forthe memory of it can never be thrust out. "[56]

II. 

When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise anddismay that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for anindefinite time to Paris. He never knew the secret of this suddendeparture, for no man, he says, was ever so little curious as to theprivate affairs of his friends. His heart, completely occupied with thepresent, filled its whole capacity and entire space with that, andexcept for past pleasures no empty corner was ever left for what wasdone with. [57] He says he was too young to take the desertion deeply toheart. Where he found subsistence we do not know. He was fascinated by aflashy French adventurer, [58] in whose company he wasted many hours, andthe precious stuff of youthful opportunity. He passed a summer day injoyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again, but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with himremained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence insome of the traits of the new Heloïsa and her friend Claire. [59] Then heaccepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warensto attend her home to Freiburg. On this expedition he paid an hour'svisit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon. Returningfrom Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that mightbe taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook toteach music. "I have already, " he says, "noted some moments ofinconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself. Behold me now ateacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air. Without theleast knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before allthe world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, Igave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. DeTreytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at hishouse, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set towork to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if Iknew all about it. " The performance came off duly, and the strangeimpostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master. Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted theears of men. [60] Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars, but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did not lackeither hope or charity. "How is it, " Rousseau cried, many years afterthis, "that having found so many good people in my youth, I find so fewin my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No; but the class inwhich I have to seek them now is not the same as that in which I foundthem then. Among the common people, where great passions only speak atintervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard oftener. Inthe higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the mask ofsentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks. "[61]

From Lausanne he went to Neuchâtel, where he had more success, for, teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was markedenough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his ramblesfalling in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversingEurope in search of subscriptions for the restoration of the HolySepulchre, he at once attached himself to him in the capacity ofinterpreter. In this position he remained for a few weeks, until theFrench minister at Soleure took him away from the Greek monk, anddespatched him to Paris to be the attendant of a young officer. [62] Afew days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, andwhich disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all otherwonders disappointed them, [63] convinced him that here was not what hesought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame deWarens and more familiar lands. 

The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, andwhich we may date in the summer of 1732, [64] was always counted byRousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seemgrievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas ofredeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money. He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris backagain to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him inthe stead of books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival ofletters has been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted toliterature for the most characteristic part of his work. He was formedby life; not by life in the sense of contact with a great number ofactive and important persons, or with a great number of persons of anykind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of hisown impressions. A world composed of such people, all dispensing withthe inherited portion of human experience, and living independently ontheir own stock, would rapidly fall backwards into dissolution. Butthere is no more rash idea of the right composition of a society thanone which leads us to denounce a type of character for no better reasonthan that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces. There isvery little danger of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless lunar orother great physical influences arise to work a vast change in thecerebral constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious_vis inertioe_ of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricitybeyond bounds spreading too far. At present, however, it is enough, without going into the general question, to notice the particular factthat while the other great exponents of the eighteenth century movement, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength ofunderstanding by the study and practice of literature, Rousseau, theleader of the reaction against that movement, was wandering a beggar andan outcast, craving the rude fare of the peasant's hut, knocking atroadside inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, orin the great desolate streets of towns. 

If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all thesignificance that it now has for us. But where others would have foundaffliction, he had consolation, and where they would have lain desperateand squalid, he marched elate and ready to strike the stars. "Never, " hesays, "did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much, as in thejourneys that I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something aboutit which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I amstill; my body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of thecountry, the succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, thefreedom of the alehouse, the absence of everything that could make mefeel dependence, or recall me to my situation--all this sets my soulfree, gives me a greater boldness of thought. I dispose of all nature asits sovereign lord; my heart, wandering from object to object, minglesand is one with the things that soothe it, wraps itself up in charmingimages, and is intoxicated by delicious sentiment. Ideas come as theyplease, not as I please: they do not come at all, or they come in acrowd, overwhelming me with their number and their force. When I came toa place I only thought of eating, and when I left it I only thought ofwalking. I felt that a new paradise awaited me at the door, and Ithought of nothing but of hastening in search of it. "[65]

Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did notdegrade:--"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited theanswer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in theopen air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench, as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember passing one deliciousnight outside the town [Lyons], in a road which ran by the side ofeither the Rhone or the Saône, I forget which of the two. Gardens raisedon a terrace bordered the other side of the road. It had been very hotall day, and the evening was delightful; the dew moistened the parchedgrass, the night was profoundly still, the air fresh without being cold;the sun in going down had left red vapours in the heaven, and theyturned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace shelterednightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of ecstasy, surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of it all, andonly sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone. Absorbed in thesweetness of my musing, I prolonged my ramble far into the night, without ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I found it out. I laydown luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or false doorway made in thewall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was formed by overarchingtree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my head, and I fellasleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my awaking moredelicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked on sun andwater and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up and gavemyself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town, resolvedto spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I still hadleft. I was in such joyful spirits that I went along the road singinglustily. "[66]

There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the naturalsentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of theexternal world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the worldof many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had noexistence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not theproduct of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, andwhich only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case byaccident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without anythought of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies, among them that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship neverentered into his dreams. When the time for authorship actually came, his work had all the benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, ithad all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first freshimpressions were suffered to rise in his mind. 

One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing thatRousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and asillustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was somuch more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some ofits aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century. One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some sitewhich he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant, half dead with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothingmore restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently, after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by asmall trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, somemeat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Thenhe explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew noneof the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine onaccount of the duties, and his bread on account of the _taille_, anddeclared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was notdying of hunger. All this made an impression on Rousseau which he neverforgot. "Here, " he says, "was the germ of the inextinguishable hatredwhich afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harassthe common people, and against all their oppressors. This man actuallydid not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow, and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reignedaround him. "[67]

It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from withoutbut from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company, that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the oldorder, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into adeadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who hadwanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had sleptin dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who sawthe goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above allnever tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted themas the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all hisexperiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of thematter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy withtheir ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many, whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great primeelements of the human lot. 

III. 

It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrivedat Chambéri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, inthe dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She hadprocured him employment in connection with a land survey which thegovernment of Charles Emmanuel III. Was then executing. It was onlytemporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk, who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine howlittle a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eighthours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty andill-smelling fellow-workers. [68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by anyset of circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them. So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money bythat musical instruction in which he had made so many singular andgrotesque endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life apossible thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there, but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor thefixing of an hour. In time this experiment for a subsistence came to thesame end as all the others. He next rushed to Besançon in search of themusical instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggagewas confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return. [69] Finally heabandoned the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrowresources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularlyindefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite andmiscellaneous affairs, --if we are here, as so often, to give the name ofaffairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby roadto ruin. 

The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame deWarens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, washer factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words, firm, thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of hismistress admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, whenMadame de Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet ofyouth, Rousseau was delivered from them in an equivocal way bysolicitous application of the same maxims of comprehension. "AlthoughClaude Anet was as young as she was, he was so mature and so grave, thathe looked upon us as two children worthy of indulgence, and we bothlooked upon him as a respectable man, whose esteem it was our businessto conciliate. Thus there grew up between us three a companionship, perhaps without another example like it upon earth. All our wishes, ourcares, our hearts were in common; nothing seemed to pass outside ourlittle circle. The habit of living together, and of living togetherexclusively, became so strong that if at our meals one of the three wasabsent, or there came a fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of ourpeculiar relations, a _tête-à-tête_ was less sweet than a meeting of allthree. "[70] Fate interfered to spoil this striking attempt after a newtype of the family, developed on a duandric base. Claude Anet was seizedwith illness, a consequence of excessive fatigue in an Alpine expeditionin search of plants, and he came to his end. [71] In him Rousseau alwaysbelieved that he lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, "a rareand estimable man, in whom nature served instead of education, and whonourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men. "[72] Theday after his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost friend toMadame de Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction, whensuddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he shouldinherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly a handsome black coat. A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always somewhat nauseouslycalled Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought and washed awayits last traces. [73] After all, those men and women are exceptionallyhappy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought standing againstthemselves in that unwritten chapter of their lives which even the mostcandid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast recollection. 

Shortly after his return to Chambéri, a wave from the great tide ofEuropean affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the Februaryof 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed inthe choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France wasfor Stanislaus, the father-in-law of Lewis XV. , while the EmperorCharles VI. And Anne of Russia were for August III. , elector of Saxony. Stanislaus was compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking uphis quarrel, declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). Thefirst act of this war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples andthe two Sicilies by Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was thedespatch of a French expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars, the husband of one of Voltaire's first idols. This took place in theautumn of 1733, and a French column passed through Chambéri, excitinglively interest in all minds, including Rousseau's. He now read thenewspapers for the first time, with the most eager sympathy for thecountry with whose history his own name was destined to be sopermanently associated. "If this mad passion, " he says, "had only beenmomentary, I should not speak of it; but for no visible reason it tooksuch root in my heart, that when I afterwards at Paris played the sternrepublican, I could not help feeling in spite of myself a secretpredilection for the very nation that I found so servile, and thegovernment I made bold to assail. "[74] This fondness for France wasstrong, constant, and invincible, and found what was in the eighteenthcentury a natural complement in a corresponding dislike of England. [75]

Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath becameasthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered from a slowfeverishness from which he never afterwards became entirely free. [76]His mind was as feverish as his body, and the morbid broodings whichactive life reduces to their lowest degree in most young men, were leftto make full havoc along with the seven devils of idleness and vacuity. An instinct which may flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep downin us all, suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseauprevailed upon Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for thefresh fields, and to deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude fromthe adventurers who made her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modestfarm-house to which they retired, still stands. The modern traveller, with a taste for relieving an imagination strained by great historicmonuments and secular landmarks, with the sight of spots associated withthe passion and meditation of some far-shining teacher of men, may walka short league from where the gray slate roofs of dull Chambéri bake inthe sun, and ascending a gently mounting road, with high leafy bank onthe right throwing cool shadows over his head, and a stream on the leftmaking music at his feet, he sees an old red housetop lifted lonelyabove the trees. The homes in which men have lived now and again lendthemselves to the beholder's subjective impression; they seemed to bebrooding in forlorn isolation like some life-wearied gray-beard overancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les Charmettes a pitifulmelancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of the scene, thesweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the little vineyardwith here and there a rose glowing crimson among the yellow stuntedvines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the sky faracross the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty, silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found ascanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with apathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy, and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded tothis perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring thoseinmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of aman's life. [77]

"No day passes, " he wrote in the very year in which he died, "in whichI do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief timein my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, andwhen I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost say, like theprefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in thecountry, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and I have lived butseven of them. ' But for this brief and precious space, I should perhapshave remained uncertain about myself; for during all the rest of my lifeI have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and thither by thepassions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so stormy, Ishould find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my ownconduct, --to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. Butduring these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished tobe. "[78] The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described inwords. It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sensegratified and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection withindoors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude, freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens, --these were theconditions of Rousseau's ideal state. "If my happiness, " he says, inlanguage of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, Imight then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what wasneither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and feltwithout my being able to point to any other object of my happiness thanthe very feeling itself? I arose with the sun and I was happy; I wentout of doors and I was happy; I saw Maman and I was happy; I left herand I was happy; I went among the woods and hills, I wandered about inthe dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in the garden, I gathered fruit, Ihelped them indoors, and everywhere happiness followed me. It was not inany given thing, it was all in myself, and could never leave me for asingle instant. "[79] This was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent intemporary quiescence, and we may count the man rare since the fall whohas found such happiness in such conditions, and not less blessed thanhe is rare. The fact that he was one of this chosen company was amongthe foremost of the circumstances which made Rousseau seem to so manymen in the eighteenth century as a spring of water in a thirsty land. 

All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hourstogether in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence thatthey would follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever hewould, and the moment that he appeared in the garden two or three ofthem would instantly settle on his arms or his head. The bees, too, gradually came to put the same trust in him, and his whole life wassurrounded with gentle companionship. He always began the day with thesun, walking on the high ridge above the slope on which the house lay, and going through his form of worship. "It did not consist in a vainmoving of the lips, but in a sincere elevation of heart to the author ofthe tender nature whose beauties lay spread out before my eyes. This actpassed rather in wonder and contemplation than in requests; and I alwaysknew that with the dispenser of true blessings, the best means ofobtaining those which are needful for us, is less to ask than to deservethem. "[80] These effusions may be taken for the beginning of thedeistical reaction in the eighteenth century. While the truly scientificand progressive spirits were occupied in laborious preparation foradding to human knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau walked with hishead in the clouds among gods, beneficent authors of nature, wisedispensers of blessings, and the like. "Ah, madam, " he once said, "sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight overmy eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that thereis no God. But look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with headerect, and an inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it scattersthe mists that cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glitteringscene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. Ifind my faith again, and my God, and my belief in him. I admire andadore him, and I prostrate myself in his presence. "[81] As if thatsettled the question affirmatively, any more than the absence of suchtheistic emotion in many noble spirits settles it negatively. God becamethe highest known formula for sensuous expansion, the synthesis of allcomplacent emotions, and Rousseau filled up the measure of his delightby creating and invoking a Supreme Being to match with fine scenery andsunny gardens. We shall have a better occasion to mark the attributes ofthis important conception when we come to _Emilius_, where it waslaunched in a panoply of resounding phrases upon a Europe which wasgrown too strong for Christian dogma, and was not yet grown strongenough to rest in a provisional ordering of the results of its ownpositive knowledge. Walking on the terrace at Les Charmettes, you are atthe very birth-place of that particular Être Suprême to whom Robespierreoffered the incense of an official festival. 

Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by theprominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and heused now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether thiscruel destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose softness of heartinspired her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphicdoctor, had abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatorybecause she did not know what to do with the souls of the wicked, beingunable either to damn them, or to instal them among the good until theyhad been purified into goodness. In truth it must be confessed, saysRousseau, that alike in this world and the other the wicked areextremely embarrassing. [82] His own search after knowledge of his fateis well known. One day, amusing himself in a characteristic manner bythrowing stones at trees, he began to be tormented by fear of theeternal pit. He resolved to test his doom by throwing a stone at aparticular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he missed, thenperdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw; as he hadchosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far away, all was well. [83] As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly phantoms oftheology, he passed his days in a state of calm. Even when illnessbrought it into his head that he should soon know the future lot by moreassured experiment, he still preserved a tranquillity which he justlyqualifies as sensual. 

In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which acquiredsuch a decisive place in his character during his life at LesCharmettes, it is to be remembered that it was entirely devoid of thatstormy and boisterous quality which has grown up in more modernliterature, out of the violent attempt to press nature in her most awfulmoods into the service of the great revolt against a social andreligious tradition that can no longer be endured. Of this revoltRousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural aspects was connectedwith this attitude, but he did not seize those of them which the poet of_Manfred_, for example, forced into an imputed sympathy with his ownrebellion. Rousseau always loved nature best in her moods of quiescenceand serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods inmen. He liked rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear the sightof the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled himwith melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the ruins ofcastles. [84] It is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed soin his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, andprecipices. [85] This does not affect the fact that he never moralisedappalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done, and thatthe Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had noattraction for him. He could steep himself in nature without climbingfifteen thousand feet to find her. In landscape, as has been said by onewith a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you can, if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his wanderings;he understood that beauty does not require a great stage, and that theeffect of things lies in harmony. [86] The humble heights of the Jura, and the lovely points of the valley of Chambéri, sufficed to give himall the pleasure of which he was capable. In truth a man cannot escapefrom his time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth centuryin being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste forobjects inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, andno sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense ofthe littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of theunseen forces which make us their sport, as he peered over the precipiceand heard the water roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained forhours enjoying the physical sensation of dizziness with which it turnedhis brain, with a break now and again for hurling large stones, andwatching them roll and leap down into the torrent, with as littlereflection and as little articulate emotion as if he had been achild. [87]

Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a maninto body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a functionof the body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotionalside, his thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact andat the roots these qualities are not two but one, with temperament forthe common substratum. During this period of his life the whole ofRousseau's true force went into his feelings, and at all times feelingpredominated over reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages ofa very critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every onewho came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity forbeing instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several excellentopportunities of learning Latin, especially at Turin in the house ofCount Gouvon, and in the seminary at Annecy, and at Les Charmettes hedid his best to teach himself, but without any better result than a verylimited power of reading. In learning one rule he forgot the last; hecould never master the most elementary laws of versification; he learntand re-learnt twenty times the Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single wordremained with him. [88] He was absolutely without verbal memory, and hepronounces himself wholly incapable of learning anything from masters. Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; hecould never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction hewas as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the firstday. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himselfup in his room, and worked night and day over the books withindescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to thecafé to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves andcombinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but clouds onthe board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he only foundhimself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a genuinepassion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any facilityat sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying thescore of others. [89]

Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, areunited in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardenttemperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that arevery slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never ariseuntil after the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligencedo not belong to the same individual. . . . I feel all, and see nothing; Iam carried away, but I am stupid. . . . This slowness of thinking, unitedwith such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation, but when I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my headwith incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way andferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give mepalpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I couldnot write a single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, thechaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowlyand after long and confused agitation. "[90]

So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to twopersons, we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that hisintelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been. The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and wasmost conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid anddeliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the samereceptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake undersky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectualfaculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment ofknowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies adistinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperamentwhich left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to mufflehis intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of theindefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. Hisrational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope ofsentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cutoff the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations, which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in hisavowal that objects generally made less impression on him than therecollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before hiseyes, and had only his intelligence in cases where memories wereconcerned; and that of what was said or done in his presence, he feltand penetrated nothing. [91] In other words, this is to say that hismaterial of thought was not fact but image. When he plunged intoreflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first handand in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which hehad never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematicobservation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused andsaturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermentingimagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy, the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, thesystematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of thegenuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on asummer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in asuccession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work canbe done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to thosewho chase her with logical forceps. But one should always try todiscover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by carefultoil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy. 

To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy theintellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who becameso consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition, Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried aswell as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit thecultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According tohis own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which firstdrew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious manwrote at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him withthe desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating "the fine andenchanting colour of Voltaire's style"[92]--an object in which he cannotbe held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superbstyle of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun insome small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he hadlost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond, Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room, and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased himgreatly and did him much good. [93] Madame de Warens was what he callsprotestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the greatBayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she could everpersuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years later than this he beganto use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first timeto the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligencethat has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy anda body of doctrine. 

His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read anintroduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclopædia and tried tolearn all things together, until he repented and resolved to studysubjects apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom longapplication was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupyhimself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following theideas of another person. [94] He began his morning's work, after an houror two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay onthe Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes. [95] He foundthese authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction amongthemselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling themwith one another. This was tedious, so he took up another method, onwhich he congratulated himself to the end of his life. It consisted insimply adopting and following the ideas of each author, withoutcomparing them either with one another or with those of other writers, and above all without any criticism of his own. Let me begin, he said, by collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear, until my head is well enough stocked to enable me to compare and choose. At the end of some years passed "in never thinking exactly, except afterother people, without reflecting so to speak, and almost withoutreasoning, " he found himself in a state to think for himself. "In spiteof beginning late to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that ithad lost its vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I washardly accused of being a servile disciple. "[96]

To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say thatthis mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, anddeveloping thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the mostmischievous, where it is not the most impotent, fashion in whichintellectual exercise can well be taken. It is exactly the use of thejudicial faculty, criticising, comparing, and defining, which isindispensable in order that a student should not only effectuallyassimilate the ideas of a writer, but even know what those ideas come toand how much they are worth. And so when he works at ideas of his own, ajudicial faculty which has been kept studiously slumbering for someyears, is not likely to revive in full strength without any preliminarytraining. Rousseau was a man of singular genius, and he set anextraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would have been verydifferent if he had ever mastered any one system of thought, or if hehad ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means. Instead of this, his debt to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal, and hisobligation an obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the worstway of acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the vitalcontinuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this orthat of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas, if you donot see the merit of his way of coming by his notions. In short, Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowinghow to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them, and neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of thattoilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest ofhis contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet, Hume, all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that "thesensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are moreproper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy ofbooks. "[97]

Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, andwhich wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work, already engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaireimplanted in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceiveat all, that there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidentlytook pains with the form of expression and thought about it, inobedience to some inborn harmonious predisposition which is the sourceof all veritable eloquence, though there is no strong trace now nor formany years to come of any irresistible inclination for literarycomposition. We find him, indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of aslight skill in writing, [98] but he only thought of it as a possiblerecommendation for a secretaryship to some great person. He also appearsto have practised verses, not for their own sake, for he always mostjustly thought his own verses mediocre, and they are even worse; but onthe ground that verse-making is a rather good exercise for breakingone's self to elegant inversions, and learning a greater ease inprose. [99] At the age of one and twenty he composed a comedy, longafterwards damned as _Narcisse_. Such prelusions, however, were of smallimportance compared with the fact of his being surrounded by a moralatmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It is not in the studyof Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of constant mood andold habit that such a style as Rousseau's has its growth. 

It was the custom to return to Chambéri for the winter, and the day oftheir departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and tearfulfor Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the trees, the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved companion. At the first melting of the winter snows they left their dungeon inChambéri, and they never missed the earliest song of the nightingale. Many a joyful day of summer peace remained vivid in Rousseau's memory, and made a mixed heaven and hell for him long years after in thestifling dingy Paris street, and the raw and cheerless air of aDerbyshire winter. [100] "We started early in the morning, " he says, describing one of these simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis, whowas the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, "together andalone; I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of thevalley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent ourprovisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went fromhill to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often in theshade, resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for wholehours; chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offeringunheard prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the blissof this day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, andthe little streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves, the air was pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenityreigned in our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage, and we shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls!After dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while Icollected dry sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself bybotanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports oftenderness and effusion. "[101] This is one of such days as the soulturns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized it, and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory ofirrecoverable things. 

He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de Warens with an inalterablefidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her with allthe dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to himsomething dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell wasthis. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the disorderof the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction derived fromthe rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from apolypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if hedid not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only leaving it foradventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to consult thephysicians, and took the money for his expenses out of hisbenefactress's store, which was always slender because it was alwaysopen to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with atravelling companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina ofWilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable todiscover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery wasdull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced theweightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debatedwhether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return toChambéri. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is theiron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartanvirtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhapslearnt a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom hedescribes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled. Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whomhis travelling diversions had made a Pharisee for the hour. Heprotested, but Madame de Warens was a woman of principle, and declinedto let Rousseau, who had profited by the doctrine of indifference, nowset up in his own favour the contrary doctrine of a narrow and churlishpartiality. So a short, delicious, and never-forgotten episode came toan end: this pair who had known so much happiness together were happytogether no more, and the air became peopled for Rousseau with wanspectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares. 

The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth booksof the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently invertedmore than once. The inversion of order is less serious than thecontradictions between the dates of the Confessions and the moreauthentic and unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, hedescribes a visit to Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec'stemporary pacification of the civic troubles of that town; and thatevent took place in the spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellierjourney, which he says came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, butthe letters to Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are datedin the autumn and winter of 1737. [102] Minor verifications attest theexactitude of the dates of the letters, [103] and we may thereforeconclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his place taken andlost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part of 1738. Inthe tenth of the Rêveries he speaks of having passed "a space of four orfive years" in the bliss of Les Charmettes, and it is true that hisconnection with it in one way and another lasted from the middle of 1736until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for Montpellier in theautumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738, the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes perhaps onlylasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set a deep markon a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things bitterand sweet. 

FOOTNOTES:

[38] _Conf. _, iii. 177. 

[39] Lamartine in _Raphael_ defies "a reasonable man to recompose withany reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out ofthe contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One ofthese elements excludes the other. " It is worth while for any who carefor this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquisede Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut ofthe seventeenth century. 

[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. DeBernex, printed in _Mélanges_, pp. 139-144. 

[41] De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of thesexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation ofreligion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with thedoctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse thegratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give food anddrink to the starving. Picot's _Hist. De Genève_, vol. Ii. 

[42] _Conf. _, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401. 

[43] _Conf. _, v. 345. 

[44] _Conf. _, ii. 83. 

[45] _Ib. _ ii. 82. 

[46] _Ib. _ iii. 179. See also 200. 

[47] _Conf. _, iii. 177, 178. 

[48] _Conf. _, iii. 183. 

[49] M. D'Aubonne. 

[50] _Conf. _, iii 192. 

[51] M. Gatier. 

[52] M. Gaime. 

[53] _Conf. _, iii. 204. 

[54] _Ib. _ iii. 209, 210. 

[55] _Conf. _, iii. 217-222. 

[56] _Conf. _, iv. 227. 

[57] _Ib. _ iii. 224. 

[58] One Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards(1755) in Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was acrapulent debauchee. _Ib. _ viii. 221. 

[59] Mdlles. De Graffenried and Galley. _Conf. _, iv. 231. 

[60] _Ib. _ iv. 254-256. 

[61] _Conf. _, iv. 253. 

[62] While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in aroom which had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau(_b. 1670--d. 1741_), whom the older critics astonishingly insist oncounting the first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau, Pierre [_b. 1725--d. 1785_], who wrote plays and did other work nowwell forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly commemorative of thetrio--

Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme, Connus de Paris jusqu'à Rome, Sont différens; voici par où; Rousseau de Paris fut grand homme;Rousseau de Genève est un fou; Rousseau de Toulouse un atome. 

Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire, Jan. 30, 1750. _Corr. _, i. 145. 

[63] The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was thegreat Roman structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. _Conf. _, vi. 446. 

[64] Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return toChambéri, after his first visit to Paris [_Conf. _, v. 305], and theonly objection to this is his mention of the incident of the march ofthe French troops, which could not have happened until the winter of1733, as having taken place "some months" after his arrival. Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the return in thespring of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is this: Returnsfrom Turin towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until thespring of 1731; passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuchâtel; first visitsParis in spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732. But a precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions isimpossible; Rousseau wrote them three and thirty years after ourpresent point [in 1766 at Wootton], and never claimed to be exact inminuteness of date. Fortunately such matters in the present case areabsolutely devoid of importance. 

[65] _Conf. _, iv. 279, 280. 

[66] _Conf. _, iv. 290, 291, [67] _Conf. _, iv. 281-283. 

[68] _Conf. _, v. 325. 

[69] _Conf. _, v. 360-364. _Corr. _, i. 21-24. 

[70] _Conf. _, v. 349, 350. 

[71] Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to thereturn of the French troops at the peace [_Ib. _ v. 365] would place itin 1735. 

[72] _Ib. _ v. 356

[73] _Ib. _

[74] _Conf. _, v. 315, 316. 

[75] _Ib. _ iv. 276. _Nouv. Hél. _, II. Xiv. 381, etc. 

[76] He refers to the ill-health of his youth, _Conf. _, vii. 32, anddescribes an ominous head seizure while at Chambéri, _Ib. _ vi. 396. 

[77] Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of thefifth book. The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it usedto be, and has gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant, including his poor _clavecin_ and his watch. In an outside wall, Hérault de Sechelles, when Commissioner from the Convention in thedepartment of Mont Blanc, inserted a little white stone with two mostlapidary stanzas inscribed upon it, about _génie, solitude, fierté, gloire, vérité, envie_, and the like. 

[78] _Rêveries_, x. 336 (1778). 

[79] _Conf. _, vi. 393. 

[80] _Conf. _, vi. 412. 

[81] _Mém. De Mdme. D'Epinay_, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition:Charpentier. 1865. )

[82] _Conf. _, vi. 399. 

[83] _Ib. _ vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's_Life_, p. 126. 

[84] Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. _Oeuvres_ (Ed. 1818), xii. 70, etc. 

[85] _Conf. _, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of theValais, in the _Nouv. Hél. _, Pt. I. Let. Xxiii. 

[86] George Sand in _Mademoiselle la Quintinie_ (p. 27), a bookcontaining some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoylandscape. 

[87] _Conf. _, iv. 298. 

[88] _Conf. _, vi. 416, 422, etc. ; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383, 384. Also vii. 53. 

[89] _Conf. _, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also _Mém. De Mdme. D'Epinay_, ii. 151. 

[90] _Ib. _ iii. 192, 193. 

[91] _Conf. _, iv. 301; iii. 195. 

[92] _Conf. _, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to thecorrespondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instanceshow little we can trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, thoughtheir substantial veracity is confirmed by all the collateral evidencethat we have. 

[93] _Ib. _ iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame deWarens, see also _Ib. _ vii. 46. 

[94] _Conf. _, vi. 409. 

[95] _Ib. _ vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking "_et cetera_. "

[96] _Conf. _, vi. 414

[97] _Conf. _, iv. 295. See also v. 346. 

[98] _Corr. _, 1736, pp. 26, 27. 

[99] _Conf. _, iv. 271, where he says further that he never foundenough attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it. 

[100] The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton inDerbyshire, in the winter of 1766-1767. 

[101] _Conf. _, vi. 422. 

[102] _Corr. _, i. 43, 46, 62, etc. 

[103] Musset-Pathay, i. 23, _n. _

CHAPTER IV. 

THERESA LE VASSEUR. 

Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delightperish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, oreven to perceive that life has gone out of it. The sight of simplehearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former days into apresent that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching enough. But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in whichRousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch hisembarrassment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as asimple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolvesafter making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madamede Warens over from theories which had become too practical to beinteresting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons. His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abbé ofthe same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac(1714-80). 

The future author of the most influential treatise on education that hasever been written, was not successful in the practical and far morearduous side of that master art. [104] We have seen how little traininghe had ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness andself-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in allwho have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all wentwell, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing toconfess that he was a devil. When his two pupils could not understandhim, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part ofthe disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, humanexcellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he wasready to kill them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to renderthem either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacherhimself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal hisemployer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in thesecrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and some dearromance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of this kindmore easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These aresurely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng ofworthier memories. 

It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from thedeadly drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of formerdays. "What rendered my present condition insupportable was therecollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, myfountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt myself bornand who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of our pleasures, ourguileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping ofmy breath, which robbed me of all spirit. "[105] For years to come thiswas a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his earsunder all the discords of a miserable life. He made another effort toquicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude inescaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year atLyons (April, 1740--spring of 1741), he made his way back to his oldhaunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him thathappiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, hisdesolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paristo make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he hadinvented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for thesecond time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century hadbecome for the moment the centre of the universe. [106]

It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him. His plan ofmusical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, nomember of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb, inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with whichhis critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments andobjections which he perceived that they did not at all understand. Hisexperience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection, how even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of anyone thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possibleenlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, withoutstudy of the special matter in question. It astonished him that allthese learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorantthat a man should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft. [107]

His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrenderedhimself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. Hehad a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future. He was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blunderinggallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest ofthem, declaring his passion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter ofone, and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and theattentions of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun byinviting him to dine in the servants' hall, were not pleasing toher. [108] She forgave the impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M. Francueil, was Rousseau's patron for some years. [109] On the whole, however, in spite of his own account of his social ineptitude, therecannot have been anything so repulsive in his manners as this accountwould lead us to think. There is no grave anachronism in introducinghere the impression which he made on two fine ladies not many yearsafter this. "He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least heis without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usagesof society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely intelligent. Hehas a brown complexion, while eyes that overflow with fire giveanimation to his expression. When he has spoken and you look at him, heappears comely; but when you try to recall him, his image is alwaysextremely plain. They say that he has bad health, and endures agonywhich from some motive of vanity he most carefully conceals. It isthis, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air ofsullenness. "[110] The other lady, who saw him at the same time, speaksof "the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job for you, but withwit and vanity enough for four. . . . They say his history is as queer ashis person, and that is saying a good deal. . . . Madame Maupeou and Itried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face, ' said she (for it iscertain he is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays a greatpart in his romance. ' 'No, ' said I, 'his nose tells me that it isvanity. ' 'Well then, 'tis both one and the other. '"[111]

One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post ofsecretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment inthe famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of whichthere are not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rankforemost in the short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seennot to have been decisive at all, but mere interruptions conductingnowhither. In truth the critical moments with us are mostly as points inslumber. Even if the ancient oracles of the gods were to regain theirspeech once more on the earth, men would usually go to consult them ondays when the answer would have least significance, and could guidethem least far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and asit happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, shouldhave got a footing in the train of the ambassador of a great government, would naturally seem to him and others as chance's one critical strokein his life. In reality it was nothing. The Count of Montaigu, hismaster, was one of the worst characters with whom Rousseau could for hisown profit have been brought into contact. In his professional qualityhe was not far from imbecile. The folly and weakness of the governmentat Versailles during the reign of Lewis XV. , and its indifference tocompetence in every department except perhaps partially in the fisc, wasfairly illustrated in its absurd representative at Venice. Thesecretary, whose renown has preserved his master's name, has recordedmore amply than enough the grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau isfor once eager to assert his own efficiency, and declares that herendered many important services for which he was repaid withingratitude and persecution. [112] One would be glad to know what theCount of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth Rousseau'sconduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he who hadhitherto always been unfaithful over few things, suddenly touchedperfection when he became lord over many. 

There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid quality, of which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thingamong men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most strikingtrait. For instance, careful observation had persuaded him that threeshoes are equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pairwhich is more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered hisshoes in threes. [113] It was natural enough that such a master and sucha secretary should quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringingquality which we have noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau'shungry youthful time, had been hardened out of him by circumstance orthe strengthening of inborn fibre. He would now neither dine in aservants' hall because a fine lady forgot what was due to a musician, nor share his fees with a great ambassador who forgot what was due tohimself. These sordid disputes are of no interest now to anybody, and weneed only say that after a period of eighteen months passed inuncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his count in extreme dudgeon, and the diplomatic career which he had promised to himself came to thesame close as various other careers had already done. 

He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignationat the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, andlaying memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He assuresus that it was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that leftin his soul the germ of exasperation against preposterous civilinstitutions, "in which the true common weal and real justice are alwayssacrificed to some seeming order or other, which is in fact destructiveof all order, and only adds the sanction of public authority to theoppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong. "[114]

One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in thememory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps withmost people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage tohis new post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board thefelucca, or passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we maynotice in passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention ofthe fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have leftthe least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, andthought of it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found thewant of space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, andpreferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neitherwindow-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of strawto lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself. "I manufactured, " he says, "a good bed out of my coats and shirts, sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out of my oldcloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and atable of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, andarranged some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I mademyself so comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows, I was nearly as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in mylodgings in Paris. My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers, with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was mydining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat, and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew, to warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was neitherwriting nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk inthe Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out onto the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out. Ipassed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole threeweeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness. "[115]

These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; buthis residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociableperiods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certaingaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way thatan earlier century would have counted unholy. [116] He rarely soughtpleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic hada guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing thedegree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist'swork in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep onefrom sin more effectually than an ethical precept. [117] It is pleasanterto think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste whichten years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving thatFrench melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. AVenetian experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is lessweighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts whichpersuaded him that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who hadnever heard any music was invited to listen first of all to a Frenchmonologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in theArmenian more surprise than pleasure during the performance of theFrench piece. The first notes of the Italian were no sooner struck, thanhis eyes and whole expression softened; he was enchanted, surrenderedhis whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the music, and couldnever again be induced to listen to the performance of anyFrench air. [118]

More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of thedefects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mindto political speculation, and suggested to him the composition of abook that was to be called Institutions Politiques. [119] The work, asthus designed and named, was never written, but the idea of it, aftermany years of meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality, and then in the Social Contract. 

If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element inhis life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an eventwhich counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and bycame to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, butwhich he persistently described as the only real consolation that heavenpermitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled himto bear his many sore burdens. [120]

He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from theSorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival inParis. [121] Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, whoused to sit at table with her mistress and the guests of the house. Thecompany was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abbés, andother people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had comeneither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched theconversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of herserving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved withpity for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity headvanced to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur tookeach other for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficientlyeffective. This was the beginning of a union which lasted for the lengthof a generation and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragicalending. [122] She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he wasconvinced that he saw in her a woman of sensibility, simple and freefrom trick, and neither of the two, he says, was deceived in respect ofthe other. Her intellectual quality was unique. She could never betaught to read with any approach to success. She could never follow theorder of the twelve months of the year, nor master a single arithmeticalfigure, nor count a sum of money, nor reckon the price of a thing. Amonth's instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the hours of theday on the dial-plate. The words she used were often the directopposites of the words that she meant to use. [123]

The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those whohave no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolerybetween purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives isthe stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated byit. When the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chanceis time wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver theirjudgments upon the conditions of success in the relations between menand women, has flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not veryinviting case. People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of hiswritings, and then fetter their elevated, susceptible, sensitive, andhumane creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught thatApril is the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine. Now we have already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitelylittle he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he seteither on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He wastouched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but bymoral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead ofanalysing a character, bringing its several elements into the balance, computing the more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel itsinfluence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound oragitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air. The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest facultiesof apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he couldonly be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye andmovement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, whichnature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would haveleft him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfrettedsense. A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a morefatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled thestupidity of man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress toRousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to himthan the subtle inhalations of softened and close envelopingcompanionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectualequality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about thethousand small matters that make up the existence of a day. This is notthe highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the pointof view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concernedwith the conditions of productive energy. He only sought to live, to behimself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kindof nature was the best supplement for his own. As he said in anapophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it, --you nevercan cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the manhimself knows anything about it. [124] "By the side of people we love, "he says very truly, "sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as theheart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived withmy Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in theuniverse. "[125]

Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married astout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way ofgathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason tothink that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other matethan he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two. She was a person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he. And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of theplain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to themore hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine mannersand a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and thearithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was nodeterioration in going with a serving-woman. [126] However this may be, it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of hispartnership--and many others as well as he are said to have found inthis term a limit to the conditions of the original contract, --Rousseauhad perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friendspronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedlybrutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, howmuch of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from theshoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was frombeginning to end entirely voluntary? If he attached himself deliberatelyto an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to breakon any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as muchdue to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as tothe character of Theresa Le Vasseur? Nothing, as he himself said in apassage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the trueleanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachmentswhich he forms. [127]

It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society tocharge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in thisparticular way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politerpersons. He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison waswith his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would nothave been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in theeighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in akitchen wench. The selection was probably not very deliberate; as ithappened, Theresa served as a standing illustration of two of his mostmarked traits, a contempt for mere literary culture, and a yet deepercontempt for social accomplishments and social position. In time hefound out the grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with acompanion who did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was soslight that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip andquodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement, and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a sombre life sovarious, went for nothing with him. What his friends missed in her, hedid not seek and would not have valued; and what he found in her, theywere naturally unable to appreciate, for they never were in the mood fordetecting it. "I have not seen much of happy men, " he wrote when nearhis end, "perhaps nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts, and of all the objects that have struck me, I believe it is this whichhas always given most contentment to myself. "[128] This moderateconception of felicity, which was always so characteristic with him, asan even, durable, and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accountsfor his prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elationin their ideal would assuredly have found hostile even to the mostmodest contentment. 

"The heart of my Theresa, " he wrote long after the first tenderness hadchanged into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into indifference onhers, "was that of an angel; our attachment waxed stronger with ourintimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we were made for oneanother. If our pleasures could be described, their simplicity wouldmake you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in which I wouldmunificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; ourmodest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on two smallchairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure. Here the window did duty for a table, we breathed the fresh air, wecould see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though on thefourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shalldescribe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of acoarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pintof wine which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious seasoning there isin friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We usedsometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of thetime. "[129]

Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bearthe burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid theburden on their lives. [130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner ofaccepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with thiswoman present him in a better light than those with any other personwhatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry, jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habituallytrustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes evenoccurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of themorbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People ofa certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices forbare love of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely tofeel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in awoman who to everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms withthe bulk of his fellows may contrive to save his self-respect andconfirm his conviction that they are all in the wrong, by preservingattachment to some one to whom general opinion is hostile; the privateargument being that if he is capable of this degree of virtue andfriendship in an unfavourable case, how much more could he havepractised it with others, if they would only have allowed him. Whetherthis kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau couldalways refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steadykindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among the mostodious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her motherhad every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes, includingthat worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he bore withthem all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur until shehad poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity andlying to render him contemptible to all his friends. 

In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of achange in her affections. "I began to feel, " he says, at a date ofsixteen or seventeen years from our present point, "that she was nolonger for me what she had been in our happy years, and I felt it allthe more clearly as I was still the same towards her. "[131] This was in1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference more open, until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had proposed aseparation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual change mayhave been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of thewhole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are twogood traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never consoleherself for having let her father be taken away to end his daysmiserably in a house of charity. [132] And the repudiation of herchildren, against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled, remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may supposethat there was that about household life with Rousseau which might havebred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was. Amongother things which must have been hard to endure, we know that incomposing his works he was often weeks together without speaking a wordto her. [133] Perhaps again it would not be difficult to produce somepassages in Rousseau's letters and in the Confessions, which show tracesof that subtle contempt for women that lurks undetected in many whowould blush to avow it. Whatever the causes may have been, fromindifference she passed to something like aversion, and in the oneplace where a word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes her asrending and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries wereat their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old, worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion and themost dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness, nearlyfriendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated the oldtenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed it in wordsof such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting strength, as may toucheven those whom his books leave unmoved, and who view his character withdeepest distrust. "For the six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our unionhas lasted, I have never sought my happiness except in yours, and havenever ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by what I didlately, [134] that your honour and happiness were one as dear to me asthe other. I see with pain that success does not answer my solicitude, and that my kindness is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweetto me to show. I know that the sentiments of honour and uprightness withwhich you were born will never change in you; but as for those oftenderness and attachment which were once reciprocal between us, I feelthat they now only exist on my side. Not only, dearest of all friends, have you ceased to find pleasure in my company, but you have to taxyourself severely even to remain a few minutes with me out ofcomplaisance. You are at your ease with all the world but me. I do notspeak to you of many other things. We must take our friends with theirfaults, and I ought to pass over yours, as you pass over mine. If youwere happy with me I could be content, but I see clearly that you arenot, and this is what makes my heart sore. If I could do better for yourhappiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not possible. Ihave left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to yourfelicity. At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed withdistress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finishmy days in closest union with you. You know my lot, --it is such as onecould not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it. I neverhad, my dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; itwas to pour out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries toyou, they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity nomore. My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only;my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy exceptwith you. It is certain that if you fail me and I am forced to livealone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a thousand times morecruelly still, if we continued to live together in misunderstanding, andif confidence and friendship were to go out between us. It would be ahundred times better to cease to see each other; still to live, andsometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be necessary onmy part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content. We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us notblot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purityof those we have passed together. "[135] Think ill as we may ofRousseau's theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct, yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man'sformulæ, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragicretaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the greatmaster's symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pityon the heart. In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair hadbeen stained by crimes shortly after its beginning. In the estrangementof father and mother in their late years we may perhaps hear the rustleand spy the pale forms of the avenging spectres of their lost children. 

At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed, Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musicaldiversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wronglypronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made someminor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameauhad set to music--that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaïreowed his seat in the Academy. [136] But neither task brought him money, and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little ofthe valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. De Francueil, for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. Onone occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience thearrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which cameto him by the death of his father. [137] He found the letter, and wasopening it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shameat his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece, undressed, slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning, he had forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He wasdelighted to find that it contained his money, but "I can swear, " headds, "that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself. " Anoccasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. Inthese tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunateTheresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the motheracquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-bornchild was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings. Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the sameheedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance onthe part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away, andwith such entire absence of any precaution with a view to theiridentification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of theday of their birth. [138]

People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, fromthe economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results ofhospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to thetheologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the humanheart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways, one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had goodreason to believe that the children were not his own, and therefore wasfully warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into theuniverse. [139] Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope thatcivilisation may one day reach a point when a plea like this shall countfor an aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception ofthe duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as wellas by the spread of both rational and compassionate considerations as tothe blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as somered and naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellentreason for repudiating a woman, can never be a reason for abandoning achild, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to thinkit a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and theensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls. 

We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of thegreater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has givenus, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was theresult of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyedselfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern, where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with muchself-respect put as far from them, as men with little self-respect willallow them to do. "I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceivedto reign among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and Isaid to myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here, one may as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, andwithout the least scruple. "[140] By and by he proceeded to cover thisnude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferringthat his children should be trained up as workmen and peasants ratherthan as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that insending them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself acitizen in Plato's Republic. [141] This is hardly more than the talk ofone become famous, who is defending the acts of his obscurity on thehigh principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens ofPlato's Republic "cheerfully and without the least scruple, " and if aman frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to thehospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous todrag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again wasgiven to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspiciousmania. Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himselfthat his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children athousand times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, beingspoiled by their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, andfinally being taught to hate and betray their father by his plottingenemies. [142] This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motiveswhich led to the abandonment of the children and justified the act tohimself at the time, with the circumstances that afterwards reconciledhim to what he had done; for now he neither had any enemies plottingagainst him, nor did he suppose that he had. As for his wife's family, he showed himself quite capable, when the time came, of dealingresolutely and shortly with their importunities in his own case, and hemight therefore well have trusted his power to deal with them in thecase of his children. He was more right when in 1770, in his importantletter to M. De St. Germain, he admitted that example, necessity, thehonour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him entrust hischildren to the establishment provided for that purpose, and kept himfrom fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties. "In this, farfrom excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that I didwhat I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than myheart, which bitterly belies it. "[143] This coincides with the firstundisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been alreadyquoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words whichsounds through nearly all his other references to this great stain uponhis life, excepting one, and this is the only further document withwhich we need concern ourselves. In that, [144] which was written whilethe unholy work was actually being done, he states very distinctly thatthe motives were those which are more or less closely connected withmost unholy works, motives of money--the great instrument and measure ofour personal convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control inplacing personal convenience behind duty to other people. "If my miseryand my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so dear, that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to reproach mewith. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better or at least asurer subsistence for them than I could myself have provided; thiscondition is above all others. " Next comes the consideration of theirmother, whose honour must be kept. "You know my situation; I gained mybread from day to day painfully enough; how then should I feed a familyas well? And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession ofauthor, how would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave mepeace of mind enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings whichhunger dictates are hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedilyexhausted. Then I should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, totricks . . . In short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for whichI am penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, andtheir mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better forthem to be orphans than to have a scoundrel for their father. . . . Whyhave I not married, you will ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. Itwas not fitting for me to contract an eternal engagement; and it willnever be proved to me that my duty binds me to it. What is certain isthat I have never done it, and that I never meant to do it. But we oughtnot to have children when we cannot support them. Pardon me, madame;nature means us to have offspring, since the earth produces sustenanceenough for all; but it is the rich, it is your class, which robs mine ofthe bread of my children. . . . I know that foundlings are not delicatelynurtured; so much the better for them, they become more robust. Theyhave nothing superfluous given to them, but they have everything that isnecessary. They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants orartisans. . . . They would not know how to dance, or ride on horseback, butthey would have strong unwearied legs. I would neither make authors ofthem, nor clerks; I would not practise them in handling the pen, but theplough, the file, and the plane, instruments for leading a healthy, laborious, innocent life. . . . I deprived myself of the delight of seeingthem, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas, as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, andI deliver them from misery at my own expense. "[145] We may see here thatRousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least aspowerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter, with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouthsof the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialisticsentences by which the writer in after times gained so famous a name. Itis at any rate clear from this that the real motive of the abandonmentof the children was wholly material. He could not afford to maintainthem, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed bytheir presence. 

There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason andunsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only toremember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when thestructure of the family was undermined alike in practice andspeculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better thanthey, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but wastolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confesshis misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocityof the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always beeninvested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by andby the author of the most powerful book by which parental duty has beencommended in its full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, letRousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen, sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common andrather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, ifthey do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions, still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdenson others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene ofsqualor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that isfar more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in publicinstitutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children withoutregard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and ifafterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum onthe one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of apoverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to givepeople who act as Rousseau acted, all that credit for self-denial andhigh moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. Itreally seems to be no more criminal to produce children with thedeliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseaudid, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besottedmaxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of thespurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add tothe gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury ofreligious unction. 

In 1761 the Maréchale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau'schildren, but without success. They were gone beyond hope ofidentification, and the author of _Emitius_ and his sons and daughterslived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau withsingular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessnessof the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. "The success ofyour search, " he wrote, "could not give me pure and undisturbedpleasure; it is too late, too late. . . . In my present condition thissearch interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; andconsidering the too easily yielding character of the person in question, it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or forevil, might turn out a sorry boon to her. "[146] We may doubt, in spiteof one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of anature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blankeye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns andchanges in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both tooself-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in allthings, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness andimmaturity touch us with half-painful hope. 

Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresafive-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance, [147]but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place whichanybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. Whathappened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and twoguests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was hiswife. "This good and seemly engagement was contracted, " he says, "in allthe simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence oftwo men of worth and honour. . . . During the short and simple act, I sawthe honest pair melted in tears. "[148] He had at this time whimsicallyassumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course hehad married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertionof an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that aremarried; no, it is persons. " "Even if in this simple and holy ceremonynames entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed, since I recognise no other. If it were a question of property to beassured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that isnot our case. "[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage accordingto the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own ritesas more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words aboutproperty that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He and Theresawere on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time, [150] andRousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceivedhimself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman mustmagically transform the substance of their characters and lives, andconjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness. 

 * * * * *

We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now toreturn to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run afterstable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, butsat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in thewindow of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with"confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul, " and that general comfort ofsensation which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariablecondition either of duty done externally or of spiritual growth within. It is perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a greatreligious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces ofthe soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh. But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like theplants of the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of thechief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, tobe able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the mostimportant of all realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socratesif we can never forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David'sif we can only think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if wecan simply remember that he denied his master. Our vision is onlyblindness, if we can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities ofdeep mystic aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or tobelieve that this coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarsemate, might yet have many glimpses of the great wide horizons that arehaunted by figures rather divine than human. 

FOOTNOTES:

[104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almostsagacious; witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc. , submitted to M. De Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works entitled _Mélanges_, pp. 106-136. In the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting thatRousseau rashly or otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as avexatious superfluity (p. 132). 

[105] _Conf. _, vi. 471. 

[106] _Ib. _, vi. 472-475; vii. 8. 

[107] _Conf. _, vii. 18, 19. 

[108] Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from LordChesterfield's Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as aproper person with whom his son might in a regular and business-likemanner open the elevating game of gallant intrigue. 

[109] M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped theeditors of the Encyclopædia by procuring information for them as tosalt-works (D'Alembert's _Discours Préliminaire_). His son M. Dupin deFrancueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chainbetween two famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau'sdeath, he married (in the chapel of the French embassy in London)Aurora de Saxe, a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the naturalson of August the Strong, King of Poland. From this union was bornMaurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand. M. Francueil died in 1787. 

[110] _Mém. De Mdme. D'Epinay_, vol. I. Ch. Iv. P. 176. 

[111] _Ib. _ vol. I. Ch. Iv. Pp. 178, 179. 

[112] _Conf. _, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau'shandwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate atConstantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spreadthe report that Rousseau had been the ambassador's private attendant. For Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see _Corr. _, v. 75 (Jan. 5, 1767); also iv. 150. 

[113] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv. _, xii. 55 _seq. _

[114] _Conf. _, vii. 92. 

[115] _Conf. _, vii. 38, 39. 

[116] _Lettres de la Montagne_, iii. 266. 

[117] _Conf. _, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron'sopinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi. 132. (Ed. 1837. )

[118] _Lettre sur la Musique Française_ (1753), p. 186. 

[119] _Conf. _, ix. 232. 

[120] _Ib. _ vii. 97. 

[121] Hôtel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street runningbetween the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The stillsqualid hostelry is now visible as Hôtel J. J. Rousseau. There is somedoubt whether he first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk. Vii. Of the _Confessions_ is for the latter date (see also _Corr. _, ii. 207), but in the well-known letter to her in 1769 (_Ib. _ vi. 79), he speaks of the twenty-six years of their union. Their so-calledmarriage took place in 1768, and writing in that year he speaks of thefive-and-twenty years of their attachment (_Ib. _ v. 323), and in the_Confessions_ (ix. 249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; alsoin the letter to Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving1745 in one place (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has withless than his usual care paid no attention to the discrepancy. 

[122] _Conf. _, vii. 97-100. 

[123] _Conf. _, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may beinteresting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: "Mesiceuras ancormien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tousla goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour erus pour vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vouspaleu ces paes mes le vre . . . Ge sui avestous lamities e la reu coneccaceu posible e la tacheman mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bonamiess theress le vasseur. " Of which dark words this is theinterpretation:--"Mais il sera encore mieux remis quand je sera auprèsde vous, et de vous témoigner toute la joie et la tendresse de moncoeur que vous connaissez que j'ai toujours eue pour vous, et qui nefinira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur qui vous parle, c'est pas meslèvres. . . . Je suis avec toute l'amitié et la reconnaissance possibles, et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre humble et bonne amie, Thérèse Le Vasseur. " (_Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, ii. 450. )Certainly it was not learning and arts which hindered Theresa'smanners from being pure. 

[124] _Oeuv. Et Corr. Inéd. _, 365. 

[125] _Conf. _, vii. 102. See also _Corr. _, v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). Onthe other hand, _Conf. _, ix. 249. 

[126] M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers onRousseau, speaks of him as "a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance witha tavern servant" (_Rev. Des Deux Mondes_, Nov. 1852, p. 759); butsurely Rousseau had unclassed himself long before, in the houses ofMadame Vercellis, Count Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by hisrepudiation, from the time when he ran away from Geneva, of nearlyevery bourgeois virtue and bourgeois prejudice. 

[127] _Conf. _, vii. 11. Also footnote. 

[128] _Rêveries_, ix. 309. 

[129] _Conf. _, viii. 142, 143. 

[130] The other day I came for the first time upon the following inthe sayings of Madame de Lambert:--"Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautesqui nous perdent; c'est la manière de se conduire aprés les avoirfaites. " [1877. ]

[131] _Conf. _, xii. 187, 188. 

[132] _Ib. _, viii. 221. 

[133] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv. _, xii. 103. See _Conf. _, xii188, and _Corr. _, v. 324. 

[134] Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called theirmarriage, and which had taken place in 1768. 

[135] _Corr. _, vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769. 

[136] Composed in 1745. The _Fêtes de Ramire_ was represented atVersailles at the very end of this year. 

[137] Some time in 1746-7. _Conf. _, vii. 113, 114. 

[138] Probably in the winter of 1746-7. _Corr. _, ii. 207. _Conf. _, vii. 120-124. _Ib. _, viii. 148. _Corr. _, ii. 208. June 12, 1761, tothe Maréchale de Luxembourg. 

[139] George Sand, --in an eloquent piece entitled _À Propos desCharmettes (Revue des Deux Mondes_, November 15, 1863), in which sheexpresses her own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseaudeclares that he had never hitherto had the least reason to suspectTheresa's fidelity. _Corr. _, ii. 209

[140] _Conf. _, vii. 123. 

[141] _Ib. _, viii. 145-151. 

[142] _Rêveries_, ix. 313. The same reason is given, _Conf. _, ix. 252;also in Letter to Madame B. , January 17, 1770 (_Corr. _, vi. 117). 

[143] _Corr. _, vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770. 

[144] Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. _Corr. _, i. 151. 

[145] _Corr. _, i. 151-155

[146] August 10, 1761. _Corr. _, ii. 220. The Maréchale de Luxembourg'snote on the subject, to which this is a reply, is given in _Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, i. 444. 

[147] _Conf. _, x. 249. See above, p. 106, _n. _

[148] To Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. _Corr. _, v. 324. See also D'Escherny, quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170. 

[149] To Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. _Corr. _, v. 360. 

[150] To Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. _Corr. _, v. 116-119. 

CHAPTER V. 

THE DISCOURSES. 

The busy establishment of local academies in the provincial centres ofFrance only preceded the outbreak of the revolution by ten or a dozenyears; but one or two of the provincial cities, such as Bordeaux, Rouen, Dijon, had possessed academies in imitation of the greater body of Parisfor a much longer time. Their activity covered a very varied ground, from the mere commonplaces of literature to the most practical detailsof material production. If they now and then relapsed into inquiriesabout the laws of Crete, they more often discussed positive andscientific theses, and rather resembled our chambers of agriculture thanbodies of more learned pretension. The academy of Dijon was one of theearliest of these excellent institutions, and on the whole the list ofits theses shows it to have been among the most sensible in respect ofthe subjects which it found worth thinking about. Its members, however, could not entirely resist the intellectual atmosphere of the time. In1742 they invited discussion of the point, whether the natural law canconduct society to perfection without the aid of political laws. [151]In 1749 they proposed this question as a theme for their prize essay:_Has the restoration of the sciences contributed to purify or to corruptmanners?_ Rousseau was one of fourteen competitors, and in 1750 hisdiscussion of the academic theme received the prize. [152] This was hisfirst entry on the field of literature and speculation. Three yearsafterwards the same academy propounded another question: _What is theorigin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by the naturallaw?_ Rousseau again competed, and though his essay neither gained theprize, nor created as lively an agitation as its predecessor had done, yet we may justly regard the second as a more powerful supplement tothe first. 

It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which piecesthat have moved a world were originally composed, and Rousseau's accountof the generation of his thoughts as to the influence of enlightenmenton morality, is remarkable enough to be worth transcribing. He waswalking along the road from Paris to Vincennes one hot summer afternoonon a visit to Diderot, then in prison for his Letter on the Blind(1749), when he came across in a newspaper the announcement of the themepropounded by the Dijon academy. "If ever anything resembled a suddeninspiration, it was the movement which began in me as I read this. Allat once I felt myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds ofvivid ideas thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threwme into unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddinesslike that of intoxication. A violent palpitation oppressed me; unable towalk for difficulty of breathing, I sank under one of the trees of theavenue, and passed half an hour there in such a condition of excitement, that when I arose I saw that the front of my waistcoat was all wet withmy tears, though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if Icould ever have written the quarter of what I saw and felt under thattree, with what clearness should I have brought out all thecontradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I should havedemonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institutions onlyis he made bad. "[153] Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize, and to give full flight to the ideas which had come to him in thissingular way. [154]

People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the ideathat perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentimentis surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to theacademicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, ifyou are asked whether a given result has or has not followed fromcertain circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quiteas readily as Yes. The originality lay not in the central contention, but in the fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sortwith which it was presented and enforced. There is less originality indenouncing your generation as wicked and adulterous than there is inbelieving it to be so, and in persuading the generation itself both thatyou believe it and that you have good reasons to give. We have not tosuppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency celestial orinfernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau hadbeen thinking of politics ever since the working of the government ofVenice had first drawn his mind to the subject. What is the government, he had kept asking himself, which is most proper to form a sage andvirtuous nation? What government by its nature keeps closest to the law?What is this law? And whence?[155] This chain of problems had led him towhat he calls the historic study of morality, though we may doubtwhether history was so much his teacher as the rather meagrely nourishedhandmaid of his imagination. Here was the irregular preparation, thehidden process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itselfwith an exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for aninward revolution with no precursive sign. 

Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of alife of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, butwhich in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and theSocial Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which ifyou consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and properbreadth, is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key toit is given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of thewide-spreading oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool andrational western temperament, but more often to the oriental afterlonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the roadto Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in hisown nature, [156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, ofintense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, heassuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijonproblem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in hishead, revealed to him another universe. From the active effervescencewhich thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which people sawglittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium, butof which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which wouldprobably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced towish to continue writing after the access was over. Inflamed by thecontemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present tohis mind. His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the futurehappiness of the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it, dictated to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise . . . And for amoment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls sawonly eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those whodwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of theirown. "[157]

This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, andthis is the only point of view from which we are secure against thevulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and consciouscharlatan. He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by anenthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rageand prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revoltagainst the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting ina heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasiveexpression. The last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its firstand more imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses. 

Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of theruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappymoment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation anddisguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented hissincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strongenough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteenyears, _grande mortalis oevi spatium_. They threw him on to that turbidsea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from which, let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in theease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him. Itwas the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placidliving, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed betweenhis existence and the tumult of a generation with which he wasprofoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was theletting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the SocialContract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe. 

Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, thoughfull of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, andthat of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning andthe poorest in numbers and harmony. "For, " as he justly adds, "the artof writing is not learnt all at once. "[158] The modern critic must becontent to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love asthis was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness, would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination ofspeculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on thestrength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among thenotables of an age that was full of them. [159] We ought to take inconnection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse, which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and whichserve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, becausein truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, evenas a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat inthis wise:--

Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use atoo elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference ofconduct announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile andmost deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem asif they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with whatsort of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions, fears, reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety, arrogance, calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish ofrefinement. So terrible a set of effects must have a cause. Historyshows that the cause here is to be found in the progress of sciences andarts. Egypt, once so mighty, becomes the mother of philosophy and thefine arts; straightway behold its conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, byRomans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice conquered Asia, oncebefore Troy, once in its own homes; then came in fatal sequence theprogress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and the yoke of theMacedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised to glory byhusbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the eve of her ruin wasthe day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of arbiter of goodtaste. China, where letters carry men to the highest dignities of thestate, could not be preserved by all her literature from the conqueringpower of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians, Scythians, Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence, andvirtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of hisown apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators, and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the sciences, andwhen the new law was established, it was not the learned, but the simpleand lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted his teachingand its ministry. [160]

This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken ourpresumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in whicheternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdomhas covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were notdestined to fatuous research. All the secrets that Nature hides from usare so many evils against which she would fain shelter us. 

Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be reallyinconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are meredeceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science ofwhich we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm theresults of induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born ofsuperstition; geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futilecuriosity; all of them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for everto be the dupes of words, and to believe that these pompous names ofscience, philosophy, and the rest, stand for worthy and profitablerealities?[161] Be sure that they do not. 

How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors athousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks arewe to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, ifwe do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it?If celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result;and we may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who areborn to be the guides of others. [162] But the intelligences of commonmen are neither celestial nor Socratic. 

Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man;and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us whatinsects reproduce themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attractone another in space, what curves have conjugate points, points ofinflection or reflection, what in the planetary revolutions are therelations of areas traversed in equal times--let us ask those who haveattained all this sublime knowledge, by how much the worse governed, less flourishing, or less perverse we should have been if they hadattained none of it? Now if the works of our most scientific men andbest citizens lead to such small utility, tell us what we are to thinkof the crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour thepublic substance in pure loss. 

Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury, and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than fromthe teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by whichnations preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues whichmake the independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go tocostly establishments where they learn everything except their duties. They remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak othersnot in use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composingverses which they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguishtruth from error, they possess the art of rendering themindistinguishable to others by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity, temperance, courage, humanity, have no real meaning to them; and if theyhear speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear. 

Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequalityintroduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening ofvirtue?[163] People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, butwhether he is clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether itis well written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are theselessons of wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? Tolisten to these sages, would you not take them for a troop ofcharlatans, all bawling out in the market-place, Come to me, it is onlyI who never cheat you, and always give good measure? One maintains thatthere is no body, and that everything is mere representation; the otherthat there is no entity but matter, and no God but the universe: onethat moral good and evil are chimeras; the other that men are wolves andmay devour one another with the easiest conscience in the world. Theseare the marvellous personages on whom the esteem of contemporaries islavished so long as they live, and to whom immortality is reserved aftertheir death. And we have now invented the art of making theirextravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of typographic charactersthe dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza will endure for ever. Surely when they perceive the terrible disorders which printing hasalready caused in Europe, sovereigns will take as much trouble tobanish this deadly art from their states as they once took tointroduce it. 

If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to givethemselves up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those whofeel conscious of the strength required for advancing their subjects, who have any right to attempt to raise monuments to the glory of thehuman mind. We ought to have no tolerance for those compilers who rashlybreak open the gate of the sciences, and introduce into their sanctuarya populace that is unworthy even to draw near to it. It may be well thatthere should be philosophers, provided only and always that the peopledo not meddle with philosophising. [164]

In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious, springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, anddebasing the soul: the other "a reasonable ignorance, which consists inlimiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received;a modest ignorance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiringindifference only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, orfails to contribute to its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance, the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all itsblessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its owninnocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollowhappiness in the opinion of other people as to its enlightenment. "[165]

 * * * * *

Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instanceas that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessivepreponderance of literary instruction in the art of education, are dueto Montaigne; and in one way, the Discourse might be described asbinding together a number of that shrewd man's detached hints by meansof a paradoxical generalisation. But the Rousseau is more important thanthe Montaigne in it. Another remark to be made is that its vigorousdisparagement of science, of the emptiness of much that is calledscience, of the deadly pride of intellect, is an anticipation in a veryprecise way of the attitude taken by the various Christian churches andtheir representatives now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, thegreatest of the religious reactionaries after Rousseau. The vilificationof the Greeks is strikingly like some vehement passages in De Maistre'sestimate of their share in sophisticating European intellect. At lastRousseau even began to doubt whether "so chattering a people could everhave had any solid virtues, even in primitive times. "[166] YetRousseau's own thinking about society is deeply marked with opinionsborrowed exactly from these very chatterers. His imagination wasfascinated from the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's socialspeculations, to which his debt in a hundred details of his politicaland educational schemes is well known. What was more important than anyobligation of detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from theGreeks and partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver inmoulding a social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shallpresently quote the passage in which he holds up for our envy andimitation the policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that hefound existing and constructed the social edifice afresh from foundationto roof. [167] It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greekliterary studies in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and Rousseau seems to have read Plato only through Ficinus'stranslation. But his example and its influence, along with that of Mablyand others, warrant the historian in saying that at no time did Greekideas more keenly preoccupy opinion than during this century. [168]Perhaps we may say that Rousseau would never have proved how littlelearning and art do for the good of manners, if Plato had not insistedon poets being driven out of the Republic. The article on PoliticalEconomy, written by him for the Encyclopædia (1755), rings with thenames of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project of public educationis recommended by the example of Cretans, Lacedæmonians, and Persians, while the propriety of the reservation of a state domain is suggestedby Romulus. 

It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is theway in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists ondragging people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with agreat public reputation of much too well-established a kind to besubjected to the affront of analysis. It is true that Rousseau himselfcontributed nothing directly to that analytic operation which Socrateslikened to midwifery, and he set up graven images of his own in place ofthe idols which he destroyed. This, however, did not wholly efface thedistinction, which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead theminds of men into new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins ofphilosophical speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment ofthe great trite words which come so easily to the tongue and seem toweigh for so much, must always be the first step towards bringingthought back into the region of real matter, and confronting phrases, terms, and all the common form of the discussion of an age, with theactualities which it is the object of sincere discussion to penetrate. 

The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on theprinciples which are universally accepted among enlightened men inmodern society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merelybe to draw up a list of the gratulatory commonplaces of which we hearquite enough in the literature and talk of our day. In this direction, perhaps it suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly one-sided, admitting none of the conveniences, none of the alleviations ofsuffering of all kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, whichthe pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race. They may or may notcounterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly tobe put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of thesubject. It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those allegedevils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse ofthe thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. Itomits to take into account the various other circumstances, such asclimate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which mustenter equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisationhas marked the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of itsargument the entirely unsupported assumption of there having once beenin the early history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, andinnocent virtue, from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden treecaused an inevitable degeneration. All evidence and all scientificanalogy are now well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that thehistory of civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline froma primary state. After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letterwhich only showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of theargument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature areonly as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged theearth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, whocontrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauchedAntony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamedAugustus. It was not Marot who produced the St. Bartholomew massacre, nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the wars of the Fronde. Whatreally makes, and always will make, this world into a valley of tears, is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable insolence of men, from KouliKhan, who did not know how to read, down to the custom-house clerk, whoknows nothing but how to cast up figures. Letters nourish the soul, theystrengthen its integrity, they furnish a solace to it, "--and so on inthe sense, though without the eloquence, of the famous passage inCicero's defence of Archias the poet. [169] All this, however, in ourtime is in no danger of being forgotten, and will be present to the mindof every reader. The only danger is that pointed out by Rousseauhimself: "People always think they have described what the sciences do, when they have in reality only described what the sciences oughtto do. "[170]

What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has apositive as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehementand overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculativeenthusiasm of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the casewith such enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or anindividual, was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget. [171] Thistruth may be put in different terms. We may describe it as thepossibility of eminent civic virtue existing in people, without eitherliterary taste or science or speculative curiosity. Or we may express itas the compatibility of a great amount of contentment and order in agiven social state, with a very low degree of knowledge. Or finally, wemay give the truth its most general expression, as the subordination ofall activity to the promotion of social aims. Rousseau's is an elaborateand roundabout manner of saying that virtue without science is betterthan science without virtue; or that the well-being of a country dependsmore on the standard of social duty and the willingness of citizens toconform to it, than on the standard of intellectual culture and theextent of its diffusion. In other words, we ought to be less concernedabout the speculative or scientific curiousness of our people than aboutthe height of their notion of civic virtue and their firmness andpersistency in realising it. It is a moralist's way of putting theancient preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom is not thewisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in our modern eraalways pressing, because there is a constant tendency on the part ofenergetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their energies ona minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to their owncourse. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions to thestock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more serious, to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest, self-denying, moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and the continuityof society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their greater commandof specious expression and their control of the organs of publicopinion, they both assume a kind of supreme place in the socialhierarchy, and persuade the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to takeso very egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau'sDiscourse recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was fullof wholesomeness. 

Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of theverse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large, led him into a general position with reference to scientific andspeculative energy, which seems to involve a perilous misconception ofthe conditions of this energy producing its proper results. It is easynow, as it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in anepigrammatical manner by how much men are better or happier for havingfound out this or that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology, or astronomy; and this is very well as against the discoverer of smallmarvels who shall give himself out for the benefactor of the humanrace. But both historical experience and observation of the terms onwhich the human intelligence works, show us that we can only make sureof intellectual activity on condition of leaving it free to work allround, in every department and in every remotest nook of eachdepartment, and that its most fruitful epochs are exactly those whenthis freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen and minute, and thiswaste, if you choose to call the indispensable superfluity of force in anatural process waste, most copious and unsparing. You will not findyour highest capacity in statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor inart, nor in any other field where that capacity is most urgently neededfor the right service of life, unless there is a general and vehementspirit of search in the air. If it incidentally leads to manyindustrious futilities and much learned refuse, this is still the signand the generative element of industry which is not futile, and oflearning which is something more than mere water spilled uponthe ground. 

We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were adim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that theonly normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtuehas been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love ofknowledge, nor the active curiosity of the understanding dulled, blunted, and made ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only ofthe affections. Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extremefrom that against which his whole work was a protest. We need notcomplain very loudly that while remonstrating against the restlessintrepidity of the rationalists of his generation, he passed over thecentral truth, namely that the full and ever festal life is found inactive freedom of curiosity and search taking significance, motive, force, from a warm inner pulse of human love and sympathy. It was notgiven to Rousseau to see all this, but it was given to him to see theside of it for which the most powerful of the men living with him had noeyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately successful attemptto bring his vision before Europe. It was said at the time that he didnot believe a word of what he had written. [172] It is a naturalcharacteristic of an age passionately occupied with its own set ofideas, to question either the sincerity or the sanity of anybody whodeclares its sovereign conceptions to be no better than foolishness. Wecannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the vehemence of controversycarries him rather further than he quite meant to go, when he declaresthat if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would erect on hisfrontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the firstEuropean who should venture to pass into his territory, and the firstnative who should dare to pass out of it. [173] And there are many otherextravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious enough, as represented in the emblematic vignette with which the essay wasprinted--the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who warns asatyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time and beingfain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced by theglitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to itsstudy. [174] Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs compactly together, and wemay see the signs of its growth after leaving his hands in the crudeformula of the first Discourse, if we proceed to the more audaciousparadox of the second. 

II. 

The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with adescription of the natural state of man, which occupies considerablymore than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein whichis only too familiar to the student of the literature of the time, picturing each habit and thought, and each step to new habits andthoughts, with the minuteness, the fulness, the precision, of one whonarrates circumstances of which he has all his life been the closeeye-witness. The natural man reveals to us every motive, every processinternal and external, every slightest circumstance of his daily life, and each element that gradually transformed him into the non-naturalman. One who had watched bees or beetles for years could not give us amore full or confident account of their doings, their hourly goings inand out, than it was the fashion in the eighteenth century to give ofthe walk and conversation of the primeval ancestor. The conditions ofprimitive man were discussed by very incompetent ladies and gentlemen atconvivial supper parties, and settled with complete assurance. [175]

Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because all hisworld was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases and formulaswith reference to it which other people used. He required no moreevidence than they did, as to the reality of the existence of thesupposed set of conditions to which they gave the almost sacramentalname of state of nature. He never thought of asking, any more thananybody else did in the middle of the eighteenth century, what sort ofproof, how strong, how direct, was to be had, that primeval man had suchand such habits, and changed them in such a way and direction, and forsuch reasons. Physical science had reached a stage by this time when itsfollowers were careful to ask questions about evidence, correctdescription, verification. But the idea of accurate method had to bemade very familiar to men by the successes of physical science in thesearch after truths of one kind, before the indispensableness ofapplying it in the search after truths of all kinds had extended to thescience of the constitution and succession of social states. In thisrespect Rousseau was not guiltier than the bulk of his contemporaries. Voltaire's piercing common sense, Hume's deep-set sagacity, Montesquieu's caution, prevented them from launching very far on to thismetaphysical sea of nature and natural laws and states, but none of themasked those critical questions in relation to such matters which occurso promptly in the present day to persons far inferior to them inintellectual strength. Rousseau took the notion of the state of naturebecause he found it to his hand; he fitted to it his own characteristicaspirations, expanding and vivifying a philosophic conception with allthe heat of humane passion; and thus, although, at the end of theprocess when he had done with it, the state of nature came out bloomingas the rose, it was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction ofhis time, artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strangeideal under a familiar name. 

Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make somemention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau inan indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly. [176] In 1753 Morellypublished a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the corruptionof manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing outhow this corruption is to be amended by return to the empire of natureand truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be thecentral doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, thatit is government and institutions which make men what they are. But hewas stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his wholetheory, in a piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness isadmirably different from Rousseau's rhetoric. [177] It lacked thesovereign quality of persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morellyaccepts the doctrine that men are formed by the laws, but insists thatmoralists and statesmen have always led us wrong by legislating andprescribing conduct on the false theory that man is bad, whereas he isin truth a creature endowed with natural probity. Then he strikes to theroot of society with a directness that Rousseau could not imitate, bythe position that "these laws by establishing a monstrous division ofthe products of nature, and even of their very elements--by dividingwhat ought to have remained entire, or ought to have been restored toentireness if any accident had divided them, aided and favoured thebreak-up of all sociability. " All political and all moral evils are theeffects of this pernicious cause--private property. He says ofRousseau's first Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that thecorruption of manners which he set down to literature and art reallycame from this venomous principle of property, which infects all thatit touches. [178] Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle andrestored equality or community of possessions, but Christianity had theradical fault of involving such a detachment from earthly affections, inorder to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation, as brought about anecessary degeneration in social activity. The form of government is amatter of indifference, provided you can only assure community of goods. Political revolutions are at bottom the clash of material interests, anduntil you have equalised the one you will never prevent the other. [179]

Let us turn from this very definite position to one of the leastdefinite productions to be found in all literature. 

 * * * * *

It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on theorigin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginarydescription, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it wasdesigned to support. But we have only to remember that Rousseau's objectwas to persuade people that the happier state is that in whichinequality does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, andthat this was first the state of nature, and then the state only onedegree removed from it, in which we now find the majority of savagetribes. At the outset he defines inequality as a word meaning twodifferent things; one, natural or physical inequality, such asdifference of age, of health, of physical strength, of attributes ofintelligence and character; the other, moral or political inequality, consisting in difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detrimentof the rest, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful. Theformer differences are established by nature, the latter are authorised, if they were not established, by the consent of men. [180] In the stateof nature no inequalities flow from the differences among men in pointof physical advantage and disadvantage, and which remain withoutderivative differences so long as the state of nature enduresundisturbed. Nature deals with men as the law of Sparta dealt with thechildren of its citizens; she makes those who are well constitutedstrong and robust, and she destroys all the rest. 

The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest, andinhabited by animals of every species. Men, scattered among them, imitate their industry, and so rise to the instinct of the brutes, withthis advantage that while each species has only its own, man, withoutanything special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirablecreature, with foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on thealert, and hence to be always in full possession of all his faculties, unlike civilised man, whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanicalprotections with which he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid ofthe wild beasts around him, for experience has taught him that he istheir master. His health is better than ours, for we live in a time whenexcess of idleness in some, excess of toil in others, the heating andover-abundant diet of the rich, the bad food of the poor, the orgies andexcesses of every kind, the immoderate transport of every passion, thefatigue and strain of spirit, --when all these things have inflicted moredisorders upon us than the vaunted art of medicine has been able to keeppace with. Even if the sick savage has only nature to hope from, on theother hand he has only his own malady to be afraid of. He has no fear ofdeath, for no animal can know what death is, and the knowledge of deathand its terrors is one of the first of man's terrible acquisitionsafter abandoning his animal condition. [181] In other respects, such asprotection against weather, such as habitation, such as food, thesavage's natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands aremoderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us toconsider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual andmoral side. 

If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast duringthese primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then donot forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment againstnature, --no trifling blasphemy in those days--and second, that you areattributing misery to a free creature with tranquil spirit and healthybody, and that must surely be a singular abuse of the term. We seearound us scarcely any but people who complain of the burden of theirlives; but who ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his libertyever dreaming of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?

With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes iswrong in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowingvirtue. He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know whatbeing good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor therestrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice, which keep them from doing ill. _Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorumignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis. _

Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedesin him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some ofthe brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of thisadmirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flowall the social virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energeticin the primitive condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflectionwhich isolates one. It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher tosay secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; Iam safe and sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under yourwindow; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and arguea little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feelas if you were in the case of the victim. [182] The savage man has notgot this odious gift. In the state of nature it is pity that takes theplace of laws, manners, and virtue. It is in this natural sentimentrather than in subtle arguments that we have to seek the reluctance thatevery man would feel to do ill, even without the precepts ofeducation. [183]

Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a stateof society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbandslead each day to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelityonly serves to occasion adulteries, and where the law of continencenecessarily extends the debauching of women and the practice ofprocuring abortion[184]--this passion in a state of nature, where it ispurely physical, momentary, and without any association of durablesentiment with the object of it, simply leads to the necessaryreproduction of the species and nothing more. 

"Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection ofany kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harmthem, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to himself, had onlythe sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his condition. He wasonly sensible of his real wants, and only looked because he thought hehad an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more progressthan his vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was all theless able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own children. An art perished with its inventor. There was neither education norprogress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generationalways started from the same point, centuries glided away in all therudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individualremained always a child. "

This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare theprodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign inthe different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity anduniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment inthe same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the samethings, you will easily understand to what degree the difference betweenman and man must be less in the state of nature than in that ofsociety. [185] Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state ofnature, and its indirect influences there are almost non-existent. 

Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by manpotentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop intoactuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable andmost fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence ofa variety of external changes. What are these different changes, whichmay perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly havedeteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?

What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature andthe state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up thehappy uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil, inclimate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men's manner ofliving. Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, theyinvented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish. In the forests theyinvented bows and arrows, and became hunters. In cold countries theycovered themselves with the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, orsome happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection againstthe rigours of winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grewup a sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them thekind of precautions most necessary to their security. From thisrudimentary and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of theexistence of a similar nature and similar interests in theirfellow-creatures. Instructed by experience that the love of well-beingand comfort is the only motive of human actions, the savage united withhis neighbours when union was for their joint convenience, and did hisbest to blind and outwit his neighbours when their interests wereadverse to his own, and he felt himself the weaker. Hence the origin ofcertain rude ideas of mutual obligation. [186]

Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw intocaves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, todig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This wasthe epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment anddivision of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort ofproperty. Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though notconnected with them, came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When menwere thrown more together, then he who sang or danced the best, thestrongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the mostconsideration--that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. Andwith the coming of this end of equality there passed away the happyprimitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate. 

On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, andtheir natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, thisperiod of the development of the human faculties, occupying a justmedium between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulantactivity of our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiestand the most durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident wefind it that this state was the least subject to revolutions and thebest for man. "So long as men were content with their rustic hovels, solong as they confined themselves to stitching their garments of skinwith spines or fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers andshells and painting them in different colours, to perfecting andbeautifying their bows and arrows--in a word, so long as they onlyapplied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts thatneeded no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good, and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, andcontinued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independentintercourse. But from the moment that one man had need of the help ofanother, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person tohave provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property wasintroduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed intosmiling fields, which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and inwhich they ever saw bondage and misery springing up and growing ripewith the harvests. "[187]

The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents inthis revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for thephilosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone thehuman race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts wassuggested to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. Itis less easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, andinvented means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautionsto hide the fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcanowhich first suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of landbeing cultivated its division followed, and therefore the institution ofproperty in its full shape. From property arose civil society. "Thefirst man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying, _This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe him, was thereal founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who, plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called outto his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone ifyou forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are forall. "[188]

Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had onlybeen equal, and if for example the employment of iron and theconsumption of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced oneanother. But the stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantagefrom his work; the more ingenious found means of shortening his labour;the husbandman had more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain;and while working equally, one got much gain, and the other couldscarcely live. This distinction between Have and Have-not led toconfusion and revolt, to brigandage on the one side and constantinsecurity on the other. 

Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise tothe most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. Thiswas to employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons whoattacked it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them otherinstitutions which should be as favourable to property as natural lawhad been contrary to it. The man who conceived this project, aftershowing his neighbours the monstrous confusion which made their livesmost burdensome, spoke in this wise: "Let us unite to shield the weakfrom oppression, to restrain the proud, and to assure to each thepossession of what belongs to him; let us set up rules of justice andpeace, to which all shall be obliged to conform, without respect ofpersons, and which may repair to some extent the caprices of fortune, bysubjecting the weak and the mighty alike to mutual duties. In a word, instead of turning our forces against one another, let us collect theminto one supreme power to govern us by sage laws, to protect and defendall the members of the association, repel their common foes, andpreserve us in never-ending concord. " This, and not the right ofconquest, must have been the origin of society and laws, which threw newchains round the poor and gave new might to the rich; and for the profitof a few grasping and ambitious men, subjected the whole human racehenceforth and for ever to toil and bondage and wretchednesswithout hope. 

The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was radicallyimperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of the sagestlawgivers, it has always remained imperfect, because it was the work ofchance, and because, inasmuch as it was ill begun, time, while revealingdefects and suggesting remedies, could never repair its vices; _peoplewent on incessantly repairing and patching, instead of which it wasindispensable to begin by making a clean surface and by throwing asideall the old materials, just as Lycurgus did in Sparta_. 

Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of nature eachman lived in entire isolation, and therefore physical inequality was asif it did not exist. After many centuries, accident, in the shape ofdifference of climate and external natural conditions, enforcing for thesake of subsistence some degree of joint labour, led to an increase ofcommunication among men, to a slight development of the reasoning andreflective faculties, and to a rude and simple sense of mutualobligation, as a means of greater comfort in the long run. The firststate was good and pure, but the second state was truly perfect. It wasdestroyed by a fresh succession of chances, such as the discovery of thearts of metal-working and tillage, which led first to the institution ofproperty, and second to the prominence of the natural or physicalinequalities, which now began to tell with deadly effectiveness. Theseinequalities gradually became summed up in the great distinction betweenrich and poor; and this distinction was finally embodied in theconstitution of a civil society, expressly adapted to consecrate theusurpation of the rich, and to make the inequality of condition betweenthem and the poor eternal. 

We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition, contains no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals. Is it inequality of material possession or inequality of politicalright? Morelly tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident, flowing from the first; that the key to renovation lies in the abolitionof the first. Rousseau mixes the two confusedly together under a singlename, bemoans each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendationas to either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, butfalls back from any ideas leading to the modification of the institutionlying at the root of all that he deplores. 

The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearlyall others, turns on Method. "Conjectures become reasons when they arethe most likely that you can draw from the nature of things, " and "it isfor philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely facts. "In an inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed. Guesses drawnfrom the general nature of things can no longer give us light as to theparticular nature of the things pertaining to primitive men, any morethan such guesses can teach us the law of the movement of the heavenlybodies, or the foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can deduction fromanything but propositions which have themselves been won by laboriousinduction, ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has fairpretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in thechain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledgewhich is science, was not yet thought of in connection with themovements of our own race upon the earth. It is to be said, further, that of the two possible ways of guessing about the early state, theconditions of advance from it, and the rest, Rousseau's guess that allmovement away from it has been towards corruption, is less supported bysubsequent knowledge than the guess of his adversaries, that it hasbeen a movement progressive and upwards. 

This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there arefervent disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's cravingfor method in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may brieflyremark on one or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To beginwith, there is no certainty as to there having ever been a state ofnature of a normal and organic kind, any more than there is any onenormal and typical state of society now. There are infinitely diversestates of society, and there were probably as many diverse states ofnature. Rousseau was sufficiently acquainted with the most recentmetaphysics of his time to know that you cannot think of a tree ingeneral, nor of a triangle in general, but only of some particular treeor triangle. [189] In a similar way he might have known that there neverwas any such thing as a state of nature in the general and abstract, fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, whichcomes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of thekind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the differenttribes of savages, in reference to every object that can engage theirattention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses ofmarriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence, are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about this vast diversity, the less easy is it to think of the savage state in general. WhenRousseau extols the savage state as the veritable youth of the world, wewonder whether we are to think of the negroes of the Gold Coast, or theDyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris, Cheyennes or Tierra-del-Fuegians orthe fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable youth of the world theycounted up to five or only to two; whether they used a fire-drill, andif so what kind of drill; whether they had the notion of personalidentity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade; and a hundredother points, which we should now require any writer to settle, whoshould speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and indivisible, inthe way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to our vainadmiration. 

Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature inconsequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such asliving on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that theforce of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could theisolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what wasthe precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew theprimitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognisedone another, into that semi-social state in which the familywas founded?

We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if itever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencieswhich are alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coevalwith the appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed, fire, and the mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths, [190] wecould understand that there was a long stage preliminary to theseheavenly gifts. But if the gods had no part nor lot in it, and if theaccidents that slowly led the human creature into union were as old asthat nature, of which indeed they were actually the component elements, then man must have quitted the state of nature the very day on which hewas born into it. And what can be a more monstrous anachronism than toturn a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-conscious, argumentativeutilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the social problem out inhis flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of firstprinciples, that would have entitled him to a chair in the institute ofmoral sciences, and entering the social union with the calm andreasonable deliberation of a great statesman taking a critical step inpolicy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon sociability as anultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it, as Rousseau andso many others have done, the conclusion of an unimpeachable train ofsyllogistic reasoning. [191] Morelly even, his own contemporary, andmuch less of a sage than Aristotle, was still sage enough to perceivethat this primitive human machine, "though composed of intelligentparts, generally operates independently of its reason; its deliberationsare forestalled, and only leave it to look on, while sentiment does itswork. "[192] It is the more remarkable that Rousseau should have falleninto this kind of error, as it was one of his distinctions to haveperceived and partially worked out the principle, that men guide theirconduct rather from passion and instinct than from reasonedenlightenment. [193] The ultimate quality which he named pity is, afterall, the germ of sociability, which is only extended sympathy. But hedid not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality, nor make any effortconsistently to trace out its various products. 

We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse thecomposition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantlywarning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticatedwith primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements ofcharacter must always have been substantially identical with suchelements and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages ofincreasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering inhis notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to thoseof domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enoughto enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusionsfrom it. 

It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes forgranted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been oneand the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the sameset of several stages, following one another in precisely the sameorder. There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes toshow that civilisation varies in origin and process with race and otherthings, and that though in all cases starting from the prime factor ofsociableness in man, yet the course of its development has depended onthe particular sets of circumstances with which that factor has had tocombine. These are full of variety, according to climate and racialpredisposition, although, as has been justly said, the force of boththese two elements diminishes as the influence of the past in givingconsistency to our will becomes more definite, and our means ofmodifying climate and race become better known. There is no sign thatRousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected whether thecapacity for advance into the state of civil society in any highlydeveloped form is universal throughout the species, or whether there arenot races eternally incapable of advance beyond the savage state. Progress would hardly be the exception which we know it to be in thehistory of communities if there were not fundamental diversities in thecivilisable quality of races. Why do some bodies of men get on to thehigh roads of civilisation, while others remain in the jungle andthicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of theseroads, and others advance by different roads?

Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theorywith which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlesslyvaried, intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at allworth while to extend such criticism further than suffices to show howlittle his piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to itfrom a scientific point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say aboutthe state of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, anymore than the Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy. Theimportance of the Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehementdenunciation of the existing social state. To the writer the questionof the origin of inequality is evidently far less a matter at heart, than the question of its results. It is the natural inclination of onedeeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his own time and country, to extol some other time or country, of which he is happily ignorantenough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about the savage statein something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote the Germania. Andhere, as in the Discourse on the influence of science and art uponvirtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment of theunscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of thepiece, and to render its enormous influence for a generation after itwas written incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set ofideas ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless theycontained something which the social or spiritual condition of the menwhom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense. Is it not tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is morenormal, offers a better balance between desire and opportunity, betweenfaculty and performance, than the permanent state of large classes inwestern countries, the broken wreck of civilisation?[194] To admit thisis not to conclude, as Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the movementaway from the primitive stages has been productive only of evil andmisery even to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers ofwater; or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by thepredominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Ourprovisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlookor hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them withno smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, andat last are shovelled silently back under the ground, --our acquiescencecan only be justified in the sight of humanity by the conviction thatthis is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process, workingforwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human spirits, butneeding much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, andimmeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficentconsummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeplycondemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is oftenchanged in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host whothink that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigiousinequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of socialblessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternativeto the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogressionto some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, alover of his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as itaffected the happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably completeindifference. It is only the faith that we are moving slowly away fromthe existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly away from the old wantof order, that makes the present endurable, and makes any tenaciouseffort to raise the future possible. 

 * * * * *

An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality ofman, for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it maydivide the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according tothe doctrines with which it is confronted. As against the theory thatthe existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and delightsof the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of naturalinequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary theoryis true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of externalchance most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end here. Take such propositions as these:--there are differences in the capacityof men for serving the community; the well-being of the communitydemands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty;the rights of man in politics are confined to a right of the sameprotection for his own interests as is given to the interests of others. As against these principles, the revolutionary deductions from theequality of man are false. And such pretensions as that every man couldbe made equally fit for every function, or that not only each shouldhave an equal chance, but that he who uses his chance well and sociablyshould be kept on a level in common opinion and trust with him who usesit ill and unsociably, or does not use it at all, --the whole of this isobviously most illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree anyset of men have ever taken it up, to that degree they have paidthe penalty. 

What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean, and whathis first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is not that all menare born equal. He never says this, and his recognition of naturalinequality implies the contrary proposition. His position is that theartificial differences, springing from the conditions of the socialunion, do not coincide with the differences in capacity springing fromoriginal constitution; that the tendency of the social union as noworganised is to deepen the artificial inequalities, and make the gulfbetween those endowed with privileges and wealth and those not soendowed ever wider and wider. It would have been very difficult ahundred years ago to deny the truth of this way of stating the case. Ifit has to some extent already ceased to be entirely true, and if violentpopular forces are at work making it less and less true, we owe theorigin of the change, among other causes and influences, not least tothe influence of Rousseau himself, and those whom he inspired. It wasthat influence which, though it certainly did not produce, yet did ascertainly give a deep and remarkable bias, first to the AmericanRevolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the French Revolution. 

It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which awaitedthe idea of the equality of man in America and in France. In America ithas always remained strictly within the political order, and perhapswith the considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had, along with Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, andstatesmanlike notions of national prosperity, in leading to theabolition of slavery, it has brought forth no strong moral sentimentagainst the ethical and economic bases of any part of the social order. In France, on the other hand, it was the starting-point of movementsthat have had all the fervour and intensity of religions, and have mademen feel about social inequalities the burning shame and wrath withwhich a Christian saw the flourishing temples of unclean gods. Thisdifference in the interpretation and development of the first doctrinemay be explained in various ways, --by difference of materialcircumstance between America and France; difference of the political andsocial level from which the principle of equality had to start; and notleast by difference of intellectual temperament. This last was itselfpartly the product of difference in religion, which makes the Englishdread the practical enforcement of logical conclusions, while the Frenchhave hitherto been apt to dread and despise any tendency to stopshort of that. 

 * * * * *

Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance ofRousseau's Discourses was the first sign of reaction against thehistoric mode of inquiry into society that had been initiated byMontesquieu. The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748, with a trulyprodigious effect. It coloured the whole of the social literature inFrance during the rest of the century. A history of its influence wouldbe a history of one of the most important sides of speculative activity. In the social writings of Rousseau himself there is hardly a chapterwhich does not contain tacit reference to Montesquieu's book. TheDiscourses were the beginning of a movement in an exactly oppositedirection; that is, away from patient collection of wide multitudes offacts relating to the conditions of society, towards the promulgation ofarbitrary systems of absolute social dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmaticsocialist of the century, and one of the most dignified and austerecharacters, is an important example of the detriment done by theinfluence of Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the earlier stages ofthe conflict between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785), of whom theremark is to be made that he was for some years behind the scenes ofgovernment as De Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in affairs, began his inquiries with Greece and Rome. "You will find everything inancient history, " he said. [195] And he remained entirely in this grooveof thought until Rousseau appeared. He then gradually left Montesquieu. "To find the duties of a legislator, " he said, "I descend into theabysses of my heart, I study my sentiments. " He opposed the Economists, the other school that was feeling its way imperfectly enough to apositive method. "As soon as I see landed property established, " hewrote, "then I see unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunesmust there not necessarily result different and opposed interests, allthe vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation ofintelligence, the corruption of civil manners?" and so forth. [196] Inhis most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notionsdeveloped, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, eitherfrom fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as areasoner. "It is to equality that nature has attached the preservationof our social faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude thatlegislation will only be taking useless trouble, unless all itsattention is first of all directed to the establishment of equality inthe fortune and condition of citizens. "[197] That is to say not onlypolitical equality, but economic communism. "What miserable folly, thatpersons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after oneanother that without property there can be no society. Let us leaveillusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich andpoor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state, while the second will never love a government or laws that leave them inmisery. "[198] This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuseand rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France sometwenty years before. After powerfully helping the process of generaldissolution, it produced the first fruits specifically after its ownkind some twenty years later in the system of Baboeuf. [199]

The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the menwho first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems toexhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of thesubversion of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis. Within a few months of his profession of profound lament that the firstman who made a claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as thearch foe of the race, he speaks most respectfully of property as thepledge of the engagements of citizens and the foundation of the socialpact, while the first condition of that pact is that every one should bemaintained in peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him. [200] We neednot impute the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was alwaysapt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogicallyaccepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoreticalpremisses that were in truth utterly incompatible with them. 

FOOTNOTES:

[151] Delandine's _Couronnes Académiques, ou Recueil de prix proposéspar les Sociétés Savantes_. (Paris, 2 vols. , 1787. )

[152] Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the awardof the prize, ii. 365-367. 

[153] Second Letter to M. De Malesherbes, p. 358. Also _Conf. _, viii. 135. 

[154] Diderot's account (_Vie de Sénèque_, sect. 66, _Oeuv. _, iii. 98;also ii. 285) is not inconsistent with Rousseau's own, so that we maydismiss as apocryphal Marmontel's version of the story (_Mém. _ VIII. ), to the effect that Rousseau was about to answer the question with acommonplace affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradoxwould attract more attention. It has been said also that M. DeFrancueil, and various others, first urged the writer to take anegative line of argument. To suppose this possible is to prove one'sincapacity for understanding what manner of man Rousseau was. 

[155] _Conf. _, ix. 232, 233. 

[156] _Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues_, i. 252. 

[157] _Dialogues_, i. 275, 276. 

[158] _Conf. _, viii. 138. 

[159] "It made a kind of revolution in Paris, " says Grimm. _Corr. Lit. _, i. 108. 

[160] _Rép. Au Roi de Pologne_, p. 111 and p. 113. 

[161] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 138. 

[162] _Ib. _ 137. 

[163] "The first source of the evil is inequality; from inequalitycome riches . . . From riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxurycome the fine arts, and from idleness the sciences. " _Rép. Au Roi dePologne_, 120, 121. 

[164] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 147. In the same spirit he once wrote themore wholesome maxim, "We should argue with the wise, and never withthe public. " _Corr. _, i. 191. 

[165] _Rép. Au Roi de Pologne_, 128, 129. 

[166] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 150-161. 

[167] P. 174. 

[168] Egger's _Hellénisme en France_, 28ième leçon, p. 265. 

[169] Voltaire to J. J. R. Aug. 30, 1755. 

[170] _Rép. Au Roi de Pologne_, 105. 

[171] In 1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning acounter-blast to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of theiressay the thesis that "The love of letters inspires the love ofvirtue, " and the prize was won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor ofrhetoric. See Delandine, i. 42. 

[172] Preface to _Narcisse_, 251. 

[173] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 167. 

[174] P. 187. 

[175] See for instance a strange discussion about _morale universelle_and the like in _Mém. De Mdme. D'Epinay_, i. 217-226. 

[176] Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him fromhis father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on thehuman intelligence. 

[177] _Code de la Nature, ou le véritable esprit de ses loix, de touttems négligé ou méconnu. _

[178] P. 169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself onthe track. 

[179] At the end of the _Code de la Nature_ Morelly places a completeset of rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of itwas the absence of private property--a condition that was to bepreserved by vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking, thatshould make the possession of private property odious orinconceivable. There are to be sumptuary laws of a moderate kind. Thegovernment is to be in the hands of the elders. The children are to betaken away from their parents at the age of five; reared and educatedin public establishments; and returned to their parents at the age ofsixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage is to be dissoluble atthe end of ten years, but after divorce the woman is not to marry aman younger than herself, nor is the man to marry a woman younger thanthe wife from whom he has parted. The children of a divorced coupleare to remain with the father, and if he marries again, they are to beheld the children of the second wife. Mothers are to suckle their ownchildren (p. 220). The whole scheme is fuller of good ideas than suchschemes usually are. 

[180] P. 218. 

[181] This is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the senseof scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it asa general state; but they know and are afraid of its concretephenomena, and so are most savages. 

[182] This is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness ofwhich was afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence ofDiderot. _Conf. _, viii. 205, _n. _

[183] P. 261. 

[184] As if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a lawdefining and prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of thecommission of the act which it constituted a malpractice. As if givinga name and juristic classification to any kind of conduct were addingto men's motives for indulging in it. 

[185] P. 269. 

[186] P. 278. 

[187] Pp. 285-287. 

[188] P. 273. 

[189] P. 250. 

[190] _Politicus_, 268 D-274 E. 

[191] Here for instance is D'Alembert's story:--"The necessity ofshielding our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examineamong external objects those which are useful and those which arehurtful, so that we may seek the one and flee the others. But wehardly begin our search into such objects before we discover amongthem a great number of beings which strike us as exactly likeourselves; that is, whose form is just like our own, and who, so faras we can judge at the first glance, appear to have the sameperceptions. Everything therefore leads us to suppose that they havealso the same wants, and consequently the same interest in satisfyingthem, whence it results that we must find great advantage in joiningwith them for the purpose of distinguishing in nature what has thepower of preserving us from what has the power of hurting us. Thecommunication of ideas is the principle and the stay of this union, and necessarily demands the invention of signs; such is the origin ofthe formation of societies. " _Discours Préliminaire del'Encyclopédie. _ Contrast this with Aristotle's sensible statement(_Polit. _ I. Ii. 15) that "there is in men by nature a strong impulseto enter into such union. "

[192] _Code de la Nature. _

[193] See, for example, his criticism on the Abbé de St. Pierre. _Conf. _, viii. 264. And also in the analysis of this very Discourse, above, vol. I. P. 163. 

[194] "I have lived with communities of savages in South America andin the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion ofthe visage freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rightsof his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or nevertakes place. In such a community all are nearly equal. There are noneof those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth andpoverty, master and servant, which are the products of ourcivilisation; there is none of that widespread division of labourwhich, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests;there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, orfor wealth, which the dense population of civilised countriesinevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of publicopinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of hisneighbour's right, which seems to be in some degree inherent in everyrace of man. Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savagestate in intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally inmorals. It is true that among those classes who have no wants thatcannot be easily supplied, and among whom public opinion has greatinfluence, the rights of others are fully respected. It is true, also, that we have vastly extended the sphere of those rights, and includewithin them all the brotherhood of man. But it is not too much to say, that the mass of our populations have not at all advanced beyond thesavage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it. "Wallace's _Malay Archipelago_, vol. Ii. Pp. 460-461. 

[195] So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760, "For an attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmostdiversity of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number ofcauses differently combined, Greece is the universe in small, and thehistory of Greece an excellent epitome of universal history. " (Quotedin Egger's _Hellénisme en France_, ii. 272. ) The revolutionists of thenext generation, who used to appeal so unseasonably to the ancients, were only following a literary fashion set by their fathers. 

[196] _Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel_; _Oeuv. _, xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795. )

[197] _La Législation_, I. I. 

[198] _Ibid. _

[199] It is not within our province to examine the vexed questionwhether the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merelypolitical. That socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of somemembers, one can hardly doubt. See Von Sybel's _Hist. Of the FrenchRevolution_, Bk. II. Ch. Iv. , on one side, and Quinet's _LaRévolution_, ii. 90-107, on the other. 

[200] _Economie Politique_, pp. 41, 53, etc. 

CHAPTER VI. 

PARIS. 

I. 

By what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a summer lifeamong all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled orchards, turninto panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato and grim Brutus'scivic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century France--and Francewas amiable in spite of the atrocities of White Penitents at Toulouse, and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and women who dealt in_lettres-de-cachet_ at Versailles--was revolted by the name of the cruelpatriot who slew his son for the honour of discipline. [201] How cameRousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to theheight of these unlovely rigours?

The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had beenbred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love oflaw and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he hadbeen accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active fermentwith ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In Paris theidea of a God was either repudiated along with many other ancestralconceptions, or else it was fatally entangled with the worstsuperstition and not seldom with the vilest cruelties. The idea offreedom was unknown, and the idea of law was benumbed by abuses andexceptions. The idea of country was enfeebled in some and displaced inothers by a growing passion for the captivating something styledcitizenship of the world. If Rousseau could have ended his days amongthe tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never havecome back to him. For it depends on circumstance, which of the chancesthat slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused withus into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest ofthe writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact thathis ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their mostviolent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not aFrenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his nativecity. He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to livein France: he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrotehis first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas ofthe Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all. 

There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Genevahas a fundamental association with each of them. The first was thatagainst the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of thisCalvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialismof the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. Thediplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. Atthe congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken bythe hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involvingmomentous issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it wasafter all no more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who madebold to reply, "Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk thatperfumes all Europe. "[202] We have to remember that it was at all eventsas a grain of musk ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It happenedin later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but howeverbitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood, andRousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may perhapsconjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant spectacleand memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous, whoseinstitutions had been shaped and whose political temper had beeninspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully thanwhat he had picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedæmon, to give him a turnfor Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easymodifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certainthan that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from thecircumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as tofreedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part ofhim on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible wheneverhe exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculativeenergy, "Never, " he says, "did I see the walls of that happy city, Inever went into it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, dueto excess of tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image offreedom elevated my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentlemanners, touched me even to tears. "[203] His spirit never ceased tohaunt city and lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owedacknowledgment in the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to therepublic of Geneva. [204] It was there it had its root. The honour inwhich industry was held in Geneva, the democratic phrases thatconstituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of thelong battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of itsmanners, the simplicity of its pleasures, --all these things awoke in hismemory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More thanthat, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of hisearliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital ideathat there are sacred things and objects of reverence among men. Andhence there came to him, though with many stains and much misdirection, the most priceless excellence of a capacity for devout veneration. 

There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality ofreverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament, though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds thesecond in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self. Theobjects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externallyso unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns isas one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic dramaof his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect orillusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the trueopposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analystsand critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning. Thatenergetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yetis incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and ear, of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive absorptionthat seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance of thisprofound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of thekindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in thepresence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compassof words. 

The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic venerationand austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that hadnothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past incontempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; thatcounted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literarycuriousness the master virtue. There were giants in this world, like thepanurgic Diderot. There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, whoused their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, likeD'Holbach. There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulatingatmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to theweaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain ofthem all. Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction byits generous power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists andphilosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revoltagainst their whole system of thought in all its principles. The dissentbetween him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamedout into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to himfirst by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of theminor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguishedfrom his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that shoulduphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they mightlean without examination and without mistrust: his life in Paris wasthrown among people who lived in the midst of open questions, andrevelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in theheart and so made things easy for the practical conscience. He soughttranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and atheme for endless argument and debate: he found friends who knew nohigher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy overdessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutorsin a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature, about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may havedone when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would makea man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down to thelevel of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take careonly to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all comers. 

The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact, gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce ofmen and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence toRousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honestcourage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all theserious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialismas a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. Theperfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles theworse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions tooverthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines. 

Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the worldaround him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and thesensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. Theplay of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessantdemands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow ofsoft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his ownsensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contraryform of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. Wemay be sure that as the two sides of his character--his notions ofserious principle, and his notions of personal comfort--both went in thesame direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspiredhim towards society did not lessen with increased communication, butnaturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy. 

Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood whichthe good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seenone very important side of his fortunes during these years, in therelations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiatedwith his children. We have heard too the new words with which duringthese years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries waxhot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstanceon which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it wasbearing him. 

His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle offinance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but eventhe introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of thegreatest of the farmers general. [205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay, his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnatesof the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked byall the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but ithad also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As isalways the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a communitypossessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it theirhighest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of theVersailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, withindependent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that anessentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerabledegree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstancesby means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy isdemoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of asimilar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of cravingthe countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliateit. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely onmaterial opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glitteringostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects bothserious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitativemanners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousnesswithin and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the mostdistasteful scene that any collected spirit can witness. 

Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and herstepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux inTouraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers, and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know, were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundredfrancs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For thefirst of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for thesecond he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting. His comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; itbrought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and somefive and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, "theinterlude, which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly asmuch money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years ofmeditation and three years of composition. "[206] Before the arrival ofthis windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him thepost of cashier in that important department, and Rousseau attended forsome weeks to receive the necessary instructions. His progress was tardyas usual, and the complexities of accounts were as little congenial tohim as notarial complexities had been three and twenty years previously. It is, however, one of the characteristics of times of national break-upnot to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat atthe receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill asliking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief going ona short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at themoment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which thewatchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflictedRousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him tobe the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of verypainful illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six monthshe would be in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man ofhis temper, and the train of reflections which it would be sure to setaflame, are to be foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of dealingwith the irksome. Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the littlefragment of days left to him, to the bondage of an office for which hefelt nothing but disgust? How reconcile the austere principles which hehad just adopted in his denunciation of sciences and arts, and hispanegyric on the simplicity of the natural life, with such duties as hehad to perform? And how preach disinterestedness and frugality from amidthe cashboxes of a receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass inindependence and poverty the little time that was yet left to him, tobring all the forces of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters ofopinion, and to carry out courageously whatever seemed best to himself, without suffering the judgment of others to interpose the slightestembarrassment or hindrance. [207]

With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying hislife was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because suchprojects harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His designmastered and took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn hisliving by copying music, as that was conformable to his taste, withinhis capacity, and compatible with entire personal freedom. His patrondid as the world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose thestoic's way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad. [208] Talk like thishad no effect on a man whom self-indulgence led into a path that otherswould only have been forced into by self-denial. Let it be said, however, that this is a form of self-indulgence of which society isnever likely to see an excess, and meanwhile we may continue to pay itsome respect as assuredly leaning to virtue's side. Rousseau's manylapses from grace perhaps deserve a certain gentleness of treatment, after the time when with deliberation and collected effort he sethimself to the hard task of fitting his private life to his publicprinciples. Anything that heightens the self-respect of the race is goodfor us to behold, and it is a permanent source of comfort to all whothirst after reality in teachers, whether their teaching happens to beour own or not, to find that the prophet of social equality was not afine gentleman, nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the sillyskirts of fashion. 

Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have madehim rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficultas the application of the same principle to trifles. Besides thisgreater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most menvalue the money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuaryreform in truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowingperuke was substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons andwhite stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singularthought that he would never again need to know the time. One sacrificeremained to be made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy hadbeen a large stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particularaffection, for both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personalcleanliness, as he had for corporeal wholesomeness. He was seasonablydelivered from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without. OneChristmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerablequantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be thebrother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the treasure, leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of coarserstuffs. [209]

We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or thebeginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussionwhich his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literarypower which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. "Ittakes, " wrote Diderot, "right above the clouds; never was such asuccess. "[210] We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamentalsincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him ofhis power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous anddisturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards uponhimself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshedindependence. Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world wasworth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satiristdoes, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, butfrom recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacityof life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy us. "When mydestiny threw me into the whirlpool of society, " he wrote in his lastmeditation on the course of his own life, "I found nothing there togive a moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followedme everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might havebeen within my reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in thedisquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felteven amid gleams of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposedmyself to be seeking, I should still not have found the happiness forwhich my heart was greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowingits object. Thus everything served to detach my affections from society, even before the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger toit. I reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune, between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any eviltendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my duties withoutdespising them, but often without much clear knowledge what theywere. "[211]

A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that isin strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the activetype. The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulnessof the commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadilycomposed to oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of anart of moral counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aimand emotion like distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of thephilosophers with whom he came into contact, that their philosophy wassomething foreign to them and outside of their own lives. They studiedhuman nature for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for thesake of self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not toenlighten themselves within. When they published a book, its contentsonly interested them to the extent of making the world accept it, without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or false, provided only that it was not refuted. "For my own part, when I desiredto learn, it was to know things myself, and not at all to teach others. I always believed that before instructing others it was proper to beginby knowing enough for one's self; and of all the studies that I havetried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there is hardly one thatI should not have followed equally if I had been alone, and shut up in adesert island for the rest of my days. "[212]

When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among thesociety which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a littleoutrageous. But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of thefirst eminence in the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exilefrom the society of Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseaudid, and he spoke more bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spokebitterly of it in prose. [213] It was, as has been so often said, asociety dominated by women, from the king's mistress who helped to ruinFrance, down to the financier's wife who gave suppers to flashy men ofletters. The eighteenth century salon has been described as having threestages; the salon of 1730, still retaining some of the statelydomesticity, elegance, dignity of the age of Lewis XIV. ; that of 1780, grave, cold, dry, given to dissertation; and between the two, the salonof 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality, glittering wastefulness. [214] Though this division of time must not bepressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's advent inliterature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of socialunreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the same datemarks the highest point of feminine activity and power. 

The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with muchlight-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely intomanners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined theword Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters, conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest andwarmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of the marriage lawwould melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they mustsurely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any onevirtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitablyletting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears, if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believingvery deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching, and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man, and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts, their lives remain worth having. 

It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this timeoccasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, "It is yourlover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in God; toone's husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover onemust reserve for one's self some door of escape, and devotional scruplescut everything short. "[215] Or here: "I do not distrust anybody, forthat is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is notrouble in this. "[216] Or again in the word thrown to a man vaunting theprobity of some one: "What! can a man of intelligence like you acceptthe prejudice of _meum_ and _tuum_?"[217] Such speech, however, wasprobably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, aswho should go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, withoutanything more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peakedtoes. "She was absolutely charming, " said one of a new-comer; "she didnot utter one single word that was not a paradox. "[218] This was thepassing taste. Human nature is able to keep itself wholesome infundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as wise as itis charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make largeallowances for mere costume and assumed character. 

In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it isexactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that ismost jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in anobservant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and nativefolly of men and women--and if his observation be conducted in acatholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely inothers--when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements strikeshim as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in theuniverse. Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculousresult, the provisional and temporary sanity of things, and heconfronted society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked himhow it was that she had not seen him for an age. "Because when I wish tosee you, I wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in themidst of your society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle ofmincing tripping coxcombs; they do not suit me. " We cannot wonder thaton some occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested before acompany of friends, Madame d'Epinay prayed Rousseau to be of them, onthe ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously absurdquestions, which would give gaiety to the affair. [219] As it happened, the father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he haddevoured two million francs, without either saying or doing a singlegood thing. He rewarded the child's performance with the gift of asuperb suit of cherry-coloured velvet, extravagantly trimmed with costlylace; the peasant from whose sweat and travail the money had been wrung, went in heavy rags, and his children lived as the beasts of the field. The poor youth was ill dealt with. "That is very fine, " said rudeDuclos, "but remember that a fool in lace is still a fool. " Rousseau, inreply to the child's importunity, was still blunter: "Sir, I am no judgeof finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a littlewhile ago, but I wish so no longer. "[220]

Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection inlater years, says that before the success of the first Discourse, Rousseau concealed his pride under the external forms of a politenessthat was timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance youperceived mistrust and observant jealousy; there was no freedom in hismanner, and no one ever observed more cautiously the hateful precept tolive with your friends as though they were one day to be yourenemies. [221] Grimm's description is different and more trustworthy. Until he began to affect singularity, he says, Rousseau had been gallantand overflowing with artificial compliment, with manners that werehoneyed and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness. All at once heput on the cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still in spiteof an abrupt and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaboratefine speeches, and particularly in his relations with women. [222] Of hisabruptness, he tells a most displeasing tale. "One day Rousseau told uswith an air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the opera where hehad been seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, theDuke of Zweibrücken had approached him with much politeness, saying, 'Will you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes, if it be very short. ' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to himlaughingly, 'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since thereresides in you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let merepresent to you that, for all the severity of your principles, youshould hardly refuse to a sovereign prince the respect due to awater-carrier, and that if you had met a word of good-will from awater-carrier with an answer as rough and brutal as that, you would havehad to reproach yourself with a most unseasonable piece ofimpertinence. '"[223]

There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at theflippant tone about him carried him beyond the ordinary bounds of thatpolite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of anation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. "They mockthe other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of all. "ROUSSEAU: "I forgive them for their credulity, but not for condemningthose who are credulous in some other way. " Some one said that inmatters of religion everybody was right, but that everybody shouldremain in that in which he had been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: "Notso, by God, if it is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm. "Then some one contended that religion always did some good, as a kind ofrein to the common people who had no other morality. All the rest criedout at this in indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking thatthe common people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of beingdamned. The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostesscalling out, "After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we callour body, so ring and let them bring us the joint. " This done, theservants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed withsuch vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the lady whotells us the story, "I feared they were bent on destroying all religion, and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate to naturalreligion. " There was not a whit more sympathy for that than for therest. Rousseau declared himself _paullo infirmior_, and clung to themorality of the gospel as the natural morality which in old timesconstituted the whole and only creed. "But what is a God, " cried oneimpetuous disputant, "who gets angry and is appeased again?" Rousseaubegan to murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries setin at his expense, to which came this: "If it is a piece of cowardice tosuffer ill to be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime tosuffer ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part, sirs, I believe in God. " "I admit, " said the atheistic champion, "thatit is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow to earth andwatching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this notion is, likemany others, very useful in some great heads, such as Trajan, MarcusAurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce heroism, but it is thegerm of all madnesses. " ROUSSEAU: "Sirs, I leave the room if you sayanother word more, " and he was rising to fulfil his threat, when theentry of a new-comer stopped the discussion. [224]

His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep upa fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turneddaily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys, and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. Soterrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madamed'Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of havingdestroyed some valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There wasmuch idle and cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, herfriend, kept steadfast silence: she challenged his opinion. "What am Ito say?" he answered; "I go and come, and all that I hear outrages andrevolts me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in theirinjustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions, that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as acavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim. What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager each personis to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people who are likehim. "[225]

Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the littlepains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand, whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that "itis not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent. "Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness. Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in theletter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times, requiring immediate acknowledgment. "It is not just, " at length wrotethe exasperated Rousseau, "that I should be tyrannised over for yourpleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either passedin suffering or it is lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ itusefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from wasting it inmy own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings ofthe universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master thatI flee from the idle folk of towns, --people as thoroughly wearied asthey are thoroughly wearisome, --who, because they do not know what to dowith their own time, think they have a right to waste that ofothers. "[226] The more abruptly he treated visitors, persecutingdinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more obstinatethey were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the hoursthey were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constantirritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for amorning's work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestlythat he could not well subsist on less. [227] He had one chance of apension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner. 

When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the MusesGalantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, underthe patronage of M. De la Popelinière. Rameau apostrophised the unluckycomposer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece wasthe work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirelyignorant of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore wasRousseau's own, and the good was a plagiarism. [228] This repulse did notdaunt the hero. Five or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as hewas lying awake in bed, he conceived the idea of a pastoral interludeafter the manner of the Italian comic operas. In six days the VillageSoothsayer was sketched, and in three weeks virtually completed. Duclosprocured its rehearsal at the Opera, and after some debate it wasperformed before the court at Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian stoic, itsauthor, went from Paris in a court coach, but his Roman tone desertedhim, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the great world, suchdivinity doth hedge even a Lewis XV. , and even in a soul of Genevantemper. The piece was played with great success, and the composer wasinformed that he would the next day have the honour of being presentedto the king, who would most probably mark his favour by the bestowal ofa pension. [229] Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He would fain havegreeted the king with some word that should show sensibility to theroyal graciousness, without compromising republican severity, "clothingsome great and useful truth in a fine and deserved compliment. " Thismoral difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable toan infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king andcourtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death. Whatwould become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should bedriven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veraciouspanegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the borndreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in justproportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror ofunrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse intofiner names. 

When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoketo him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he couldnever have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing theopinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large. "He said that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no rightto be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owedit to them not to let pass any possible and honest means of giving thembread. . . . This was the first real dispute I had with him, and all ourquarrels that followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me whathe insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that Iought not to do it. "[230]

Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure thatwe easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready tofling up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry, some trait is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show himunlike common men, reverent of truth and human dignity. There is aslight anecdote of this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau. The day after the representation of his piece, he happened to be takinghis breakfast in some public place. An officer entered, and, proceedingto describe the performance of the previous day, told at great lengthall that had happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, andgave a circumstantial account of his conversation. In this story, whichwas told with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word oftruth, as was clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke withsuch intimacy sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes. The effecton Rousseau was singular enough. "The man was of a certain age; he hadno coxcombical or swaggering air; his expression bespoke a man of merit, and his cross of St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer. While hewas retailing his untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, Isat on thorns; I tried to think of some means of believing him to havemade a mistake in good faith. At length trembling lest some one shouldrecognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate withoutsaying a word; and stooping down as I passed in front of him, I wentout as fast as possible, while the people present discussed his tale. Iperceived in the street that I was bathed in sweat, and I am sure thatif any one had recognised me and called me by name before I got out, they would have seen in me the shame and embarrassment of a culprit, simply from a feeling of the pain the poor man would have had to sufferif his lie had been discovered. "[231] One who can feel thus vividlyhumiliated by the meanness of another, assuredly has in himself thewholesome salt of respect for the erectness of his fellows; he has therare sentiment that the compromise of integrity in one of them is as astain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his own moral stature. There is more deep love of humanity in this than in giving many alms, and it was not the less deep for being the product of impulse andsympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites. 

Another scene in a café is worth referring to, because it shows in thesame way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of thefatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which hehad written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth readingor playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience ofthe ways of the world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed andtouched by the indulgence of the public, in suffering without any signof impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself, he could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre beforeit was over, he entered the famous café de Procope at the other side ofthe street, where he found critics as wearied as himself. Here he calledout, "The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; itwearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that veryRousseau. "[232] The relentless student of mental pathology is verylikely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and noton its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not benoticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form ofvanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth tohand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come. 

II. 

In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went torevisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionallyfavourable occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because hewas growing increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which hemoved. On his road he turned aside to visit her who had been more thaneven his birth-place to him. He felt the shock known to all who cherisha vision for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality. He had not prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we onlyremember for others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the facethat recollection at each new energy makes lovelier with an addedsweetness. "I saw her, " he says, "but in what a state, O God, in whatdebasement! Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days sobrilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart wastorn by the sight!" Alas, as has been said with a truth that dailyexperience proves to those whom pity and self-knowledge have made mostindulgent, as to those whom pinched maxims have made mostrigorous, --_morality is the nature of things_. [233] We may have a humanetenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment allthe time that the poor soul must die in a penal settlement. It is partlya question of time; whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out ofreach of the penalties which the nature of things may appoint, but whichin their fiercest shape are mostly of the loitering kind. Death wasunkind to Madame de Warens, and the unhappy creature lived long enoughto find that morality does mean something after all; that the old hoaryworld has not fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good thing, out of avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence andorder in the relations of men and women as a good thing, out ofcheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues isever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, tocollectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal. 

Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactressto leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, whilehe and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had notforgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her moneywhen he had it. [234] She was sunk in indigence, for her pension had longbeen forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. WhileRousseau was at Geneva she came to see him. "She lacked money tocomplete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her anhour afterwards by Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of herheart. The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it fromher finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as shekissed the noble hand and bathed it with her tears. " In after years hepoured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach hislot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have beenhaunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse. [235] Here is theworst of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if thesensations happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, thechance goes by, never to return, and then, as memory in the best ofsuch temperaments is long though not without intermittence, oldsentiment revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appearsnot to have seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him tothe end, like a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweetmysterious perfume of many-scented night in the silent garden atCharmettes. She died in a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease, misery, and neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heightsabove Chambéri. [236] Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of anotherworld that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness;like a man who should illusorily confound the last glistening of awintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with the broad-beamingstrength of the summer morning. "If I thought, " he said, "that I shouldnot see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from theidea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it. "[237] Topluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoinggulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is anatural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving amoment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has beenrobbed of its object. Yet would not men be more likely to have a deeperlove for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house withaching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of theirdays that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promiseourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeedthe end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?

The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followedby his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last wascontemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had beenreared. The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm;he surrendered himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought ofthe Parisian world that he had left behind, its frivolity, itspetulance, its disputation over all things in heaven and on the earth, its profound deadness to all civic activity, quickened his admirationfor the simple, industrious, and independent community from which henever forgot that he was sprung. But no Catholic could enjoy the rightsof citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is thesame for all Christians, and the substance of dogma only differs, because people interposed with explanations of what they could notunderstand; that therefore it is in each country the business of thesovereign to fix both the worship and the amount and quality ofunintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the citizen's duty toadmit the dogma, and follow the worship by law appointed. "The societyof the Encyclopædists, far from shaking my faith, had confirmed it by mynatural aversion for partisanship and controversy. The reading of theBible, especially of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself forseveral years, had made me despise the low and childish interpretationput upon the words of Christ by the people who were least worthy tounderstand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards theessential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass oftrivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it. "[238] Wemay be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a givencourse of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in ablaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblemsand devices of superlative conviction. In short, he submitted himselffaithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his parish; was closelycatechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received fromthem a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine inall points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finallyrestored to all his rights as a citizen. [239]

This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expenseof an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseauhimself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of thosehonest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs hadmarked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was foundagain. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist, and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestantthan he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child ofProtestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholictradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of menas only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of allthe several communities of men as members of that great organisationwhich binds one order to another, and each generation to those that havegone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed thatmonstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He wouldnever have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as anorganism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have leftthe spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from hisfellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the greatvague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born andreared in the religious school of authority with its elaboratelydisciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for politicalfreedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, thatenergetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire andessence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remarkhow Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country likeFrance: so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionaryschools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest droppedaway, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part ofhis system. In other words, in no country has the power of collectiveorganisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France, and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to countfor so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal andspiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think mostconfidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reasonmay lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove. 

In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was notleaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he wasonly undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciledhim with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritualconnection with it which had never been more than superficially parted. There can be little doubt that the four months which he spent in Genevain 1754 marked a very critical time in the formation of some of the mostmemorable of his opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate andsmouldering resentment against the irreverence and denial of thematerialistic circle which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. Whatsort of opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of theGenevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert hadthree or four years later than this to suffer a bitter attack fromthem, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers which hegave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was substantiallycorrect. "Many of them, " he wrote, "have ceased to believe in thedivinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal points in ourbelief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors, who contendthat it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full ofgoodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by aneternity of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pureSocinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, andsupposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shallpropose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion here isalmost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearlyall who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect forJesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing thatdistinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism. "[240] And itwould be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies. Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated some ofthe rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in denying the Trinity, and so forth, [241] but the time was not then ripe. The generalconditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6, says that though there were not many among the Genevese of the firstform of learning, "yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of alearned education. "[242] The pacification of civic troubles in 1738 wasfollowed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity andcontentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previouslytrained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There wasat all times a constant communication, both public and private, going onbetween Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chiefProtestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenthcentury between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as atLeyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a placein the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenthcentury from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which wasthe first marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. Tothis general movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied thefirst impulse. The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of anattempt to pacify the Christian churches on the basis of some such Deismas was shortly to find its passionate expression in the SavoyardVicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-1737). Hebelonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his grandfatherhad been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence of Genevaagainst Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he visitedHolland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, andFrance, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries ofDescartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquentexposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy fromthe people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There wasmuch stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and infinding many considerable followers. [243] For example, some three yearsor so after his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of _LaReligion Essentielle a l'Homme_, showing that faith in the existence ofa God suffices, and treating with contempt the belief in theinspiration of the Gospels. [244]

Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and moreactive minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it betrue or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pureDeism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, andthat those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, andin refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to hisown account almost entirely among the ministers of religion and theprofessors of the academy, precisely the sort of persons who would bemost sure to familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations, with the current religious ideas and the arguments by which they wereopposed or upheld. We may picture the effect on his mind of thedifference in tone and temper in these grave, candid, and careful men, and the tone of his Parisian friends in discussing the same high themes;how this difference would strengthen his repugnance, and corroborate hisown inborn spirit of veneration; how he would here feel himself in hisown world. For as wise men have noticed, it is not so much difference ofopinion that stirs resentment in us, at least in great subjects wherethe difference is not trivial but profound, as difference in gravity ofhumour and manner of moral approach. He returned to Paris (Oct. 1754)warm with the resolution to give up his concerns there, and in thespring go back once and for all to the city of liberty and virtue, wheremen revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolitiesof literary dialectic. [245]

The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse onInequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some andindignation by others. [246] Nobody thought it a compliment, and somethought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purposeaside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now alsosigned himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powderflew over the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain thatVoltaire would make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find inhis native country the tone, the air, the manners which were driving himfrom Paris. From that moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought tomake head against the disturber, but what could he do alone, timid andbad talker as he was, against a man arrogant, rich, supported by thecredit of the great, of brilliant eloquence, and already the very idolof women and young men?[247] Perhaps it would not be uncharitable tosuspect that this was a reason after the event, for no man was ever sofond as Rousseau, or so clever a master in the art, of covering anaccident in a fine envelope of principle, and, as we shall see, he wasat this time writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive panegyric. Inthis case he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did notreturn to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand. Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts whetherhis fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as hostile to his loveof living solitarily and after his own fashion as the good peopleof Paris. 

Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinaywandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded byfruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how heexclaimed in delight at its solitary charm that here was the very placeof refuge made for him; and how on a second visit he found that his goodfriend had in the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replacedby a pretty cottage exactly arranged for his own household. "My poorbear, " she said, "here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it, 'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notionof going from me. "[248] Though moved to tears by such kindness, Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for sometime longer between this retreat and return to Geneva. 

In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she wasdealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottagein the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuringthe moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared tomark the limit of his wants. [249] He wrote to her bitterly in reply, that her proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could havebut sorry appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn afriend into a valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed, if only she would remember that neither he nor his sentiments were forsale. [250] Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, andthen Rousseau hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed specialappreciation, and that he meant by the word valet "the degradation intowhich the repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. Theindependence I seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for winning myown bread, I take pleasure in it; but I mean not to subject myself toany other duty, if I can help it. I will never pledge any portion of myliberty, either for my own subsistence or that of any one else. I intendto work, but at my own will and pleasure, and even to do nothing, if ithappens to suit me, without any one finding fault except mystomach. "[251] We may call this unamiable, if we please, but in afrivolous world amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live anindependent life after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides ofRousseau's character ought not to hinder us from admiring hissteadfastness in refusing to sacrifice his existence to the first personwho spoke him civilly. We may wish there had been more of ruggedsimplicity in his way of dealing with temptations to sell his birthrightfor a mess of pottage; less of mere irritability. But then thisirritability is one side of soft temperament. The soft temperament iseasily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance does not stir up trueanger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick currents of eagerirritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau, quivering from head tofoot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently unlike our plain Johnson, the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding of the patron is asworthy of our honour in one instance as in the other. Indeed, resistanceto humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as Rousseau's, inwhich deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the naturallystoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and riseswithout effort. 

When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the toofriendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madamed'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him anentire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom from all senseof pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copioustorrent of pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle whomet round D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummermadness, or even a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerfulworld for the dismal solitude of woods and fields. "Only the bad man isalone, " wrote Diderot in words which Rousseau kept resentfully in hismemory as long as he lived. The men and women of the eighteenth centuryhad no comprehension of solitude, the strength which it may impart tothe vigorous, the poetic graces which it may shed about the life ofthose who are less than vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, theydreaded and abhorred, and thought monstrous in the one man who didcomprehend it. They were all of the mind of Socrates when he said toPhædrus, "Knowledge is what I love, and the men who dwell in the townare my teachers, not trees and landscape. "[252] Sarcasms fell on himlike hail, and the prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does notshare the common tastes of the herd. He would never be able to livewithout the incense and the amusements of the town; he would be back ina fortnight; he would throw up the whole enterprise within threemonths. [253] Amid a shower of such words, springing from men's perverseblindness to the binding propriety of keeping all propositions as towhat is the best way of living in respect of place, hours, companionship, strictly relative to each individual case, Rousseaustubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his feet, and sought newlife away from the stridulous hum of men. Perhaps we are better pleasedto think of the unwearied Diderot spending laborious days in factoriesand quarries and workshops and forges, while friendly toilers patientlyexplained to him the structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, theprocesses of metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and allthe other countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which heafterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificentrepertory of human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement. And itis yet more elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the greathigh-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to discharge beneficentduty in the hard field of his distant Limousin commissionership, enduring many things and toiling late and early for long years, that theburden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the land moreassured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only magnanimousself-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with the deepthrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of excessivepersonality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the socialgroove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhapsfor some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate. 

FOOTNOTES:

[201] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 163. 

[202] Pictet de Sergy. , i. 18. 

[203] _Conf. _, iv. 248. 

[204] _Ib. _ ix. 279. Also _Economie Politique_. 

[205] Madame de la Popelinière, whose adventures and the misadventuresof her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel'sMemoirs. 

[206] The passages relating to income during his first residence inParis (1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Booksvii. -ix. Of the _Confessions_. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre(_Oeuv. _, xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the_Confessions_ (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundredcopies. It may be worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembertreceived 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the Encyclopædia. Sterne received £650 for two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ in 1780. Walpole's _Letters_, in. 298. 

[207] _Conf. _, viii. 154-157. 

[208] _Ib. _ viii. 160. 

[209] _Conf. _, viii. 160, 161. 

[210] _Ib. _ viii. 159. 

[211] _Réveries_, iii 168. 

[212] _Rêveries_, iii. 166. 

[213] See the _Epître à Mdme. La Marquise du Châtelet, sur laCalomnie_. 

[214] _La Femme au 18ième siècle_, par MM. De Goncourt, p. 40. 

[215] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém. _, i. 295. 

[216] Quoted in Goncourt's _Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 378. 

[217] _Ib. _, p. 337. 

[218] Mdlle. L'Espinasse's _Letters_, ii. 89. 

[219] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém. _, ii. 47, 48. 

[220] _Ib. _, ii. 55. 

[221] _Mém. _, Bk. Iv. 327. 

[222] _Corr. Lit. _, iii. 58. 

[223] _Ib. _, 54. 

[224] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém. _, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulatedhis atheism afterwards in the _Catéchisme Universel_. 

[225] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém. _, i. 443. 

[226] _Corr. _, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756. 

[227] Letter to Madame de Créqui, 1752. _Corr. _, i. 171. 

[228] _Conf_, . , vii. 104. 

[229] The _Devin du Village_ was played at Fontainebleau on October18, 1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadourtook a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note toher, _Corr. _, i. 178. 

[230] _Conf. _, viii. 190. 

[231] _Conf. _, viii. 183. 

[232] _Conf. _, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When inStrasburg, in 1765, he could not bring himself to be present at itsrepresentation. _Oeuv. Et Corr. Inéd. _, p. 434. 

[233] Madame de Staël insisted that her father said this, and Neckerinsisted that it was his daughter's. 

[234] _Corr. _, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753. 

[235] _Conf. _, viii. 208-210. 

[236] She died on July 30, 1762, aged "about sixty-three years. "Arthur Young, visiting Chambéri in 1789, with some trouble procuredthe certificate of her death, which may be found in his _Travels_, i. 272. See a letter of M. De Conzié to Rousseau, in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445. 

[237] _Conf. _, xii. 233. 

[238] _Conf. _, viii. 210. 

[239] Gaberel's _Rousseau et les Genevois_, p. 62. _Conf. _, viii. 212. 

[240] The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Churchand Academy of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, toexamine these allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound, reported (Feb. 10, 1758) with mild indignation, that they wereunfounded, and that the flock was untainted by unseasonable use of itsmind. See on this Rousseau's _Lettres écrites de la Montagne_, ii. 231. 

[241] See Picot's _Hist. De Genève_, ii. 415. 

[242] _Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc. , in1685-86. _ By G. Burnet, p. 9. 

[243] J. A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776, including among much besides that no longer interests men, an _Oratiode Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia_ (vol. Iii. 437), not at all inthe vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, _DeLegibus Naturalibus_, in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbesand assails the doctrine of Utility (i. 173, etc. ), by limiting itsdefinition to [Greek: to pros heauton] in its narrowest sense. Heappears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini, his father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of the treatyor contract between God and man, in a piece entitled _Foedus Naturæ aprimo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris imputatam_(1675). 

[244] Gaberel's _Eglise de Genève_, iii. 188. 

[245] _Corr. _, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755). 

[246] _Conf. _, viii. 215, 216. _Corr. _, i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28, 1754). 

[247] _Conf. _, viii. 218. 

[248] _Conf. _, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on theaccuracy of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (_Mém. _, ii. 115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau hehad never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believethat the expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter tohim describing it could only have been written to one who had not seenit, and though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance, the documents in them are substantially authentic, and this letter isshown to be so by Rousseau's reply to it. 

[249] _Mém. _, ii. 116. 

[250] _Corr. _ (1755), i. 242. 

[251] _Corr. _, i. 245. 

[252] _Phædrus_, 230. 

[253] _Conf. _, viii. 221, etc. 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE HERMITAGE. 

It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of theEncyclopædia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of those sceneswhich are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp ofhumanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and withadorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortificationof flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of firm hopeand beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth century werecentred in action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of thatepoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled away from theimpotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of satisfiedconviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them--Wordsworth, thepoetic hermit of our lakes--impresses us in any degree like one of thegreat individualities of the ages when men not only craved for theunseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads andabout their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of thepreacher who declared all the things that are under the sun to bevanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things thatare under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the lightof a celestial brightness to come. 

Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against societyand circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in hisnative exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did notleave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted. The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with lifeextraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosureof a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as thegeneral tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surroundedwith the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, butan essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, hesays, when making excursions into the country with great people, "I wasso tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was soworn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs, great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, afarmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odourof a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrainof the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale ofrouge and furbelows. "[254] He was no anchorite proper, one weary of theworld and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for onekind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he was nowabout to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to hisinveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace apast. He forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tenderbenefactress who was now waiting for slow death in her hovel, hishouse-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot, too, that since those days the various processes of intellectual lifehad expanded within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes aman's surroundings very critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportionas a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on anythingexternal, whether on the greenness of the field or the gaiety of thestreet or the constancy of friends, so comes he nearer to chance ofmaking shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very root of the tragedylay deeper, --in temperament. 

I. 

Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the wallsof his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). "Although it was cold, andsnow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life;violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees werebeginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by thefirst song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a woodthat touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that Iwas transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when inan instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. Myvery first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rusticobjects about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside myquarters, I first set about planning my walks, and there was not a pathnor a copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found outbefore the end of the next day. The place, which was lonely rather thanwild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no one couldever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from Paris. "[255]

This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at theend of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work wastoo soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by thestimulus given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which hefound himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from thatwhich had seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discardedthe usage and costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive anangry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time. Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened thisausterity. No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes, he no longer cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. "When Idid not see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the badbefore my eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it isfor hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made nodistinction between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, somuch more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasmthat had long transported me. "[256] That is to say, his nature remainedfor a moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment. And in studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at thiscritical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase. Once more we are watching a man who lived without either intellectual orspiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, apersonality accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aimand fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the mostdeliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination ofa cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be nonormally composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the richlife of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of thetown passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that sweptthe stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolledtriumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes andbitterness. 

At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made himgloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented himfrom having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering byrecollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency, with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. "As I got up withthe sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was goingto be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might cometo disturb its charm. After having given the morning to divers taskswhich I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them offto another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escapefrom the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before oneo'clock, even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze ofthe sun, along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some oneshould lay hold of me before I could get away. But when I had oncepassed a certain corner, with what beating of the heart, with whatradiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and myown master for the rest of the day! Then with easier pace I went insearch of some wild and desert spot in the forest, where there wasnothing to show the hand of man, or to speak of servitude anddomination; some refuge where I could fancy myself its discoverer, andwhere no inopportune third person came to interfere between nature andme. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a magnificence that wasalways new. The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struckmy eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very heart; themajesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the delicacy ofthe shrubs that surrounded me, the astonishing variety of grasses andflowers that I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual alternationof attention and delight. . . . My imagination did not leave the earth thussuperbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming society, ofwhich I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden age to please myown fancy, and filling up these fair days with all those scenes of mylife that had left sweet memories behind, and all that my heart couldyet desire or hope in scenes to come, I waxed tender even to sheddingtears over the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so delicious, sopure, and henceforth so far from the reach of men. Ah, if in suchmoments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my little aureole as author, came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out, todeliver myself without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of whichI was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of mychimeras sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream hadsuddenly been transformed into reality, it would not have been enough;I should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still. " Alas, this deepinsatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulnessof animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination, was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either hisconduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short spaceby that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of oldtheology into the living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of theearth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to theuniversal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embracesall. Then with mind lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did notreason, I did not philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I feltoverwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to theravishing confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to lose myself inimagination in immeasurable space; within the limits of real existencesmy heart was too tightly compressed; in the universe I was stifled; Iwould fain have launched myself into the infinite. I believe that if Ihad unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I should have found myself ina less delicious situation than that bewildering ecstasy to which mymind so unreservedly delivered itself, and which sometimes transportedme until I cried out, 'O mighty Being! O mighty Being!' without power ofany other word or thought. "[257]

It is not wholly insignificant that though he could thus expand hissoul with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endurethe sight of one of his fellow-creatures. "If my gaiety lasted the wholenight, that showed that I had passed the day alone; I was very differentafter I had seen people, for I was rarely content with others and neverwith myself. Then in the evening I was sure to be in taciturn orscolding humour. " It is not in every condition that effervescent passionfor ideal forms of the religious imagination assists sympathy with thereal beings who surround us. And to this let us add that there arenatures in which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with theideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant tothem as something alien; and this without the least insincerity, thoughwith a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged tothis class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was, it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; itwas one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of hisspirit with a force as genuine as that which is kindled in natures ofanother type by sympathy with the real and concrete, with the daily walkand conversation and actual doings and sufferings of the men and womenwhom we know. The fermentation which followed his arrival at theHermitage, in its first form produced a number of literary schemes. Theidea of the Political Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressedupon his meditations. He had been earnestly requested to compose atreatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedlyround the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or theMaterialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine theinfluence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons, food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thusindirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art ofmodifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surerof ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external systemof treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep thesoul in the condition most favourable to virtue. [258] Though thetreatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, weperceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access tocharacter wide enough, and the material influences that impress it andproduce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting themwith the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of theconditions that affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words inwhich he sketches his project in the least justify the attribution tohim of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical constitutionover the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or adiscredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one deniesthe influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseausays no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and themodifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for aspiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation. 

A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and editthe papers and printed works of the Abbé de Saint Pierre (1658-1743), confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also ofMadame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man. [259] Thistask involved reading, considering, and picking extracts fromtwenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity andrepetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness ofperception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort;and he soon found out that the Abbé de Saint Pierre's views wereimpracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men areguided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, SaintPierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiardegree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration forthe extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfectedreason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and wouldspeedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went wrong, "says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other passion but that ofreason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead oftaking them as they are and as they will continue to be. " The critic'sown error in later days was not very different from this, save that itapplied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, byrefusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-pointsfor higher attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen theold man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness ofenthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towardsinanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not makethe twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer innumber or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he couldwith two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up thetask. [260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow thatfatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really neededno better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill infinding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. SaintPierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France, some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not beenpunished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as akind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed tosay what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened towhat he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, andhence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on Frenchaffairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with acountry that did not concern him. "It surprised me, " says Rousseau, "that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier, " but thiscoincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with thediscovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in studyof a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough todislike to admit it. 

The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of SaintPierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Pluralityof Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to showus, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer tomake to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre'sfault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his viewsrelative to men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something thatstartles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declarationthat, "whether an existing government be still that of old times, orwhether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equallyimprudent to touch it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and ifit has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circumstance, and human sagacity is powerless. " Rousseau points to France, asking hisreaders to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormousmasses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after awise general remark on the futility of political machinery without menof a certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question:When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit, and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget theinterest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hopefrom bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removingthem from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps not oneof these pages which Burke might not well have owned. [262]

A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessfuleffort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to findthat if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if thereis evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that isonly a little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness forphantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pureor stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then theimagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of thestrongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice ofhis sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility graduallyrose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does noteither brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are suchstates, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature shouldhave an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may bepresumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom wemeet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but dangerin allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of thethird person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within theman's. " In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth normagic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood, " but the toopotent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in amental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance hadever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected againstthis subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, whileeven those who are born with senses and appetites of great strength andkeenness, are guarded by accumulated discipline of all kinds fromwithout, especially by the necessity for active industry which bringsthe most exaggerated native sensibility into balance. It is the constantand rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the sensesfrom making furious rout. Rousseau had just repudiated all socialobligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was atan age when passion that has never been broken in has the beak of thebald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is infair shapes. 

Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in the monthof June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale andthe soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear, " he began to wonderrestlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vividsentiments which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any ofthat intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in hissoul. Why had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be leftthus unused and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this ofa certain injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which heloved to let flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youthdown to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into hisbrain. He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he hadknown, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. Hisimagination was kindled into deadly activity. "The impossibility ofreaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; andseeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, Inourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soonpeopled with beings after my heart's desire. In my continual ecstasies, I made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments thatever entered the heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole humanrace, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenlyfor their virtues as their beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends, such as I never found in our nether world. I had such a passion forhaunting this empyrean with all its charming objects, that I passedhours and days in it without counting them as they went by; and losingrecollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hothaste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves. If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw unhappymortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither moderatenor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to givethem greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal. "[263]

This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from thetranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young, and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness ofnature made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had beenattended with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice indevout acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of thegoodness and bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and morepitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was onlynot a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh. Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madamede Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years whichslowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At ourpresent point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almostmercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, butfar less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subjectall his life long. It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves. "Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, myimagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees, languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams. " This interval heemployed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy ofProvidence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine. The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, thetransport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort inthe creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to theseover-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his emotionsby associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and byintroducing into them that play and movement and changing relation whichprevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. Theegoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better thanthe egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of naturalobjects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuousforce. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark andthe other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and theother quick, analogous in character but different, not handsome butanimated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave a lover, to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after muchdeliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake atVevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he alwaysthought the richest and loveliest in all Europe. 

This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certainamount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moralconvalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets, assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of thethree companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he wasconfined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume hisordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of hisMusical Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longerpossible. The fever of that literary composition of which he had alwayssuch dread had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on anyside but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful byhis imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistancewas vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts"so as to produce a kind of romance. " We have a glimpse of his mentalstate in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance onanything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder withwhich he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that hetied up the quires with delicate blue riband. [264] The distance from allthis to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed. It must notbe supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the otherPlutarchians. "My great embarrassment, " he says honestly, "was that Ishould belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severeprinciples I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after theaustere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many bitinginvectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and softdelights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for, than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authorson whose books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt thisinconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed overit, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me toreason. "[265] He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of theNew Heloïsa was turning his madness to the best account. That may betrue, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letterto D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation aconsiderable element in literature or the drama, at the very time whenhe was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of hiscentury, a rather indecent piece of invective? We may forgiveinconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories, or twoself-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the formof reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself. 

We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivancewith the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M. D'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him twoladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whomamong other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They werecurious to see the eccentric man, " as M. D'Epinay afterwards told hisscandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account toparade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections. "He waswalking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand;he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, andstalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In themiserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, andquarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad ofeven one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still moreglad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of thisscene of high morals. 

II. 

The New Heloïsa was not to be completed without a further extension ofmorbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings ofcompressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the airswarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth againbegan to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fireof a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream. In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, thesister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay. [267] Her husband had gone to the war(we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert, whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Châtelet eightyears before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a housenot very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absenceof her two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on variousoccasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and hadpartaken of its host's homely fare. [268] But the time was not ripe; theforce of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too, depended with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been avery ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphroditeherself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. Hisfancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the femalecavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication, which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invitedthe world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the firstinterview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who hadthirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He layweeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see thesorceress he wept in the woods. [269] He talked to himself for hours, andwas of a black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object ofthis deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved. He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture, commixed with sicklier delight. 

People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will, emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but itsconvenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul allblurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising inslow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of theblood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distantunmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brutein spring-time, it would be less dreadful, but shame and remorse in theever-struggling reason of man or woman in the grip of the foul thing, produces an aggravation of frenzy that makes the mental healer tremble. Add to all this lurking elements of hollow rage that his passion was notreturned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he couldnot take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was alittle despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw thathis hairs were sprinkled with gray, --and the whole offers a scene ofmoral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away withdismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scalyshapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze. 

Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscioushand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either inphysical or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox, the terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given ayellowish tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her browlow; she was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted byan excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle andcaressing expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and freesprightliness of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure wasvery slight, and there was in all her movements at once awkwardness andgrace. She was natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of amodest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimesfound vent. Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it fromyielding to any impulse of mirth. "She weeps with the best faith in theworld, and breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody sohappily born, " says her much less amiable sister-in-law. [270] Herhusband was indifferent to her. He preserved an attachment to a ladywhom he knew before his marriage, whose society he never ceased tofrequent, and who finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetotfound consolation in the friendship of Saint Lambert. "We both of us, "said her husband, "both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation forfidelity, only there was a mis-arrangement. " She occasionally composedverses of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not towrite them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess andwit. [271] Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year ofLeipsic, preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day, for instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going onas to the various merits and defects of women; she heard much, and thenwith her accustomed suavity of voice contributed this lightsummary:--"Without women, the life of man would be without aid at thebeginning, without pleasure in the middle, and without solace at theend. "[272]

We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sortthat kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness, frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinionunited every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseauwould be least likely to miss. The bond of union between them wassubtle. She found in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told thestory of her passion for Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious forceproduced in him a thrill which he never felt with any one else before orafter. Thus, as he says, there was equally love on both sides, though itwas not reciprocal. "We were both of us intoxicated with passion, shefor her lover, I for her; our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tenderconfidants, each of the other, our sentiments were of such close kinthat it was impossible for them not to mix; and still she never forgother duty for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear, that ifsometimes drawn astray by my senses, still"--still he was a paragon ofvirtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the authorof the New Heloïsa; we can appreciate the author of Emilius; but thisstrained attempt to confound those two very different persons bycombining tearful erotics with high ethics, is an exhibition ofself-delusion that the most patient analyst of human nature might wellfind hard to suffer. "The duty of privation exalted my soul. The gloryof all the virtues adorned the idol of my heart in my sight; to soil itsdivine image would have been to annihilate it, " and so forth. [273]Moon-lighted landscape gave a background for the sentimentalist'spicture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and the soft rustle of thenight air, made up a scene which became for its chief actor "an immortalmemory of innocence and delight. " "It was in this grove, seated with heron a grassy bank, under an acacia heavy with flowers, that I foundexpression for the emotions of my heart in words that were worthy ofthem. 'Twas the first and single time of my life; but I was sublime, ifyou can use the word of all the tender and seductive things that themost glowing love can bring into the heart of a man. What intoxicatingtears I shed at her knees, what floods she shed in spite of herself! Atlength in an involuntary transport, she cried out, 'Never was man sotender, never did man love as you do! But your friend Saint Lamberthears us, and my heart cannot love twice. '"[274] Happily, as we learnfrom another source, a breath of wholesome life from without brought thetranscendental to grotesque end. In the climax of tears andprotestations, an honest waggoner at the other side of the park wall, urging on a lagging beast launched a round and far-sounding oath outinto the silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with a livelycontinuous peal of young laughter, while an angry chill brought back thediscomfited lover from an ecstasy that was very full of peril. [275]

Rousseau wrote in the New Heloïsa very sagely that you should grant tothe senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits thatthe saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot. Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her ratherthan to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see. Honest pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle andunoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosityof emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, andshe wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. "His madness must be very strong, "said Saint Lambert, "since she can perceive it. "[276]

Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into afixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passionby inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept andgarnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have enteredunseen. In short, such profound disorder of spirit, though in its firststage marked by ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel. Whena man lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conductappointed by his relations with others, still the reality of suchrelations survives. He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not savehim either from his own passion, or from some degree of that kinshipwith others which instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of brassaround him. Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffermost from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau hadinnate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, thatthe first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconsciousof having fallen at all. 

One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He foundMadame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on hercheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matterwas carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected wasthat Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of theviciousness of her relations with her lover. [277] "They have played usan evil turn, " cried Madame d'Houdetot; "they have been unjust to me, but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what youought to be. "[278] This was Rousseau's first taste of the ashes ofshame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked atthe expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed. Mortification ofthe considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after this lapse, was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was pointed bythe reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his monitress wasyounger than himself. He could never master his own contempt for thegallantry of grizzled locks. [279] His austerer self might at any ratehave been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of theend, though the end came without any seeking on his part and withoutviolence. To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetotcame to the Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to thecredit of human nature's elasticity, the three passed a delightfulafternoon. The wronged lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and hepassed occasional slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven, if he had not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep, as we can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud hisvery inadequate justification of Providence against Voltaire. [280]

In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself ofhis mad passion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for itinvolved the perilous assistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately herloyalty and good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found, or thought he found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despairat not being allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion, he did the most singular thing that he could have done under thecircumstances. He wrote to Saint Lambert. [281] His letter is a prodigyof plausible duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states hadso little sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary, and was moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, thatit is hard to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was hisown dupe. Voluntary or not, it is detestable. We pass the false whineabout "being abandoned by all that was dear to him, " as if he had notdeliberately quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend hehad; about his being "solitary and sad, " as if he was not ready at thisvery time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hinderedhim of a single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored. Remembering the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we readthis:--"Whence comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you canhave suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious inconsequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue? A passage in one of yourletters shows a glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert, the breast of J. J. Rousseau never held the heart of a traitor, and Ishould despise myself more than you suppose, if I had ever tried to robyou of her heart. . . . Can you suspect that her friendship for me may hurther love for you? Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open toall sorts of affections, and no sentiment can spring up in them whichdoes not turn to the advantage of the dominant passion. Where is thelover who does not wax the more tender as he talks to his friend of herwhom he loves? And is it not sweeter for you in your banishment thatthere should be some sympathetic creature to whom your mistress loves totalk of you, and who loves to hear?"

Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which thesympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend'smistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two passages froma letter to her; as when he cries, "Ah, how proud would even thy loverhimself be of thy constancy, if he only knew how much it hassurmounted. . . . I appeal to your sincerity. You, the witness and thecause of this delirium, these tears, these ravishing ecstasies, thesetransports which were never made for mortal, say, have I ever tastedyour favours in such a way that I deserve to lose them?. . . Never oncedid my ardent desires nor my tender supplications dare to solicitsupreme happiness, without my feeling stopped by the inner cries of asorrow-stricken soul. . . . O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea ofeternal privation is too frightful for one who groans that he cannotidentify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to belowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What, are my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart alongwith my kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, thatrapid and devouring fire, swifter than lightning?"[282]. . . . We see asympathetic creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a natureendowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency, loyalty, above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough. 

One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. Hetakes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour ofhis principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social lawas the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is soattached to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. "Do notsuppose, " he says, with superlative gravity, "that you have seduced meby your reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not yourjustification. I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardlyapprove it yourself; and so long as you both of you continue dear to me, I will never leave you in careless security as to the innocence of yourstate. Yet love such as yours deserves considerateness. . . . I feelrespect for a union so tender, and cannot bring myself to attempt tolead it to virtue along the path of despair" (p. 401). 

Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert fromappreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading tovirtue along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as muchas he could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense. Saint Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had acertain manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which hiscorrespondent only felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lamberttook all the blame on himself. He had desired that his mistress and hisfriend should love one another; then he thought he saw some coolness inhis mistress, and he set the change down to his friend, though not onthe true grounds. "Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or atraitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken tome of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found hard tobear. " In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than beingover-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off aconnection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law orreligion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she hadceased to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might bespared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity andconscience in so austere an adviser. [283]

It is well known how effectively one with a germ of good principle inhim is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter inhis hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his lastinterview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been lesswise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As itwas, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm, infinitely more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which hadseized him before. They formed the project of a close companionship ofthree, including the absent lover; and they counted on the projectcoming more true than such designs usually do, "since all the feelingsthat can unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it, and we three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough tosuffice to ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others. "What happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or fourmonths, which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for thenthe bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to beborne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerateletters that a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the mostpetulant, suspicious, perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patienceand exquisite sweetness of friendship some of these letters arematchless, and we can only conjecture the wearing querulousness of theletters to which they were replies. If through no fault of her own shehad been the occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shookoff the consequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counseland grave tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough ofsuspicion and despair into which he was plunged. [284] In the beginningof 1758 there was a change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow becameknown to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and wasthe cause of a passing disturbance between him and his mistress. SaintLambert throughout acted like a man who is thoroughly master of himself. At first, we learn, he ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtuewhich he sought in him, and which he was persuaded that he found in him. "Since then, however, " wrote Madame d'Houdetot, "he pities you more foryour weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far fromjoining the people who wish to blacken your character; we have andalways shall have the courage to speak of you with esteem. "[285] Theysaw one another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countessd'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together, happily without breach of the peace. [286] One curious thing about thismeeting was that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and SaintLambert had interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel withDiderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion. [287]Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poorshort-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to havelived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood tohave forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither ofthe extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferentgood-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, mayserve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, whenit no longer suits them to see one another. [288] It is at least certainthat in them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friendsthat he ever possessed. 

III. 

The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big withcatastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplisheditself in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces asilent and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into somethingof acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrousprocess was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders. This disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him fromhis infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducingman to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that thehistory of a life is the history of a body no less than that of a soul. Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two factions ofmoral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuitiesof ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have been nothingmore than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We are not tosuspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on no man'smalformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it isfolly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena. Infirm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so littleendowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as heendured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowedfrom temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious formwhich this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintlynature, but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of hisquarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot--a tale oflabyrinthine nightmares--let us remember that we may even to this pointexplain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory ofinsanity, unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make manysane people very uncomfortable. 

His own account was this: "In my quality of solitary, I am moresensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in theworld, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractionsmake him forget it for the rest of the day; but there is nothing todistract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busymyself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself withhim from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, andthe harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In myquality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanityowes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend, who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to anunfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?"[289]We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, butit explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollableinsanity. Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation, public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension. Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowinghis temperament, his previous history, his circumstances, we have nodifficulty in accounting for his conduct. Least of all is there any needfor laying all the blame upon his friends. There are writers whomenthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanaticaldenigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say, nearly every one whom he ever knew. [290] Diderot said well, "Too manyhonest people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right. "

The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passagesduring the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madamed'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic natureunchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything thatattracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of afriend. He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had oncestruck him, as he did into the Encyclopædia. We have already seen howwarmly he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension. Then hescolded and laughed at him for turning hermit. With still moreseriousness he remonstrated with him for remaining in the countrythrough the winter, thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother. This stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitterletters were interchanged, [291] those of Diderot being pronounced by aperson who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too harsh. [292] Yetthere is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only theman to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairsas the worst of injuries. "I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed himsincerely, " says Rousseau, "and I counted with entire confidence uponthe same sentiments in him. But worn out by his unwearied obstinacy ineverlastingly thwarting my tastes, my inclinations, my ways of living, everything that concerned myself only; revolted at seeing a younger manthan myself insist with all his might on governing me like a child;chilled by his readiness in giving his promise and his negligence inkeeping it; tired of so many appointments which he made and broke, andof his fancy for repairing them by new ones to be broken in their turn;provoked at waiting for him to no purpose three or four times a month ondays which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the evening, after goingon as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for him all day, --I hadmy heart already full of a multitude of grievances. "[293] Thisirritation subsided in presence of the storms that now rose up againstDiderot. He was in the thick of the dangerous and mortifyingdistractions stirred up by the foes of the Encyclopædia. Rousseau infriendly sympathy went to see him; they embraced, and old wrongs wereforgotten until new arose. [294]

There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assignstwo motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris, in order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hearDiderot's opinion of the two first parts of the New Heloïsa. She saysthat he wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscriptsto Paris; Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot'spossession for six months. [295] As her letters containing this verycircumstantial story were written at the moment, it is difficult touphold the Confessions as valid authority against them. Thirdly, Rousseau told her that he had not taken his manuscripts to Paris (p. 302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p. 309) mentions that hehas received a letter from Diderot, to the effect that Rousseau's visithad no other object than the revision of these manuscripts. The scene ischaracteristic. "Rousseau kept him pitilessly at work from Saturday atten o'clock in the morning till eleven at night on Monday, hardly givinghim time to eat and drink. The revision at an end, Diderot chats withhim about a plan he has in his head, and begs Rousseau to help him incontriving some incident which he cannot yet arrange to his taste. 'Itis too difficult, ' replies the hermit coldly, 'it is late, and I am notused to sitting up. Good night; I am off at six in the morning, and 'tistime for bed. ' He rises from his chair, goes to bed, and leaves Diderotpetrified at his behaviour. The day of his departure, Diderot's wife sawthat her husband was in bad spirits, and asked the reason. 'It is thatman's want of delicacy, ' he replied, 'which afflicts me; he makes mework like a slave, but I should never have found that out, if he had notso drily refused to take an interest in me for a quarter of an hour. ''You are surprised at that, ' his wife answered; 'do you not know him? Heis devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when anything fine appearsthat is not his own. You will see him one day commit some great crimerather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not swear that hewill not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake theirvindication. '"

Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letterslong after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to makeus perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood toMadame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot. I see no reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and thepoints of coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truthprobable. [296]

Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and hissentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalentopinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems tohave existed. [297] Those who disbelieved that he had reached thisdistinction, yet made sure that he had a passion for her, which may ormay not have been true. [298] Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough tobe willing that this should be generally accepted, and it is certainthat she showed a friendship for him which, considering the manners ofthe time, was invitingly open to misconception. Again, she was jealousof her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason thanthat the latter, being the wife of a Norman noble, had access to thecourt, and this was unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. HenceMadame d'Epinay's barely-concealed mortification when she heard of themeetings in the forest, the private suppers, the moonlight rambles inthe park. When Saint Lambert first became uneasy as to the relationsbetween Rousseau and his mistress, and wrote to her to say that he wasso, Rousseau instantly suspected that Madame d'Epinay had been hisinformant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by tales of baskets anddrawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of Madame d'Houdetot'sletters to him. Whether these tales were true or not, we can never know;we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably not incapable of thesemeannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose that she took thepains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news which she waswriting to Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication with SaintLambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to SaintLambert, [299] but it may be doubted whether Theresa's imagination couldhave risen to such feat as writing to a marquis, and a marquis in whatwould have seemed to her to be remote and inaccessible parts of theearth. All this, however, has become ghostly for us; a puzzle that cannever be found out, nor be worth finding out. Rousseau was persuadedthat Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was seized by one of hisblackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an affectionate letterfrom her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so long, he wrote thus:"I can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am better informed, andthis I shall be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be certain that accusedinnocence will find a champion ardent enough to make calumniatorsrepent, whoever they may be. " It is rather curious that so strange amissive as this, instead of provoking Madame d'Epinay to anger, wasanswered by a warmer and more affectionate letter than the first. Tothis Rousseau replied with increased vehemence, charged with dark andmysteriously worded suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained willing toreceive him. He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because it wouldcertainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because, moreover, he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any foundation. Hewent instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at his approach shethrew herself on his neck and melted into tears. This unexpectedreception from so old a friend moved him extremely; he too weptabundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise nature of hissuspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an end. [300]

Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years, there had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Theircharacters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau weknow, --sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of thedifference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite;judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German(born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader to the Duke of SaxeGotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way, partly through thefriendship of Rousseau, into the society of the Parisian men of letters, rapidly acquired a perfect mastery of the French language, and with theinspiring help of Diderot, became an excellent critic. After beingsecretary to sundry high people, he became the literary correspondent ofvarious German sovereigns, keeping them informed of what was happeningin the world of art and letters, just as an ambassador keeps hisgovernment informed of what happens in politics. The sobriety, impartiality, and discrimination of his criticism make one think highlyof his literary judgment; he had the courage, or shall we say hepreserved enough of the German, to defend both Homer and Shakespeareagainst the unhappy strictures of Voltaire. [301] This is not all, however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which impresses us withthe writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we have to add theexternal corroboration that in the latter part of his life he filledvarious official posts, which implied a peculiar confidence in hisprobity on the part of those who appointed him. At the present moment(1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estrées, commander ofthe French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. Hewas an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner, powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the nameof the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are notalways beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather thantoo much in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of whichthere was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hateddeclamation. Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enoughunderneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singerat the opera who had a thrilling voice. As he did not believe in themetaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted fromtemperament the necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will byconstant pressure from without. "I am surprised, " Madame d'Epinay saidto him, "that men should be so little indulgent to one another. " "Nay, the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because theestablished morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from thisfalse principle of liberty. " "Ah, but the contrary principle, by makingone too indulgent, disturbs order. " "It does nothing of the kind. Thoughman does not wholly change, he is susceptible of modification; you canimprove him; hence it is not useless to punish him. The gardener doesnot cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keepsit in shape; that is the effect of public punishment. "[302] He appliedthe same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for socialcrookedness. 

It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself wouldgradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought aweighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attractattention. Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing toremove Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all hisfriends. The attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secretallowance to her mother and her by Grimm and Diderot of some sixteenpounds a year. [303] Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperingsand goings and comings to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy. That the suspicions in other respects were in a certain sense not whollyunfounded, is shown by Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. Hedisapproved of her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned herin a very remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken hisimagination. [304] "He is a poor devil who torments himself, and does notdare to confess the true subject of all his sufferings, which is in hiscursed head and his pride; he raises up imaginary matters, so as to havethe pleasure of complaining of the whole human race. "[305] More thanonce he assures her that Rousseau will end by going mad, it beingimpossible that so hot and ill-organised a head should enduresolitude. [306] Rousseauite partisans usually explain all this bysupposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion, against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and it ispossible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his naturalshrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of imagination anda very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to account for Grimm'sharsh judgment, without the addition of any sinister sentiment. He wasperfectly right in suspecting Rousseau of want of loyalty to Madamed'Epinay, for we find our hermit writing to her in strains of perfectintimacy, while he was writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as "yourunworthy sister. "[307] On the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay wasoverwhelming him with caressing phrases, she was at the same momentdescribing him to Grimm as a master of impertinence and intractableness. As usual where there is radical incompatibility of character, anattempted reconciliation between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in theearly part of October 1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathymore resolute. Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his hearthe never thought himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on thevirtues of friendship and his own special aptitude for practising them. He then conceded to the impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in aslight embrace which was like the accolade given by a monarch to newknights. [308] The whole scene is ignoble. We seem to be watching anunclean cauldron, with Theresa's mother, a cringing and babbling crone, standing witch-like over it and infusing suspicion, falsehood, andmalice. When minds are thus surcharged, any accident suffices torelease the evil creatures that lurk in an irritated imagination. 

One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to hisunbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with somestrange disorder, which made it advisable that she should start withoutany delay for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin, who was at that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise wasgreatly increased by the expectation which he found among his friendsthat he would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, byoffering to bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in atown which was strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was tono purpose that he protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurseof another; and how great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach inthe bad season, when for many days he was absolutely unable to leave hischamber without danger. Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide afriend's course, wrote him a letter urging that his many obligations, and even his grievances in respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him toaccompany her, as he would thus repay the one and console himself forthe other. "She is going into a country where she will be like onefallen from the clouds. She is ill; she will need amusement anddistraction. As for winter, are you worse now than you were a monthback, or than you will be at the opening of the spring? For me, Iconfess that if I could not bear the coach, I would take a staff andfollow her on foot. "[309] Rousseau trembled with fury, and as soon asthe transport was over, he wrote an indignant reply, in which he more orless politely bade the panurgic one to attend to his own affairs, andhinted that Grimm was making a tool of him. Next he wrote to Grimmhimself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his advice andpromising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By this timehe had found out the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed illness andher anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the sharewhich Grimm had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of hisletter any the less ungracious or unseemly. "If Madame d'Epinay hasshown friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her. . . . As for benefits, first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe no thanksfor any that people may burden me with by force. Madame d'Epinay, beingso often left alone in the country, wished me for company; it was forthat she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to friendship, I mustnow make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must be without aservant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character, before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's house. For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondagewith the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, andcleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion, and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer. . . . Consider how muchmoney an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare thekindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native countryand two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation isgreater on her side or mine. " He then urges with a torrent of impetuouseloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd forhim, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay, rich and surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that thephilosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire andwrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing hisfive and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter. [310]

The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed, how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and howlittle such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothingthis unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving himsufficiently free to follow his own changing moods, while he in turnlost all self-control, and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angryand resentful fancies. But let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to hiseloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the effect that he would think thematter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in hishermitage. Rousseau burning with excitement at once conceived a thousandsuspicions, wholly unable to understand that a cold and reserved Germanmight choose to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer withbrevity. "After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty inwhich this barbarous man had plunged me"--that is after eight or tendays, the answer came, apparently not without a second directapplication for one. [311] It was short and extremely pointed, notcomplaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay butprotesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent tohim for not accompanying her. "It has made me quiver with indignation;so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness andduplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for morethan two years have been the daily witness of all the marks of thetenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at thehands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myselfunworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while Ilive, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection ofyour conduct from my mind. "[312] A flash of manly anger like this isvery welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbidegoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocalcomplaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In aparoxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines inthe same key. He wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, inshrieks. "Have I a single friend left, man or woman? One word, only oneword, and I can live. " A day or two later: "Think of the state I am in. I can bear to be abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me sowell! Great God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313] And so on, raving. It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothingletters, praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himselfwith, to remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, "who had never appearedother than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him. "[314] Hewas almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because shepaid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to hispoverty. [315] To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of histormenting uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to hisletter. It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game oftyranny and intrigue at his cost. For the first time she replied withspirit and warmth. "Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eveof my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life repair thewrongs he had done me. " She then tersely remarks that it is not naturalto pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and thathe abuses her patience. To this he answered with still greater tersenessthat friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave theHermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until thespring he would with her permission follow their counsel. Then she, witha final thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm:"Since you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, Iam astonished that your friends could detain you. For me, I don'tconsult mine as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you asto yours. " This was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoblepetulance to dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is amisfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends, it is one notless cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two days before hewrote, he left her house. He found a cottage at Montmorency, andthither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he carried his scantyhousehold goods (Dec. 15, 1757). [316]

We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him avisit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soonas he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and with his eyes allaflame: "What have you come here for?" "I want to know whether you aremad or malicious. " "You have known me for fifteen years; you are wellaware how little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am notmad: follow me. " He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded toclear himself, by means of letters, of the charge of trying to make abreach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in factletters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madamed'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and atthe same time to accept himself in the very same relation. Of all thiswe have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the face ofDiderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which hedescribed in a letter to Grimm the same night. "I throw myself into yourarms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes into mywork; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul at myside. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils andhell. "[317] And thus the unhappy man who had began this episode in hislife with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring, ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson ofthe wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggarddesperate gaze of a lost spirit. 

FOOTNOTES:

[254] _Conf. _, ix. 247. 

[255] _Conf. _, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (_Mém. _, ii. 132) has given anaccount of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date. WhenMadame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, theHermitage--of which nothing now stands--along with the rest of theestate became national property, and was bought after other purchasersby Robespierre, and afterwards by Grétry the composer, who paid 10, 000livres for it. 

[256] _Conf. _, ix. 255. 

[257] Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368. 

[258] _Conf. _, ix. 239. 

[259] _Conf. _, ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc. 

[260] The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and thePolysynodia, together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found atthe end of the volume containing the Social Contract. The first, butwithout the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau'spermission, in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelvelouis for publication in his journal only. _Conf. _, xi. 107. _Corr. _, ii. 110, 128. 

[261] P. 485. 

[262] For a sympathetic account of the Abbé de Saint Pierre's life andspeculations, see M. Léonce de Lavergne's _Economistes français du18ième siècle_ (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's _Lettres à M. Valat_, p. 73. 

[263] _Conf. _, ix. 270-274. 

[264] _Conf. _, ix. 289. 

[265] _Ib. _ ix. 286. 

[266] D'Epinay, ii. 153. 

[267] Madame d'Houdetot, (_b. _ 1730--_d. _ 1813) was the daughter of M. De Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriagewith the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748. The circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax viewof the vows common among the great people of the time, are given withperhaps a shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's_Mém. _, i 101. 

[268] _Conf. _, ix. 281. 

[269] D'Epinay, ii. 246. 

[270] D'Epinay, ii. 269. 

[271] Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of hercomposition, ii. 136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account ofher, pp. 140, 141. 

[272] Quoted by M. Girardin, _Rev. Des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853, p. 1080. 

[273] _Conf. _, ix. 304. 

[274] _Ib. _ ix. 305. Slightly modified version in _Corr. _, i. 377. 

[275] M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273. 

[276] Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305. 

[277] This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, towhich we come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetotto Rousseau in May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where shedistinctly says that she concealed his mad passion for her from SaintLambert, who first heard of it in common conversation. 

[278] _Conf. _, ix. 311. 

[279] Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions, see the phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the _Mélanges_, pp. 347-360. 

[280] _Conf. _, ix. 337. 

[281] _Corr. _, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757. 

[282] To Madame d'Houdetot. _Corr. _, i. 376-387. June 1757. 

[283] Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757. Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415. 

[284] These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume(pp. 354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhapsthe one best worth turning to. 

[285] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. _Conf. _, x. 15. 

[286] _Ib. _ x. 22. 

[287] _Ib. _ x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422. 

[288] _Conf. _, x. 24. 

[289] To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. _Corr. _, i. 362, 353. See also_Conf. _, ix. 307. 

[290] One of the most unflinching in this kind is an _Essai sur la vieet le caractère de J. J. Rousseau_, by G. H. Morin (Paris: 1851): thelaborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts theConfessions, Dialogues, Letters, etc. , with the reverence due toverbal inspiration, and writes of everybody who offended his hero, quite in the vein of Marat towards aristocrats. 

[291] _Corr. _, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182

[292] D'Epinay, ii. 173. 

[293] _Conf. _, ix. 325. 

[294] _Ib. _, ix. 334. 

[295] _Mém. _, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later thanRousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in thewinter of 1756-1757. 

[296] The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's _Mém. DeDiderot, _p. 61. 

[297] _Conf. _, ix. 245, 246. 

[298] Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. _Conf. _, x. 17. 

[299] _Mém. _, ii. 318. 

[300] _Conf. _, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (_Mém. _, ii. 326), writing toGrimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene ofreconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would accountfor this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (_Rev. Des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy betweenher letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sentto Grimm, and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is neverperfectly master of himself in dealing with the chiefs of therevolutionary schools, as might indeed have been expected in a writerwith his predilections for the seventeenth century, rashly hints(_Causeries_, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. Thepublication from the autograph originals sets this at rest. 

[301] For Shakespeare, see _Corr. Lit. _, iv. 143, etc. 

[302] D'Epinay, ii. 188. 

[303] D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's _Mém. De Diderot_, p. 61. 

[304] _Mém. _ ii. 128. 

[305] P. 258. See also p. 146. 

[306] Pp. 282, 336, etc. 

[307] _Corr. _, i. 386. June 1757. 

[308] _Conf. _, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credibleversion, assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see_Mém. _, ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentaryreconciliation in his letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i. 418), repeating what he had said before (p. 417), that Grimm alwaysspoke of Mm in amicable terms, though complaining of Rousseau'sinjustice. 

[309] _Conf. _, ix. 372. 

[310] _Corr. _, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757. 

[311] Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's _Mém. _ ii. 386. Nov. 3, 1757. 

[312] D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3. 

[313] _Corr. _, i. 425. Nov. 8. _Ib. _ 426. 

[314] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383. 

[315] _Ib. _ 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (_Oeuv. _, xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leavethe Hermitage was the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sendinghim letters by some conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it mightequally well have been sent for as many sous. 

[316] The sources of all this are in the following places. _Corr. _, i. 416. Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. _Conf. _, ix. 377. _Corr. _, i. 427. Nov. 23. _Conf. _, ix. 381. Dec. 1. _Ib. _, ix. 383. Dec. 17. 

[317] Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's _Oeuv. _, xix. 446. See also 449 and 210. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

MUSIC. 

Simplification has already been used by us as the key-word to Rousseau'saims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with which he came totry his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published vindication of it, andhis musical compositions afterwards all fall under this term. Each ofthem was a plea for the extrication of the simple from the cumbrousnessof elaborated pedantry, and for a return to nature from the unmeaningdevices of false art. And all tended alike in the popular direction, towards the extension of enjoyment among the common people, and theglorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art designed forthe great. 

The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked arevolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to thetyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way througha middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the nobleseverity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian bybirth, found his first appreciation in a public that had been trainedby the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of theearliest produced in France. Grétri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had ahearty admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of pietylived for a time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellencebetween the group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck. "I have not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragicalsuperlative, " Grétri said, "but I have revealed the accent of truth, which I have impressed deeper in men's hearts. "[318] These words expresssufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as themusic sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we canstill hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary ofRameau. It was the expression in one way of the same mood which inanother way revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costumeas of savages grown opulent. Such music seems without passion orsubtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than anegative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptanceof a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate falseart of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of thepastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation of _Orfeo_and _Alceste_. 

In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera anumber of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. Aviolent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than thedefeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrelbetween the Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliamenthad just been exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State. The operatic quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into anotherchannel. Things went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibitthe printing of any work containing the damnable doctrine and positionthat Italian music is good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with theItalians. [319] His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the greatfury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, andthat it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Theirlanguage, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radicallyunfit either for poetry or music. All national music must derive itsprincipal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a languagein Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet, sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these areprecisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It issweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meetingof consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number ofthe syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make itspronunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowelsare full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it hasfew or no nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are farmore favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And soonwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody does notexist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothingagreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capriciousornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find itbeautiful. [320]

The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includesa vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and thelike. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtainedhardly rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and"other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reasonjustify, " they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste whichonly remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgraceof those who had patience enough to construct them. [321] The lastphrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as thesymbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism--shows that even a manwho seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does notescape its influence. 

Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of theimpossibility of setting melody to French words on the part of a writerwho had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the lettercreated a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himselftaken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, whichbecame a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in othercontroversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everythingin favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason anddemolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokesas of an axe. [322] Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravelyassures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design toput him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been afiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment thatovertook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera. After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, thedirectors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness inreleasing him from them. [323] Some twenty years after (1774), when Pariswas torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of theGluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to theimpossibility of wedding melody to French words. [324] He went as oftenas he could to hear the works both of Grétri and Gluck, and _Orfeo_delighted him, while the _Fausse magie_ of the former moved him to sayto the composer, "Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thoughtmy heart had long been closed. "[325] This being so, and life being asbrief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. Itmay be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on musicfor the Encyclopædia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderableMusical Dictionary of his own. 

His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which hedefended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are nowaccepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musicalinstruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was atonce practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning musicto the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of thearts within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence, although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as wellas vocal performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most atheart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music mostaccessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whomRousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for thepeople; and the best musical notation is that which best enables personsto sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had comepractically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which thepupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from theopen book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to anything likefacility in performance, and without some of this facility he rightlyfelt that music must remain a luxury for the few. So genuine was hisinterest in the matter, that he was not very careful to fight for theoriginality of his own scheme. Our present musical signs, he said, areso imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no wonder that severalpersons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it any wonder thatsome of them should have hit upon the same device in selecting the signsmost natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As much, however, depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with theiradoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it wasadvantageous. [326] Thus we have to bear in mind that Rousseau's schemewas above all things a practical device, contrived for making theteaching and the learning of musical elements an easier process. [327]

The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of arelative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. Inthe common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, isuniformly represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of secondspace in the clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting onthe varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by thekey-note of the scale to which it belongs, protested against the samename being given to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. ThusRe or D, which is the second tone in the key of C, ought, according tohim, to have a different name when found as the fifth in the key of G, and in every case the name should at once indicate the interval of atone from its key-note. His mode of effecting this change is as follows. The names _ut, re_, and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of thetones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixingone of these symbols, and this determines the absolute quality of themelody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is expressed by a numberbearing a relation to the key-note. This tonic note is represented byone, the other six tones of the scale are expressed by the numbers fromtwo to seven. In the popular Tonic Sol-Fa notation, which correspondsso closely to Rousseau's in principle, the key-note is always styled Do, and the other symbols, _mi_, _la_, and the rest, indicate at once therelative position of these tones in their particular key or scale. Herethe old names were preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau selectednumbers because he supposed that they best expressed the generation ofthe sounds. [328]

Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolicestablishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessedthat the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic wouldfurnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale, [329] but hisknowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after the ideaby which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mentaleffects of the several intervals in a key--namely, the degree of naturalaffinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between thegiven tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical valueof his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by thecircumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children arenow being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks. This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease ofhitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone inrespect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hitthe tone is compelled to measure the interval between it and thepreceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is toassociate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of arelation with this fundamental tone. 

Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were just asapplicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirementsof the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano, who has to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or toa violinist who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity, the most urgent need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which theabsolute pitch of each successive tone may be at once recognised. Neither of these has any time to think about the melodious relation ofthe tones; it is quite as much as they can do to find their place on thekey-board or the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails tosupply the clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old system. Old Rameau pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was laid beforehim, and Rousseau admitted that the objection was decisive, [330] thoughhis admission was not practically deterrent. 

His device for expressing change of octave by means of points wouldrender the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer stillmore difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this tothe other plan suggested, of indicating height of octave by visibleplace above or below a horizontal line. Again, his attempt to simplifythe many varieties of musical time by reducing them all to the two modesof double and triple time, though laudable enough, yet implies animperfect recognition of the full meaning of time, by omitting allreference to the distribution of accent and to the average time value ofthe tones in a particular movement. 

FOOTNOTES:

[318] Quoted in Martin's _Hist. De France_, xvi. 158. 

[319] _Conf. _, viii. 197. Grimm, _Corr. Lit. _, i. 27. 

[320] _Lettre sur la Musique Française_, 178, etc. , 187. 

[321] P. 197. 

[322] _Corr. Lit. _, i. 92. His own piece was _Le petit prophète deBoehmischbroda_, the style of which will be seen in a subsequentfootnote. 

[323] He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm, _Corr. Lit. _, i. 113. 

[324] This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard, _Oeuv. _, ii. 827):--"Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la musique est unexcellent passe-port auprès de lui. Quant à l'impossibilité de fairede la musique française, je ne puis y croire, et votre raison ne meparaît pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence de la languefrançaise est d'être sans accent. Point de conversation animée sansbeaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre et déterminé seulement parl'affection de celui qui parle, sans être fixé par des conventions surcertaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs mots dessyllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent être accentuées. "

[325] Musset-Pathay, i. 289. 

[326] Preface to _Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne_, pp. 32, 33. 

[327] I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M. A. , for furnishing me withnotes on a technical subject with which I have too littleacquaintance. 

[328] _Dissertation_, p. 42. 

[329] P. 52. 

[330] _Conf. _, vii. 18, 19. Also _Dissertation_, pp. 74, 75. 

CHAPTER IX. 

VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT. 

Everybody in the full tide of the eighteenth century had something to dowith Voltaire, from serious personages like Frederick the Great andTurgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent his verses to becorrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the days of hisunformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies withwhich they approached one another, when Richelieu employed thestruggling musician to make some modifications in the great man'sunconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their twonames were destined to form the great literary antithesis of thecentury. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchangeof letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerablyclear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter, that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Theirmethods were different, their training different, their points of viewdifferent, and above all these things, their temperaments were differentby a whole heaven's breadth. 

A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been utteredby various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. Thephilosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of thehappy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire stealsaway their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt intothe mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while thesadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence intendencies, which is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, tothe divergence between them in all the fundamental conditions ofintellectual and moral life, then the variation which divided therevolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly apart throughunlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligibleenough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements incontemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity, vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say, Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundlyantipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzlingvestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion ofknowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of thefelicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophicraiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless. Still this can never make us forget that he was in his day andgeneration one of the sovereign emancipators, because he awoke onedormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to awakeanother set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singularpreeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own, but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction canpermanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the humanmind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average ofmen to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whomthey are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painteror a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made himeagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action, admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlesslytraversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw inhimself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and was content totake that instead of the outer world, and as its truest version. He madehis own moods the premisses from which he deduced a system of life forhumanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or some parts ofthem, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle ofthe outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorptionwhich was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests ofemotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and madeeloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. Hewas a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master exampleof clear-eyed penetration. 

This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division, for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are. Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch itsopposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness ofintelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau'semotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision thatcarried far into the social depths. It was a very early criticism on thepair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was themore profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than theother. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusionof thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. Ifprofundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of subjects, Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-wittedcrusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is thatRousseau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects ofhuman life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thoughtabout at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry, history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religioussuperstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and dutyand God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain attemptat thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his thinking, as wehave already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunityof seeing still more clearly, it was often as thin and hollow as if hehad belonged to the company of the epigrammatical, who, after all, havefar less of a monopoly of shallow thinking than is often supposed. Theprime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief ofthe rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence formoral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity ofhuman character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings ofthe human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeedoften be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experienceto be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highestelements of nobleness of soul. 

It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third greatpower in the century, between the Encyclopædic party and the Church. Herecognised a something in men, which the Encyclopædists treated as achimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for theirown purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend therational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In aword he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaireand his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was apuritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually andmorally unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion inFrance. Nor is this all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeblecontroversialists put up from time to time by the Jesuits and otherecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective champion of religion, and the only power who could make head against the triumphant onslaughtof the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian dogmas and mysteries, and, throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which allreligions have their root and their power, he breathed new life intothem, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and hebeat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantlyrepeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but toroot out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This immenseachievement accomplished, --the great framework of a faith in God andimmortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, itwas an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and oncemore unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discreditedparaphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad forthe mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a betteropportunity of considering presently. 

We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religiousreactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of theschool who believed that men are better employed in thinking asaccurately, and knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all thosedifficult processes are possible, than in wearying themselves in futilesearch after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights. 

 * * * * *

Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse withhis usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against thehuman race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in thedesign of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walkon all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, Ifeel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark insearch of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I amcondemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war isgoing on in those regions; and because the example of our actions hasmade the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself withbeing a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen nearyour native place, where you ought to be too. " After an extremelyinadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay, [331] heconcludes:--"I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come toset it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with methe milk of our cows and browse our grass. "[332] Rousseau replied to allthis in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actuallyat the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of thearrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea ofreturning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms asthese:--"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitudeof my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they haveprofited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them. Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of yourinstruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue andfreedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls. "[333]

Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionatepieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century, his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such wordhad been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal hadfigured the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun lifeby refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from theoptimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man(1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751, [334] and whose imagination, already sombred by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which ragedaround him, was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in aworld where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creaturesin the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried, can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free andbenevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climaxof misery and injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so, why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate andinscrutable, and the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We askin vain what we are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We aretormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, andwith whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only adisheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature, how frightful is the present!

Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the firstsign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against thepolished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for morethan a quarter of a century such influence in Europe. [335] It is alittle odd that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch ofthis stock, should have broken so energetically away from it, and thathe should have done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling inhim for reality and actual circumstance. 

Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was withprosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this lifeand pronounce that all is evil and vanity. "Voltaire in seeming alwaysto believe in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, sincehis pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds allhis pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine isespecially revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort, and who from the midst of his own happiness tries to fill hisfellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and terrible image of theserious calamities from which he is himself free. "[336]

As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau soquietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free fromcalamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe, and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catchthe fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the methodof the supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a moreexecrable emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous. Voltaire is more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity andfar-spreading lively sympathy with which he interested himself in allthe world's fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundlyas if the Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his ownprosperity keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouthwhen he heard of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he hadmoved heaven and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong. Itwas his impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung fromhim this desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did nottouch him in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for thesurpassing energy and sincerity of his feeling for them. 

Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as thoseof Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maidenwrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavementof a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of herfate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forestof Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divinegovernment of our world. For him at any rate life was then warm and theday bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly. It was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made himreligious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him asovereign element of comfort. "Pope's poem, " he says, "softens mymisfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all mypains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope andLeibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be anecessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. Youcry, Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who createdthee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end tothem, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy existence, exceptto suffer and to perish. "[337] Rousseau then proceeds to argue thematter, but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not saidbefore, and said far more effectively. He begins, however, originallyenough by a triumphant reference to his own great theme of thesuperiority of the natural over the civil state. Moral evil is our ownwork, the result of our liberty; so are most of our physical evils, except death, and that is mostly an evil only from the preparations thatwe make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected thetwenty thousand houses, all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbonhad been dispersed over the face of the country, as wild tribes are, they would have fled at the first shock, and they would have been seenthe next day twenty leagues away, as gay as if nothing had happened. Andhow many of them perished in the attempt to rescue clothes or papers ormoney? Is it not true that the person of a man is now, thanks tocivilisation, the least part of himself, and is hardly worth savingafter loss of the rest? Again, there are some events which lose much oftheir horror when we look at them closely. A premature death is notalways a real evil and may be a relative good; of the people crushed todeath under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt thus escaped still worsecalamities. And is it worse to be killed swiftly than to await death inprolonged anguish?[338]

The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part. Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to itsCreator than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of theuniverse which produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking andfeeling beings, ought to be dearer to him than any one of them, and hemay, notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness, sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the preservationof the whole. "That the dead body of a man should feed worms or wolvesor plants is not, I admit, a compensation for the death of such a man;but if in the system of this universe, it is necessary for thepreservation of the human race that there should be a circulation ofsubstance between men, animals, vegetables, then the particular mishapof an individual contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten byworms; but my children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my bodyenriches the earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do, by the order of nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the Decii, and a thousand others, did of their own free will for a small part ofmen. " (p. 305. )

All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept it astrue doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation easier byexplaining the nature of evil, it does not touch the point of Voltaire'soutburst, which is that evil exists, and exists in shapes which it is amere mockery to associate with the omnipotence of a benevolentcontroller of the world's forces. According to Rousseau, if we go to theroot of what he means, there is no such thing as evil, though much thatto our narrow and impatient sight has the look of it. This may be trueif we use that fatal word in an arbitrary and unreal sense, for theavoidable, the consequent without antecedent, or antecedent withoutconsequent. If we consent to talk in this way, and only are careful todefine terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning, it is hardlydeniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and whatever is isindeed right and best, because no better is within our reach. Voltaire, however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed that at any raterelatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain, suffering, waste, whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with stern immutablelaw or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable reality: from ourpoint of view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at every calamity andevery iniquity that all is well in the best of possible worlds, and tosing hymns of praise and glory to the goodness and mercy of a being ofsupreme might, who planted us in this evil state and keeps us in it. Voltaire's is no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy atall, but a passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison witha cut and dried system like this of Rousseau's, which rests on a mockingjuggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of handof one definition for another. 

Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that thematter is beyond the light of reason, and that, "if the theist onlyfounds his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still lessprecision only founds his on the alternative possibilities. " Theobjections on both sides are insoluble, because they turn on things ofwhich men can have no veritable idea; "yet I believe in God as stronglyas I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing arethe last things in the world that depend on me. " So be it. But why takethe trouble to argue in favour of one side of an avowedly insolublequestion? It was precisely because he felt that the objections on bothsides cannot be answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out thathe faced the horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquakewithout a glimpse of consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstranceonly amounted to this, that he could not furnish one with anyconsolation out of the armoury of reason, that he himself found thisconsolation, but in a way that did not at all depend upon his own effortor will, and was therefore as incommunicable as the advantage of havinga large appetite or being six feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomesaccustomed to this way of dealing with subjects of discussion. We seehim using his reason as adroitly as he knows how for three-fourths ofthe debate, and then he suddenly flings himself back with a triumphantkind of weariness into the buoyant waters of emotion and sentiment. "Yousir, who are a poet, " once said Madame d'Epinay to Saint Lambert, "willagree with me that the existence of a Being, eternal, all powerful, andof sovereign intelligence, is at any rate the germ of the finestenthusiasm. "[339] To take this position and cleave to it may be verywell, but why spoil its dignity and repose by an unmeaning andsuperfluous flourish of the weapons of the reasoner?

With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true questionis not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good thatthe universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable inits constitution. Then within a dozen lines he admits that there can beno direct proof either way; we must content ourselves with settling itby means of inference from the perfections of God. Of course, it isclear that in the first place what Rousseau calls the true questionconsists of two quite distinct questions. Is the universe in its presentordering on the whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentientcreatures? Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second, this way of putting it does not in the least advance the case againstVoltaire, who insisted that no fine phrases ought to hide from us thedreadful power and crushing reality of evil and the desolate plight inwhich we are left. This is no exhaustive thought, but a deep cry ofanguish at the dark lot of men, and of just indignation against thephilosophy which to creatures asking for bread gave the brightlypolished stone of sentimental theism. Rousseau urged that Voltairerobbed men of their only solace. What Voltaire really did urge was thatthe solace derived from the attribution of humanity and justice to theSupreme Being, and from the metaphysical account of evil, rests on toonarrow a base either to cover the facts, or to be a true solace to anyman who thinks and observes. He ought to have gone on, if it had onlybeen possible in those times, to persuade his readers that there is nosolace attainable, except that of an energetic fortitude, and that we dobest to go into life not in a softly lined silken robe, but with a sharpsword and armour thrice tempered. As between himself and Rousseau, hesaw much the more keenly of the two, and this was because he approachedthe matter from the side of the facts, while the latter approached itfrom the side of his own mental comfort and the preconceptionsinvolved in it. 

The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, whereRousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from thephilosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession ofcivil faith that should contain positively the social maxims thateverybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maximsthat everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religionin accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out ofaccord with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no otherreligion but the code itself. 

Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice ofnonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is thereany reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseauchose to think that _Candide_ (1759) was meant for a reply to him. [340]He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire, for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whoseappreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficientthan in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other countryfashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire wasfour years later, and by that time the alienation which had nodefinitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, hadbecome complete. "I hate you, in fact, " he concluded, "since you have sowilled it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you, if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was fulltowards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse toyour fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in youwhich I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine. "[341] Weknow that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behavedwith bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silencewould have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseauoccasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein. [342]On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meantto be unkind. "Voltaire's first impulse, " he said, "is to be good; it isreflection that makes him bad. "[343] Tronchin had said in the same waythat Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau isalways trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man ofthe time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue tohim. It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseaumore than the doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in hiseyes sarcasm was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It sayssomething for the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment, that he should have had the patience to discern some of the fundamentalmerit of the most remorseless and effective mocker that ever madesuperstition look mean, and its doctors ridiculous. 

II. 

Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack uponanother great Encyclopædist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert onStage Plays. "There, " Rousseau said afterwards, "is my favourite book, my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the firstinspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life. "[344] Voltaire, who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to himself andto his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before all else, the author of _Zaïre_ and _Mahomet_, rather than of _Candide_ and the_Philosophical Dictionary_. D'Alembert was Voltaire's staunchesthenchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for the Encyclopædia togratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him when he composed it, hetook occasion to regret that the austerity of the tradition of the citydeprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre. This suggestion hadits origin partly in a desire to promote something that would please theeager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close aneighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatreof his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunityof denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer hometreated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set anexample that could not be resisted, and France would no longer seeactors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other anobject of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contemptby citizens. [345]

The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested bythe French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly asever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of thetime would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and thepersecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of thewar between the priest and the philosophers. The latter took up thecause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama aneffective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly fromtheir natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectualmanifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practicalinhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stageperformers. While people of quality eagerly sought the society of thosewho furnished them as much diversion in private as in public, the churchrefused to all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actresswished to marry, they were obliged to renounce the stage, and theArchbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge. [346] Theatrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case ofplayers as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozenillustrious instances, from Molière and Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards. 

Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and oldprejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least againstits adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical. Jeremy Collier in his _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality ofthe English Stage_ (1698) takes up quite a different position. This oncefamous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attackon certain specific qualities of the plays of his time--their indecencyof phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinismof the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved bythe English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were notapplicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has agood word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet'sloftier denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extendedto the whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a schoolof concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity andpurity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, andtherefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers. He appealsto the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried, _Woe unto you that laugh_. [347] There is a fine austerity aboutBossuet's energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness, and so severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generationor two later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness. 

Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to bean appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and notconceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurantmenace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thoughtand idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position isthis: that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary initself, while it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habitof frequenting the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of theactors, the cost in money, the waste in time, and all the otheraccessory conditions, apart from the morality of the matter represented, are bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every circumstance. Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in relation tothe social condition and habits of Geneva. [348] The first part of thediscussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite pleas forthe morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to pity throughterror, that comedy corrects men while amusing them, that both makevirtue attractive and vice hateful. [349] Rousseau insists with abundanceof acutely chosen illustration that the pity that is awaked by tragedyis a fleeting emotion which subsides when the curtain falls; that comedyas often as not amuses men at the expense of old age, uncouth virtue, paternal carefulness, and other objects which we should be taught ratherto revere than to ridicule; and that both tragedy and comedy, instead ofmaking vice hateful, constantly win our sympathy for it. Is not theFrench stage, he asks, as much the triumph of great villains, likeCatilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?

This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the mostinteresting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course acharacteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethicaland high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseauseems from this point to have been successful in demolishing argumentswhich might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly donot hold of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the oldcriticism which attaches the label of some moral from the copybook toeach piece, as its lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. Inrepudiating this Rousseau was certainly right. [350] Both the assailantsand the defenders of the stage, however, commit the double error, firstof supposing that the drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnondown to the last triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitchingthe discussion in too high a key, as if the effect or object of a stageplay in the modern era, where grave sentiment clothes itself in otherforms, were substantially anything more serious than an evening'samusement. Apart from this, and in so far as the discussion is confinedto the highest dramatic expression, the true answer to Rousseau is now avery plain one. The drama does not work in the sphere of directmorality, though like everything else in the world it has a moral orimmoral aspect. It is an art of ideal presentation, not concerned withthe inculcation of immediate practical lessons, but producing a stir inall our sympathetic emotions, quickening the imagination, and socommunicating a wider life to the character of the spectator. This iswhat the drama in the hands of a worthy master does; it is just whatnoble composition in music does, and there is no more directlymoralising effect in the one than in the other. You must trust to thesum of other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus quickenedinto channels of right action. Rousseau, like most othercontroversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on theassumption that the special object of the attack is the singleinfluencing element and the one decisive instrument in making men had orgood. What he says about the drama would only be true if the public wentto the play all day long, and were accessible to no other moral forcewhatever, modifying and counteracting such lessons as they might learnat the theatre. He failed here as in the wider controversy on thesciences and arts, to consider the particular subject of discussion inrelation to the whole of the general medium in which character moves, and by whose manifold action and reaction it is incessantly affected andvariously shaped. 

So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the matterwhich he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of introducingthe drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the qualities in theGenevese citizen which would protect him against the evil influence ofthe stage, though it is his anxiety for the preservation of these veryqualities that gives all its fire to his eloquence. If the citizenreally was what Rousseau insisted that he was, then his virtues wouldsurely neutralise the evil of the drama; if not, the drama would do himno harm. We need not examine the considerations in which Rousseaupointed out the special reasons against introducing a theatre into hisnative town. It would draw the artisans away from their work, causewasteful expenditure of money in amusements, break up the harmless andinexpensive little clubs of men and the social gatherings of women. Thetown was not populous enough to support a theatre, therefore thegovernment would have to provide one, and this would mean increasedtaxation. All this was the secondary and merely colourable support byargumentation, of a position that had been reached and was really heldby sentiment. Rousseau hated the introduction of French plays in thesame way that Cato hated the introduction of fine talkers from Greece. It was an innovation, and so habitual was it with Rousseau to look onall movement in the direction of what the French writers called tasteand cultivation as depraving, that he cannot help taking for grantedthat any change in manners associated with taste must necessarily be achange for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was essentially asupplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of itsprinciples to a practical case. It was part of his general reactionaryprotest against philosophers, poets, men of letters, and all theirworks, without particular apprehension on the side of the drama. Henceits reasoning is much less interesting than its panegyric on thesimplicity, robust courage, and manliness of the Genevese, and itsinvective against the effeminacy and frivolity of the Parisian. One ofthe most significant episodes in the discussion is the lengthy criticismon the immortal Misanthrope of Molière. Rousseau admits it for themasterpiece of the comic muse, though with characteristic perversity heinsists that the hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropicat all, because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself, instead of at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that Molièremakes Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in order to win theapplause of the pit. It is for the character of Philinte, however, thatRousseau reserves all his spleen. He takes care to describe him in termswhich exactly hit Rousseau's own conception of his philosophic enemies, who find all going well because they have no interest in anything goingbetter; who are content with everybody, because they do not care foranybody; who round a full table maintain that it is not true that thepeople are hungry. As criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis. D'Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the greatcomedy, but finding himself seized with the critic's besettingimpertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with thebecoming reflection--"But I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons toMolière. "[351]

The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable occasion ofpainting two pictures in violent contrast, each as over-coloured as theother by his mixed conceptions of the Plutarchian antique and imaginarypastoral. We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living ofcomedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises andcheerful festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake ofGeneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where somewoman assembles a number of men who are more like women than theirentertainers. We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic, boxing, wrestling, running, in generous emulation, and on the other thecoxcombs of cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room, "rising up, sitting down, incessantly going and coming to the fire-place, to thewindow, taking up a screen and putting it down again a hundred times, turning over books, flitting from picture to picture, turning andpirouetting about the room, while the idol stretched motionless on acouch all the time is only alive in her tongue and eyes" (p. 161). Ifthe rough patriots of the Lake are less polished in speech, they are allthe weightier in reason; they do not escape by a pleasantry or acompliment; each feeling himself attacked by all the forces of hisadversary, he is obliged to employ all his own to defend himself, andthis is how a mind acquires strength and precision. There may be hereand there a licentious phrase, but there is no ground for alarm in that. It is not the least rude who are always the most pure, and even a ratherclownish speech is better than that artificial style in which the twosexes seduce one another, and familiarise themselves decently with vice. 'Tis true our Swiss drinks too much, but after all let us not calumniateeven vice; as a rule drinkers are cordial and frank, good, upright, just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk. Wherever people have mostabhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have most reason to fear lestits indiscretion should betray intrigue and treachery. In Switzerland itis almost thought well of, while at Naples they hold it in horror; butat bottom which is the more to be dreaded, the intemperance of the Swissor the reserve of the Italian? It is hardly surprising to learn that thepeople of Geneva were as little gratified by this well-meant panegyricon their jollity as they had been by another writer's friendly eulogy ontheir Socinianism. [352]

The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours by thepictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find it moredifficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities and simplepastimes which in the Letter to D'Alembert the patriot holds up to theadmiration of his countrymen and the envy of foreigners. The writer isin Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with a something from Charmettes. Never before was there so attractive a combination of martial austeritywith the grace of the idyll. And the interest of these pictures is muchmore than literary; it is historic also. They were the original versionof those great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers offraternity during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which haveamused the cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthyaspiration. The fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise hadthen all fled, and the common people under Rousseauite leaders weredoing the best they could to realise on the banks of the Seine theimaginary joymaking and simple fellowship which had been first dreamedof for the banks of Lake Leman, and commended with an eloquence thatstruck new chords in minds satiated or untouched by the brilliance ofmere literature. There was no real state of things in Genevacorresponding to the gracious picture which Rousseau so generouslypainted, and some of the citizens complained that his account of theirsocial joys was as little deserved as his ingenious vindication of theirhearty feeling for barrel or bottle was little founded. [353]

The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese forwhom it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater nationthat lay sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin. Nowhere elseamong the writers who are the glory of France at this time, is anyserious eulogy of patriotism. Rousseau glows with it, and though healways speaks in connection with Geneva, yet there is in his words agenerous breadth and fire which gave them an irresistiblecontagiousness. There are many passages of this fine persuasive force inthe Letter to D'Alembert; perhaps this, referring to the citizens ofGeneva who had gone elsewhere in search of fortune, is as good asanother. Do you think that the opening of a theatre, he asks, will bringthem back to their mother city? No; "each of them must feel that he cannever find anywhere else what he has left behind in his own land; aninvincible charm must call him back to the spot that he ought never tohave quitted; the recollection of their first exercises, their firstpleasures, their first sights, must remain deeply graven in theirhearts; the soft impressions made in the days of their youth must abideand grow stronger with advancing years, while a thousand others wax dim;in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all their cheerlessmagnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the depth of thewanderer's soul, Ah, where are the games and holidays of my youth? Whereis the concord of the townsmen, where the public brotherhood? Where ispure joy and true mirth? Where are peace, freedom, equity? Let us hastento seek all these. With the heart of a Genevese, with a city as smiling, a landscape as full of delight, a government as just, with pleasures sotrue and so pure, and all that is needed to be able to relish them, howis it that we do not all adore our birth-land? It was thus in old timesthat by modest feasts and homely games her citizens were called back bythat Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for us;thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very bosomof luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after his coarsepastimes and exhausting exercises" (p. 211). [354]

Any reference to this powerfully written, though most sophisticalpiece, would be imperfect which should omit its slightly virulentonslaught upon women and the passion which women inspire. The moderndrama, he said, being too feeble to rise to high themes, has fallen backon love; and on this hint he proceeds to a censure of love as a poetictheme, and a bitter estimate of women as companions for men, which mighthave pleased Calvin or Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquencewhich showed men the superior delights of the state of nature, now showsthe superior fitness of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes asympathetic reader tremble at the want of modesty, purity, and decency, in the part which women are allowed to take by the infatuated men of amodern community. 

All this, again, is directed against "that philosophy of a day, which isborn and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry ofnature and the unanimous voice of the human race" (p. 131). The sameintrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notionsof providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and otherunlighted spots in the human mind, had perceived that the subjection ofwomen to a secondary place belonged to the same category, and could notany more successfully be defended by reason. Instead of raging againstwomen for their boldness, their frivolousness, and the rest, as ourpassionate sentimentalist did, the opposite school insisted that allthese evils were due to the folly of treating women with gallantryinstead of respect, and to the blindness of refusing an equally vigorousand masculine education to those who must be the closest companions ofeducated man. This was the view forced upon the most rational observersof a society where women were so powerful, and so absolutely unfit bywant of intellectual training for the right use of social power. D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible pleading inhis reply to Rousseau, [355] and some thirty-two years later, when allquestions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the sameline of argument so as to make it cover the claims of women to all therights of citizenship. [356] From the nature of the case, however, it isimpossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter indispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and whosupposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack whenhe declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race. We mayremember that the author of this philippic against love was at the verymoment brooding over the New Heloïsa, and was fresh from strangetransports at the feet of the Julie whom we know. 

The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism fromthe philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of thechurch? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against their country oughtto be hung. The little flock are falling to devouring one another. Thisarch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have beenguided by his brethren of the Encyclopædia, takes it into his head tomake a band of his own. He writes against the stage, after writing a badplay of his own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub, and instals himself therein to bark at his friends. [357] D'Alembert wasmore tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little flockshould do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them. JeanJacques, he said, "is a madman who is very clever, and who is onlyclever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure norto insult him. "

Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for aproclamation of his final breach with Diderot. "I once, " he said, "possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no longer, andwish for him no longer. " To this he added in a footnote a passage fromEcclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword on a friendthere still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless wordsto him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and thebetrayal of a secret--these things banish friendship beyond return. Thiswas the end of his personal connection with the men whom he alwayscontemptuously called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great streamdivided into two; the rationalist and the emotional schools becamevisibly antipathetic, and the voice of the epoch was no longer single orundistracted. 

FOOTNOTES:

[331] See above p. 149. 

[332] Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755. 

[333] _Corr. _, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755. 

[334] _La Loi Naturelle. _

[335] In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, AnExamination of Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote apamphlet to show that Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. SeeMr. Pattison's _Introduction to Pope's Essay on Man_, p. 12. Sime's_Lessing_, i. 128. 

[336] _Conf. _ ix. 276. 

[337] _Corr. _, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756. 

[338] Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely; _Soirées_, iv. 

[339] Madame d'Epinay, _Mém. _, i. 380. 

[340] _Conf. _, ix. 277. Also _Corr. _, iii. 326. March 11, 1764. Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage, isgiven in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and isinteresting to people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctorwho saw him closely. 

[341] _Corr. _, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also _Conf. _, x. 91. 

[342] Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau'sletters are--ii. 170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as "thattrumpet of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul, " and soforth; iii. 29 (Oct. 30, 1762), accusing Voltaire of maliciousintrigues against him in Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), thatif there is to be any reconciliation, Voltaire must make firstadvances; iii. 280 (Dec. , 1763), described a trick played by Voltaire;iv. 40 (Jan. 31, 1765) 64; _Corr. _, v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying toVoltaire's calumnious account of his early life; note on this subjectgiving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150 (May 31, 1765); the _Lettre àD'Almbert_, p. 193, etc. 

[343] Bernardin St. Pierre, xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx, _Mes Rapports avec J. J. R. _, (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also _Corr. _, iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 28, 1766, and p. 356. 

[344] Dusaulx, p. 102. 

[345] This part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau'spreface, and the whole is given at the end of the volume in M. Auguis's edition, p. 409. 

[346] Goncourt, _Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 256. Grimm, _Corr. Lit. _, vi. 248. 

[347] _Maximes sur la Comédie_, §15, etc. They were written in replyto a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit father. 

[348] The letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. Pp. 1-89, II. Pp. 90-145, III. Pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseauin saying that tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking ofthe famous passage in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's _Poetics_, hewas guilty of a shocking mistranslation. 

[349] Some of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides thewell-known passages in the _Republic_, the _Laws_, iv. 719, and stillmore directly, _Gorgias_, 502. 

[350] Yet D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245)repeats the old saws, as that in _Catilina_ we learn the lesson of theharm which may be done to the human race by the abuse of greattalents, and so forth. 

[351] _Lettre à M. J. J. Rousseau_, p. 258. 

[352] D'Alembert's _Lettre à J. J. Rousseau_, p. 277. Rousseau has apassage to the same effect, that false people are always sober, in the_Nouv. Hél. , _Pt. I. Xxiii. 123. 

[353] Tronchin, for instance, in a letter to Rousseau, in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 325. 

[354] A troop of comedians had been allowed to play for a short timein Geneva, with many protests, during the mediation of 1738. In 1766, eight years after Rousseau's letter, the government gave permissionfor the establishment of a theatre in the town. It was burnt down in1768, and Voltaire spitefully hinted that the catastrophe was theresult of design, instigated by Rousseau (_Corr. _ v. 299, April 26, 1768). The theatre was not re-erected until 1783, when the oligarchicparty regained the ascendancy and brought back with them the drama, which the democrats in their reign would not permit. 

[355] _Lettre à J. J. Rousseau_, pp. 265-271. 

[356] _Oeuv. _, x. 121. 

[357] To Thieriot, Sept. 17, 1758. To D'Alembert, Oct. 20, 1761. _Ib. _March 19, 1761. 

END OF VOL. I. 

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_

 * * * * *

ROUSSEAU

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. II. 

LondonMACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITEDNEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY1905

_All rights reserved_

_First printed in this form 1886__Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_

CONTENTS OF VOL. II. 

CHAPTER I. 

MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOÏSA. 

Conditions preceding the composition of the New Heloïsa 1

The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg 2

Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances 4

Peaceful life at Montmorency 9

Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau 12

His want of gratitude for commonplace service 13

Bad health, and thoughts of suicide 16

Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville 17

Relation of the New Heloïsa to Rousseau's general doctrine 20

Action of the first part of the story 25

Contrasted with contemporary literature 25

And with contemporary manners 27

Criticism of the language and principal actors 28, 29

Popularity of the New Heloïsa 31

Its reactionary intellectual direction 33

Action of the second part 35, 36

Its influence on Goethe and others 38

Distinction between Rousseau and his school 40

Singular pictures of domesticity 42

Sumptuary details 44

The slowness of movement in the work justified 46

Exaltation of marriage 47

Equalitarian tendencies 49

Not inconsistent with social quietism 51

Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment54

Circumstances of the publication of the New Heloïsa 55

Nature of the trade in books 57

Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius 61

Rousseau's suspicions 62

The great struggle of the moment 64

Proscription of Emilius 67

Flight of the author 67

CHAPTER II. 

PERSECUTION. 

Rousseau's journey from Switzerland 69

Absence of vindictiveness 70

Arrival at Yverdun 72

Repairs to Motiers 73

Relations with Frederick the Great 74

Life at Motiers 77

Lord Marischal 79

Voltaire 81

Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris 83

Its dialectic 86

The ministers of Neuchâtel 90

Rousseau's singular costume 92

His throng of visitors 93

Lewis, prince of Würtemberg 95

Gibbon 96

Boswell 98

Corsican affairs 99

The feud at Geneva 102

Rousseau renounces his citizenship 105

The Letters from the Mountain 106

Political side 107

Consequent persecution at Motiers 107

Flight to the isle of St. Peter 108

The fifth of the _Rêveries_ 109

Proscription by the government of Berne 116

Rousseau's singular request 116

His renewed flight 117

Persuaded to seek shelter in England 118

CHAPTER III. 

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 

Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility 119

Abandonment of the position of the Discourses 121

Doubtful idea of equality 121

The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method 124

Yet it has glimpses of relativity 127

Influence of Greek examples 129

And of Geneva 131

Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just 132

Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory 135

Why the Social Contract made fanatics 137

Verbal quality of its propositions 138

The doctrine of public safety 143

The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples 144

Its early phases 144

Its history in the sixteenth century 146

Hooker and Grotius 148

Locke 149

Hobbes 151

Central propositions of the Social Contract--

 1. Origin of society in compact 154 Different conception held by the Physiocrats 156

 2. Sovereignty of the body thus constituted 158 Difference from Hobbes and Locke 159 The root of socialism 160 Republican phraseology 161

 3. Attributes of sovereignty 162

 4. The law-making power 163 A contemporary illustration 164 Hints of confederation 166

 5. Forms of government 168 Criticism on the common division 169 Rousseau's preference for elective aristocracy 172

 6. Attitude of the state to religion 173 Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction 176 Its effect at the French Revolution 179 Its futility 180

Another method of approaching the philosophy of government--

 Origin of society not a compact 183

 The true reason of the submission of a minority to a majority 184

 Rousseau fails to touch actual problems 186

 The doctrine of resistance, for instance 188

 Historical illustrations 190

 Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany 193

 Socialist deductions from it 194

CHAPTER IV. 

EMILIUS. 

Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time 197

Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of naturalism 199

I. --Locke, on education 202 Difference between him and Rousseau 204 Exhortations to mothers 205 Importance of infantile habits 208 Rousseau's protest against reasoning with children 209 Criticised 209 The opposite theory 210 The idea of property 212 Artificially contrived incidents 214 Rousseau's omission of the principle of authority 215 Connected with his neglect of the faculty of sympathy 219

II. --Rousseau's ideal of living 221 The training that follows from it 222 The duty of knowing a craft 223 Social conception involved in this moral conception 226

III. --Three aims before the instructor 229 Rousseau's omission of training for the social conscience 230 No contemplation of society as a whole 232 Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius 233 The sphere and definition of the social conscience 235

IV. --The study of history 237 Rousseau's notions upon the subject 239

V. --Ideals of life for women 241 Rousseau's repudiation of his own principles 242 His oriental and obscurantist position 243 Arising from his want of faith in improvement 244 His reactionary tendencies in this region eventually neutralised 248

VI. --Sum of the merits of Emilius 249 Its influence in France and Germany 251 In England 252

CHAPTER V. 

THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 

Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists 256

The good side of the religious reaction 258

Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence 259

Earlier forms of deism 260

The deism of the Savoyard Vicar 264

The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity 265

A divinity for fair weather 268

Religious self-denial 269

The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission 270

His position towards Christianity 272

Its effectiveness as a solvent 273

Weakness of the subjective test 276

The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual conviction 276

The true satisfaction of the religious emotion 277

CHAPTER VI. 

ENGLAND. 

Rousseau's English portrait 281

His reception in Paris 282

And in London 283

Hume's account of him 284

Settlement at Wootton 286

The quarrel with Hume 287

Detail of the charges against Hume 287-291

Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick 291

Baselessness of the whole delusion 292

Hume's conduct in the quarrel 293

The war of pamphlets 295

Common theory of Rousseau's madness 296

Preparatory conditions 297

Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence 299

The Confessions 301

His life at Wootton 306

Flight from Derbyshire 306

And from England 308

CHAPTER VII. 

THE END. 

The elder Mirabeau 309

Shelters Rousseau at Fleury 311

Rousseau at Trye 312

In Dauphiny 314

Return to Paris 314

The _Rêveries_ 315

Life in Paris 316

Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him 317

An Easter excursion 320

Rousseau's unsociality 322

Poland and Spain 324

Withdrawal to Ermenonville 326

His death 326

ROUSSEAU. 

CHAPTER I. 

MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOÏSA. 

The many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden insuch profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period ofstormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures theindispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron isone instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current ofstimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higherparts of character, and only expended itself after having traversedthe whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, mostrealistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of whatis lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odiouscomplication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completednot only the New Heloïsa, which is the monument of his fall, but theSocial Contract, which was the most influential, and Emilius, whichwas perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the productions ofthe prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poorlight-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's successlay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is truethat no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until theage of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years, however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength andincommunicable savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those betterordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart toliterature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, thatcomes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul. 

The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Heloïsawas completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract waspublished in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later. Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, atpeace with most of his fellows. Though he never relented from hisantipathy to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a morereal and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them, transformed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy. 

The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatestpeople in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshalof France, and as intimate a friend of the king as the king wascapable of having. The Maréchale de Luxembourg (1707-87) had been oneof the most beautiful, and continued to be one of the most brilliantleaders of the last aristocratic generation that was destined to sporton the slopes of the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyaland homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating, unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfectsincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenientapartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreatedwhen he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a constantguest at their table, where he met the highest personages in France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with him, orto discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine inconversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to dowith no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the NewHeloïsa aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon themaréchale, and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, thesin, the repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, thewisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in toneswhich enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the restof the day, as all the women in France were so soon to beenchanted. [1] This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to theuncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least asmaladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess as it was inpresences less imposing. 

One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a manbears himself in his relations with those of greater socialconsideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies witha most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whosename was _Duc_. When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed hisdog's name to _Turc_. [2] Again, one day in a transport of tendernesshe embraced the old marshal--the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times aday, for the age was effusive--"Ah, monsieur le maréchal, I used tohate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more, sinceyou make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to havethemselves adored. "[3] On another occasion he happened to be playingat chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in hiscottage. [4] In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, heinsisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said withrespectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness toomuch not to beat you at chess always. "[5] A few days after, thevanquished prince sent him a present of game which Rousseau dulyaccepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote toMadame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he lovedthe prince's conversation better than his gifts. [6] He admits thatthis was an ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game "from aprince of the blood who throws such good feeling into the present, isnot so much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving hisindependence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does notknow his place. "[7] Considering the extreme virulence with whichRousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind from hisfriends, one may perhaps find some inconsistency in this condemnationof a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on all otheroccasions. If the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood isallowed to modify the quality of the donation, that is hardly adefensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame deBoufflers, [8] the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet moreintimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judicious warningwhen she bade him beware of laying himself open to a charge ofaffectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue andso hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus would have accepted suchmarks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to theirdisinterestedness and frugality. "[9] Perhaps there is a flutter ofself-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, inthe pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at thecastle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who washis neighbour and his friend. [10] On the whole, however, and so far aswe know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily with these highpeople. His letters to them are for the most part marked byself-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now and again hemakes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts hisindependence with something too much of protestation. [11] Theirrelations with him are a curious sign of the interest which themembers of the great world took in the men who were quietly preparingthe destruction both of them and their world. The Maréchale deLuxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in theplace of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince ofConti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employsat a few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess ofBoufflers, in sending him the money, insists that he is to count herhis warmest friend. [12] When his dog dies, the countess writes tosympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed toreplace it. [13] And when persecution and trouble and infiniteconfusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their owncomfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in theunhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversitieswhich revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men, andmade women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men andwomen away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, aswith the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now partedcompany. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And thelovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captiveby idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was one of the most distinguishedspirits of her time. Her friendship for him was such, that hissensuous vanity made Rousseau against all reason or probabilityconfound it with a warmer form of emotion, and he plumes himself in amanner most displeasing on the victory which he won over his ownfeelings on the occasion. [14] As a matter of fact he had no feelingsto conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore himany ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion heafterwards believed. 

There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency, which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflictedhim, if his natural irritation had not been made intense andirresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publicationof Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present friends. Thesimplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, ashe thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as theywere officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just castoff. [15] Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of personswhose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and hisold literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition withhim in the peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers, indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was aplagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko. [16] That Rousseau wasthoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literaryjealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspectthat other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others of ameanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself. Theresounding success which followed the New Heloïsa and Emilius put anend to these apprehensions. It raised him to a pedestal in popularesteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That verysuccess unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau's lastchance of ending his days in full reasonableness. 

Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness andpeace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of theletters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-westwinds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all wholive with nature. [17] At the end of his garden was a summer-house, andhere even on wintry days he sat composing or copying. It was not musiconly that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making transcriptsof his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg andother ladies for some moderate fee. [18] Sometimes he moved from hisown lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends hadinduced him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture wasof white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, inthe midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that Icomposed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With whateagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmyair! What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company withmy Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would havesufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have knownweariness. " And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so manydifferent circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, whereif fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence andlasting happiness. [19]

Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such ashe craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came tohim a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom hesent away exceeding sorrowful. "The first lesson I should give youwould be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have forthe contemplative life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to becondemned at any age, but especially so at yours. Man is not made tomeditate, but to act. Labour therefore in the condition of life inwhich you have been placed by your family and by providence: that isthe first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow. If residenceat Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to youirreconcilable with virtue, do better still, and return to your ownprovince. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace yourhonest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties thatvirtue imposes on you. "[20] This intermixture of sound sense withunutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far theperversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in themost exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediatepractical maxims from his theoretical principles of socialphilosophy. [21]

Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form asto fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxesinspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightfulpersecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in somedistrict of France. Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style ofEliphaz the Temanite. Our brethren must surely have given some pretextfor the evil treatment to which they were subjected. One who is aChristian must learn to suffer, and every man's conduct ought toconform to his doctrine. Our brethren, moreover, ought to rememberthat the word of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws setup by the prince. The writer cannot venture to run any risk byinterceding in favour of our brethren with the government. "Every onehas his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the public harshbut useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness, tolerance, sofar as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the world has notlistened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I produceno libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action, but avice. "[22] The worst of the worthy sort of people, wrote Voltaire, isthat they are such cowards: a man groans over a wrong, he holds histongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about it. [23] IfVoltaire could not write like Fénelon, at least he could never talklike Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about hismission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger andthe spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppressionone would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas andof Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism. 

Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms thanthis. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with acorrespondent for judging the rich too harshly. "You do not bear inmind that having from their childhood contracted a thousand wantswhich we are without, then to bring them down to the condition of thepoor, would be to make them more miserable than the poor. We should bejust towards all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah, if we had the virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them, we should soon forget that such people were in the world. One wordmore. To have any right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to beprudent and thrifty, so as to have no need of riches. "[24] In theobservance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his lifeabsolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to makehis independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minutefinancial probity. This firm limitation of his material desires wasone cause of his habitual and almost invariable refusal to acceptpresents, though no doubt another cause was the stubborn andungracious egoism which made him resent every obligation. 

It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibilityand softness of his character where women were concerned--it was notquite without exception--that he did not fly into a fit of rage overtheir gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but ingentler key. "What could I do with four pullets?" he wrote to a ladywho had presented them to him. "I began by sending two of them topeople to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the differencethere is between a present and a testimony of friendship. The firstwill never find in me anything but a thankless heart; the second. . . . Ah, if you had only given me news of yourself without sending meanything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me;instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do isto forget all about them; let us say no more. "[25] Rude and repellentas this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulnessabout it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow toexhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, hewas peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities offriendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. Heostentatiously refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to awoman whom he always treated with so much consideration as theMaréchale de Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is afalse virtue, [26] and though he did not go so far as to make gratitudethe subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he alwaysimplied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He confessedto Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he wasungrateful by nature. [27] To Madame d'Epinay he once went stillfurther, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those who hadused him well. [28] Undoubtedly he was right so far as this, thatgratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a benefactor is nomerit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from that factstripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere pieceof egoism in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is atestimony of good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a littletoo hard, as well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipientevil names because he is unable to respond to the good feeling. Rousseau protested against a conception of friendship which makes ofwhat ought to be disinterested helpfulness a title to everlastingtribute. His way of expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but itwas not without an element of uprightness and veracity. As in hisgreater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hidwholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance ofcommon form. "I am well pleased, " he said to a friend, "both with theeand thy letters, except the end, where thou say'st thou art more minethan thine own. For there thou liest, and it is not worth while totake the trouble to _thee_ and _thou_ a man as thine intimate, only totell him untruths. "[29] Chesterfield was for people with muchself-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meetthan Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion fora man. 

Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen takethe place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy andill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to onefresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender andvirtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all mistresses are that. Youhave chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress inParis is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a promise ofmarriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue tolove, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is noavail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic; butI don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, givesanything to the fidelity of the man who signs. "[30]

We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possiblyexcuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was nowas always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made himdistraught. "My sufferings are not very excruciating just now, " hewrote on a later occasion, "but they are incessant, and I am not outof pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. Ifeel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; butif anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness, "and so on. [31] This prolonged physical anguish, which was made moreintense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of asurgical instrument, [32] sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude awayas to make him think of suicide. [33] In Lord Edward's famous letter onsuicide in the New Heloïsa, while denying in forcible terms the rightof ending one's days merely to escape from intolerable mentaldistress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only growincessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excusefor a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human beingbefore dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes hisrelease from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul nolonger. [34] The thought was often present to him in this form. Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew verydeliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously lookedupon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward'sexception. [35] It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarationslike these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respectto the controversy on the manner of Rousseau's death, they pronouncehim incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherishedprinciples as anything like self-destruction would have been. 

As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, andsombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode ofromance shone in incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris, absorbed in the New Heloïsa, like all the women of the time, identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel thatnone could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claimingtheir identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal. "You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you;I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only hercousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was. " The unfortunate SaintPreux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in theintervals of surgery. "You do not know that the Saint Preux to whomyou write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and thatthe very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractionsof a very different kind. "[36] He figures rather uncouthly, but theunknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was. Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of amasculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letterswere found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by areference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from theneighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the hauntof mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought, "he said brutally. [37] The vulgarity of the lackey was never quiteobliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius. Thiswas too much for the imaginary Claire. "I have given myself three goodblows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough toopen between you, " she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable. The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau'slife. She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrotein defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkableof all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Heloïsainflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latourpursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse. She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766, when he was on his way through Paris to England. The second time, in1772, she visited him without mentioning her name, and he did notrecognise her; she brought him some music to copy, and went awayunknown. She made another attempt, announcing herself: he gave her afrosty welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come no more. With a strange fidelity she bore him no grudge, but cherished hismemory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the day of her death. Hewas not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think kindly ofthe idolatress. [38] Worshippers are ever dearer to us than theirgraven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched women in thisway, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch. 

II. 

As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separatewhat is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local insuggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual andparticular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the externalconditions under which a book like the New Heloïsa is produced, fromthe living qualities in the author which gave the external conditionstheir hold upon him, and turned their development in one directionrather than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, whenwe insist on fixing our eyes on a few of the minutiæ of construction, instead of patiently seizing larger impressions and more durablemeanings; when we stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition, instead of advancing to the central elements of the writer'scharacter. 

These incidents in the case of the New Heloïsa we know; the sensuouscommunion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency, the long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passionfor the too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of theseimpressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within. An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, hisown character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses, ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready, into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. Andthis inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces hisinterpretation of the situation. Much of the interest of the NewHeloïsa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense ofwhich the author himself was probably unconscious, of the generaldoctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound inwritings of graver pretension. Rousseau generally spoke of his romancein phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness. Itwas in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than theweakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it wasnot so deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and musing airwhich underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way forthe doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched bythe pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic mannerof the Emilius. 

Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only presentto his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortlydescribed as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of thesupposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civilinstitutions and social use might allow. In this survey, howeverincoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes was thevery last that was likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it waswith this that he began. The Discourses had been an attack upon thegeneral ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief thatsociety has done to human nature at large. The romance treated one setof emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches thewhole emotional sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the fieldwas accompanied by a total revolution in the method. Polemic wasabandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, ifnot in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation;instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing ofpersons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is, it is true, amonstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value, but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of thetime. All people in those days with any pretensions to use theirminds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violentlytranslated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. Theimportant thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain ispresent, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a farmore subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste wouldhave led us to expect. It is true, also, that Rousseau declared hisintention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventuallybecame Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the twogreat opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teachingthem the lesson of reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it ispossible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the otherthat it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel. [39]This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau's mind while hewas writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed forthe sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which hewas always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very palekind. It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau hadso emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided overthe composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it. In thefirst part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainlynot visible, and in the second part neither of the two contendingfactions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other. Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christiandressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have acceptedJulie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on thewheel, and cut off La Barre's head. 

French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Heloïsa in Franceexcept deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly fewin this generation read it in our own country. [40] The action is veryslight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with theingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychologicalanalysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident orexcited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimentalfiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor anda too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophyinto the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's fatherforbade all hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappypair lost the self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into thepit that lies so ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step, for Julie had with her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of adutiful character. Her lover was hurried away from the country by thegenerous solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest, tenderest, and best of men. Julie, left undisturbed by her lover'spresence, stricken with affliction at the death of a sweet andaffectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities of a father whomshe dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his will hadbrought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron fromsome northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee ofcalm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent, orderly, above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, fromwhich he was only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who didmore than argue; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship ofAdmiral Anson, then just starting for his famous voyage round theworld. And this marks the end of the first episode. 

Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls, and maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposingthat they could be instructed by romances. It was like setting fire tothe house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps play. [41] As headmitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except fromthose who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which maynot prudently be put into the hands of the young, --a puerile andcontemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art, by excluding the most interesting of human relations and the mostpowerful of human passions. There is not a single composition of thefirst rank outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that couldundergo the test. The most useful standard for measuring thesignificance of a book in this respect is found in the manners of thetime, and the prevailing tone of contemporary literature. In trying toappreciate the meaning of the New Heloïsa and its popularity, it iswell to think of it as a delineation of love, in connection not onlywith such a book as the Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but witha story like Duclos's, which all ladies both read and were not in theleast ashamed to acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, suchan abomination as Diderot's first stories; or a story like Laclos's, which came a generation later, and with its infinite briskness anddevilry carried the tradition of artistic impurity to as vigorous amanifestation as it is capable of reaching. [42] To a generation whoseliterature is as pure as the best English, American, and Germanliterature is in the present day, the New Heloïsa might without doubtbe corrupting. To the people who read Crébillon and the Pucelle, itwas without doubt elevating. 

The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners. Withoutlooking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau's ownhistory, we see how deep the depravity had become. Madame d'Epinay'sgallant sat at table with the husband, and the husband was perfectlyaware of the relations between them. M. D'Epinay had notoriousrelations with two public women, and was not ashamed to refer to themin the presence of his wife, and even to seek her sympathy on anoccasion when one of them was in some trouble. Not only this, buthusband and lover used to pursue their debaucheries in the towntogether in jovial comradeship. An opera dancer presided at the tableof a patrician abbé in his country house, and he passed weeks in herhouse in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on one occasion, "'tistrue the king has a mistress, but who has not?--except the Duke ofOrleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Geneviève, and is thoroughlydespised in consequence, and rightly. "[43] Reeking disorder such asall this illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers ofthe fair lake seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtuewas lost in that simple paradise, but even that loss was followed bycircumstances of mental pain and far circling distress, which banishedthe sin into a secondary place; and what remained to strike theimagination of the time were delightful pictures of fast union betweentwo enchanting women, of the patience and compassionateness of a gravemother, of the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend. Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossnesscould make a small collection of such defilements from the New Heloïsawithout any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character, and so theycame out in his work. Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of thiskind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in theConfessions. They were not noticed at that day, when people's ears didnot affect to be any chaster than the rest of them. 

A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that wasactually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes thatproduced it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration thatif the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralistmight desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating andscientific critics, not this, but a very different impression wouldhave followed. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloïsa. A long story told in letters has grown to be a form incomprehensibleand intolerable to us. We find Richardson hard to be borne, and he putfar greater vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rousseaudid, though he was not any less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitionsas Rousseau does not. Rousseau was absolutely without humour; thatbelongs to the keenly observant natures, and to those who love men inthe concrete, not only humanity in the abstract. The pleasantries ofJulie's cousin, for instance, are heavy and misplaced. Thus the wholebook is in one key, without the dramatic changes of Richardson, toofew even as those are. And who now can endure that antique fashion ofapostrophising men and women, hot with passion and eager with allactive impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as if theirpassion and their activity were only the inconsiderable embodiment offine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint Preuxbeing led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to liedying, murmurs passionately, "What shall I now see in the same placeof refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated mysoul, in this same object who both caused and shared my transports!the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!"[44] Thisrhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more realistictaste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of sheddingtears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to ageneration that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility, without realising for the honour of its ancestors the physiologicaltruth of the power of the will over the secretions. 

The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who areaccustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the NewHeloïsa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full, highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charmin the source and original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom nowidest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can makeendurable. Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundanceof fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poetsturn graciously on the lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice atthe feet of his mistress. Even Werther, stricken creature as he was, yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be theinstrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares. SaintPreux's egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation, or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion. The slaveof his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification. Withsome rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path tohappiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes first like apedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like apedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two. Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters incomparison. Werther, again, at least represents a principle ofrebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and heretains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful. Hisdespair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed socialambition. [45] He feels the world about him. His French prototype, onthe contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of asensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own feveredpulsation. 

Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that shebelongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preservesfortitude, self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At acertain point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If theNew Heloïsa could be said to have any moral intention, it is herewhere women learn from the example of Julie's energetic return toduty, the possibility and the satisfaction of bending character backto comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from a moral point ofview, the reader may wish that Julie had been less of a preacher, aswell as less of a sinner. And even as sinner, she would have been morereadily forgiven if she had been less deliberate. A maiden whosacrifices her virtue in order that the visible consequences may forceher parents to consent to a marriage, is too strategical to beperfectly touching. As was said by the cleverest, though not thegreatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau, when one has renounced the charms of virtue, it is at least well tohave all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow. [46] Inspite of this, however, Julie struck the imagination of the time, andstruck it in a way that was thoroughly wholesome. The type taught mensome respect for the dignity of women, and it taught women a firmerrespect for themselves. It is useless, even if it be possible, topresent an example too lofty for the comprehension of an age. At thismoment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling Francewith impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine thatFrance had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie had almost thehalo of saintliness. 

We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess ofpreaching, the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It wassaid pungently enough by the wits of the time. [47] Nothing that couldbe said on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760and the Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such apitch that they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseauhad drunk, they would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece ofhis handwriting, and vow that no woman of true sensibility couldhesitate to consecrate her life to him, if she were only certain to berewarded by his attachment. [48] The booksellers were unable to meetthe demand. The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume, and the volume could not be detained beyond an hour. All classesshared the excitement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, andbourgeois. [49] Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball, who took the book up for half an hour until the time should come forstarting; they read until midnight, and when informed that thecarriage waited, answered not a word, and when reminded by and by thatit was two o'clock, still read on, and then at four, having orderedthe horses to be taken out of the carriage, disrobed, went to bed, andpassed the remainder of the night in reading. In Germany the effectwas just as astonishing. Kant only once in his life failed to take hisafternoon walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the witcheryof the New Heloïsa. Gallantry was succeeded by passion, expansion, exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm isdangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with better hopes forcharacter. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first step towardskindling all the other energies which make life wiser and morefruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in thecharacter of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy insubjective broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled tothe straight path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy forothers, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathyof others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. Thewomen who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not ofwhimpering introspection. The danger lay in the mischievousintellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to this effusion. 

The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so manyways, marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was themost perilous of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind, constituted as it is, to march forward a space further to the light, without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. Thegreat effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the NewHeloïsa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. Onebeautiful character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach theculture of emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetnessand moderation, as that "Great thoughts come from the heart. " But hecame too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made nomark. Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs when men arebeginning to feel the urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove withmore powerful efforts, in the midst of all his herculean labours forthe acquisition and ordering of knowledge, in the same directiontowards the great outer world of nature, and towards the great innerworld of nature in the human breast. His criticisms on the paintingsof each year, mediocre as the paintings were, are admirable even nowfor their richness and freshness. If Diderot had been endowed withemotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of understanding and ofpurpose, the student of the eighteenth century would probably havebeen spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a way alongthe sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau. But Rousseauhad what Diderot lacked--sustained ecstatic moods, and fervid trances;his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so glistening, hisvoice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration. His wordsare the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had livedin Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in Frenchinstead of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that heraised feeling, now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme placewhich it was to occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equalalliance with understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, heplaced emotion as its substitute. And he made this evil doctrine comefrom the lips of a fictitious character, who stimulated fancy andfascinated imagination. Voltaire laughed at the _baisers âcres_ ofMadame de Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis ofXiménès had crushed the wretched romance. [50] But Madame de Wolmar wasso far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which herown charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in adirection that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain. 

It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of thestory takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable. Saint Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his returnto Europe he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows hispast history perfectly well, to pay them a visit. They all meet withleapings on the neck and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmarpreserving an open, serene, and smiling air. He takes his young friendto a chamber, which is to be reserved for him and for him only. In afew days he takes an opportunity of visiting some distant property, leaving his wife and Saint Preux together, with the sublime ofmagnanimity. At the same time he confides to Claire his intention ofentrusting to Saint Preux the education of his children. All goesperfectly well, and the household presents a picture of contentment, prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused happiness, which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even nowextremely charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured by asource of hidden chagrin. Her husband, "so sage, so reasonable, so farfrom every kind of vice, so little under the influence of humanpassions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, andin the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom ofhis heart the frightful peace of the wicked. "[51] He is an atheist. Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her chambers, spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading thepages of the good Fénelon. [52] "I fear, " she writes to Saint Preux, "that you do not gain all you might from religion in the conduct ofyour life, and that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of theChristian. You believe prayers to be of scanty service. That is not, you know, the doctrine of Saint Paul, nor what our Church professes. We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill. And whence should light and force come, if not from him who is theirvery well-spring?. . . Let us be humble, to be sage; let us see ourweakness, and we shall be strong. "[53] This was the opening of thedeistical reaction; it was thus, associated with everything thatstruck imagination and moved the sentiment of his readers, thatRousseau brought back those sophistical conclusions which Pascal haddrawn from premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervatingdisplacement of reason by celestial contemplation, which Fénelon hadonce made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous example. He wasjustified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was nothing inthe Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be found inthe letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for thatmore famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the attractionsof an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a harmony ofcircumstance that touched softer fibres. 

For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a sceneof disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family. A modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitternessagainst the character of Wolmar, --supposed, we may notice in passing, to be partially drawn from D'Holbach, --a man performing so long anexperiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of asurgeon engaged in vivisection. [54] It was, however, much lessdifficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept sounwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil thatwas in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful, frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense. [55] It maybe that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie inher room, suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamberof the hapless Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther(1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, ifSaint Preux had not gone to see Julie take cream and cakes with herchildren and her female servants. And perhaps the other and noblerCharlotte of the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ (1809) would not have detainedus so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Juliehad not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, thecool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance andcolour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousandbirds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and Juan Fernandez. There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightnessin this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to thosewho cannot make their way through any other letter in the NewHeloïsa. [56] Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far abovesuch pieces in Goethe's two famous romances. They have a clearnessand spontaneous freshness which are not among the bountiful gifts ofGoethe. There are other admirable landscapes in the New Heloïsa, though not too many of them, and the minute and careful way in whichRousseau made their features real to himself, is accidentally shown inhis urgent prayer for exactitude in the engraving of the strikingscene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their oldlove for one another. [57] "I have traversed all Rousseau's ground withthe Heloïsa before me, " said Byron, "and am struck to a degree Icannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions andthe beauty of their reality. "[58] They were memories made true by longdreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenesever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which thetamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gavesuggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountainpines, the waters of the lake, "the populous solitude of bees andbirds, " as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. Andthey were always benign, standing in relief with the malignity orfolly of the hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manichæan towardsnature. To him she was all good and bounteous. The demon forces thatso fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible. These were thecompositions that presently inspired the landscapes of _Paul andVirginia_ (1788), of _Atala_ and _René_ (1801), and of _Obermann_(1804), as well as those punier imitators who resemble their mastersas the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms of David. Theywere the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling for nature, and notthe mere hackneyed common-form and inflated description of theliterary pastoral. [59]

This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawnbetween Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired. The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, thatthe union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetryof nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau. [60] It only shows thatthe great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the secondpart of the New Heloïsa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusionto the _matinée à l'anglaise_ certainly proves that he had at any rateforgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearthin French literature. [61] The tendency to read Rousseau only in theByronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which areconstantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record. Rousseauassuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper doneinto splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation anddomestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state inhis Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he foundit in a household that was more, and not less, systematicallydisciplined than those of the common society around him. The paradisein which his Julie moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more andno less than an establishment of the best kind of the ruralmiddle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No mostsentimental savage could have found it endurable, or could himselfwithout profound transformation of his manners have been endured init. The New Heloïsa ends by exalting respectability, and putting thespirit of insurrection to shame. Self-control, not revolt, is its lastword. 

This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from Sénancour, Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph of will, while theirreigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will, the little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of commonrules. Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity ofMadame de Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was markedout with precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrivedthat the men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants, except at their repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and anurse, found their pastime in rambles with their mistress and herchildren, and lived mainly with them. The men were amused by games forwhich their master made regulated provision, now for summer, now forwinter, offering prizes of a useful kind for prowess and adroitness. Often on a Sunday night all the household met in an ample chamber, and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux inquired whetherthis was not a rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Juliewisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe duties, that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms, itmust always be at the cost of the essential. [62] The servants weretaken from the country, never from the town. They entered thehousehold young, were gradually trained, and never went away except toestablish themselves. 

The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian, that such households do not generally exist, because neither mastersnor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relationsof unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters andservants will be more and more removed from the possession of suchqualities, and their relations further distant from such order andfriendliness, if writers cease to press the beauty and serviceablenessof a domesticity that is at present only possible in a few rare cases, or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration ofcharacter, that are the results of our present system. Undoubtedly itis much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-patriarchalfelicity, than for the rest of us to realise it. It was his functionto press ideals of sweeter life on his contemporaries, and they may becounted fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this functionwith Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly persuasion. His scornfuldiatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and theessential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are bothexcellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a newhumaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking thedecrepitude of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation amongthe great farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions ofdomestic service marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguishedfrom the mere pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim ofthe common people to an equal consideration, as equally useful andequally capable of virtue and vice; and it implies the essentialpriority of social over political reform. 

The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table partakes of thegeneral plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous. The senses aregratified without daintiness. The food is common, but excellent of itskind. The service is simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere show, allthat depends on vulgar opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whosevalue comes of their rarity, and whose names you must know beforefinding any goodness in them, are banished without recall. Even insuch delicacies as they permit themselves, our friends abstain everyday from certain things which are reserved for feasts on specialoccasions, and which are thus made more delightful without being morecostly. What do you suppose these delicacies are? Rare game, or fishfrom the sea, or dainties from abroad? Better than all that; somedelicious vegetable of the district, one of the savoury things thatgrow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar way, some cheese from our mountains. The service is modest and rustic, butclean and smiling. Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which youdie of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your onlydessert, here take the place of honest dishes. Here people have notthe art of nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know howto add grace to good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, todrink merrily without losing reason, to sit long at table withoutweariness, and always to rise from it without disgust. [63]

One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of thosemiddle exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich theshopkeeper but impoverish his customers. Not one of these exchanges ismade without loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weakeneven a man of fortune. Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which theconvenience of each party to the bargain serves as profit for both. Thus the wool is sent to the factories, from which they receive clothin exchange; wine, oil, and bread are produced in the house; thebutcher pays himself in live cattle; the grocer receives grain inreturn for his goods; the wages of the labourers and thehouse-servants are derived from the produce of the land which theyrender valuable. [64] It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest, to carry to its highest point this confusion of what is sofascinating in a book with what is practicable in society. 

The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior maystrike the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as veryslow, just as people complain of the same things in Goethe's_Wahlverwandtschaften_. Such complaint only proves inability, which isor is not justifiable, to seize the spirit of the writer. Theexpatiation was long and the movement slow, because Rousseau was fullof his thoughts; they were a deep and glowing part of himself, and didnot merely skim swiftly and lightly through his mind. Anybody whotakes the trouble may find out the difference between this expressionof long mental brooding, and a merely elaborated diction. [65] Thelength is an essential part of the matter. The whole work is thereflection of a series of slow inner processes, the many carefulweavings of a lonely and miserable man's dreams. And Julie expressedthe spirit and the joy of these dreams when she wrote, "People areonly happy before they are happy. Man, so eager and so feeble, made todesire all and obtain little, has received from heaven a consolingforce which brings all that he desires close to him, which subjects itto his imagination, which makes it sensible and present before him, which delivers it over to him. The land of chimera is the only one inthis world that is worth dwelling in, and such is the nothingness ofthe human lot, that except the being who exists in and by himself, there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist. "[66]

Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his publicwith the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is therestoration of marriage in the New Heloïsa to a rank among high andhonourable obligations, and its representation as the best support ofan equable life of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion. Rousseau even invested it with the mysterious dignity as of somenatural sacrament. "This chaste knot of nature is subject neither tothe sovereign power nor to paternal authority, " he cried, "but only tothe authority of the common Father. " And he pointed his remark by abitter allusion to a celebrated case in which a great house hadprevailed on the courts to annul the marriage of an elder son with ayoung actress, though her character was excellent, and though she hadbefriended him when he was abandoned by everybody else. [67] This wasone of the countless democratic thrusts in the book. In the case ofits heroine, however, the author associated the sanctity of marriagenot only with equality but with religion. We may imagine the spleenwith which the philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, andtheir light esteem of marriage bonds, read Julie's eloquent account ofher emotions at the moment of her union with Wolmar. "I seemed tobehold the organ of Providence and to hear the voice of God, as theminister gravely pronounced the words of the holy service. The purity, the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so vividly set forth in thewords of scripture; its chaste and sublime duties, so important to thehappiness, order, and peace of the human race, so sweet to fulfil evenfor their own sake--all this made such an impression on me that Iseemed to feel within my breast a sudden revolution. An unknown powerseemed all at once to arrest the disorder of my affections, and torestore them to accordance with the law of duty and of nature. Theeternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now reads to thedepth of my heart. "[68] She has all the well-known fervour of theproselyte, and never wearies of extolling the peace of the weddedstate. Love is no essential to its perfection. "Worth, virtue, acertain accord not so much in condition and age as in character andtemper, are enough between husband and wife; and this does not preventthe growth from such a union of a very tender attachment, which isnone the less sweet for not being exactly love, and is all the morelasting. "[69] Years after, when Saint Preux has returned and issettled in the household, she even tries to persuade him to imitateher example, and find contentment in marriage with her cousin. Theearnestness with which she presses the point, the very sensible butnot very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of celibacy, and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry, hadcomplaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew thefire of Rousseau's critical enemies. 

Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people areweary of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerlyset in some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them toread; they assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood, and the rest passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched byJulie, and were no more capable of criticising her than Julie wascapable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her passion forhim. When we say that Rousseau was the author of this movement, all wemean is that his book and its chief personage awoke emotion toself-consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an impulse infavour of social order, and then very calamitously at the same momentdivorced it from the fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcingit from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason. 

Apart from the general tendency of the New Heloïsa in numberlessindirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by thepresentation of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty, self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct protest of singulareloquence and gravity. Julie's father is deeply revolted at the barenotion of marrying his daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts hisvigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of anEnglish nobleman. This is perhaps an infelicitous piece ofprosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea ofEngland in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-heartedfreedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of verystraightforward speaking in which our representative expressed hismind as to the significance of birth. "My friend has nobility, " criedLord Edward, "not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but gravenin his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own part, by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but thatof a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If youknow the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened, the best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, Idon't care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it istrue, the slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants ofthe people, but their leaders. We hold the balance true betweenpeople, and monarch. Our first duty is towards the nation, our secondtowards him who governs; it is not his will but his right that weconsider. . . . We suffer no one in the land to say _God and my sword_, nor more than this, _God and my right_. "[70] All this was onlyputting Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many peopleread the romance who were not likely to read the graver book. Andthere was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number ofpolitical propositions about government, and their transformation intodramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality thatdoes not correspond with inequalities of worth. 

There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism ofother parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount placethat they hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once hiscontempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank, and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions ofhumble rank. Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to despiseboth those who have departed from it, and those who would depart fromit if they could. So Julie does her best to make the lot of thepeasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helpingthem to change it for another. She teaches them to respect theirnatural condition in respecting themselves. Her prime maxim is todiscourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuadethe villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the truepleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption oftowns. [71] Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he hadseen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau's pastoralvisions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which thepublican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that coversthe fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexiblerigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of hisrural scenes. "Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows theyreceive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness, clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins--these things offer a mournfulspectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think ofthe unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed. "[72]

Yet there is no hint in the New Heloïsa of the socialism which Morellyand Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these desperatehorrors. Property, in every page of the New Heloïsa, is held in fullrespect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; theservant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness;disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour andmore than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality andeffect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehementdenunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the onehand and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a socialstate in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries savethose which are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between thesober, cheerful, prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness ofthe reality of the field life of France, --this was the element thatfilled generous souls with an intoxicating transport. 

Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay aboutthat tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, totteringbrutes, and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the manytraits in Julie which endeared her to that generation, and mightendear her even to our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house wasnear a great high-road, and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not oneof these was allowed to go empty away. And Julie had as many excellentreasons to give for her charity, as if she had been one of thephilosophers of whom she thought so surpassingly ill. If you look atmendicancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling whose endis to nourish feelings of humanity and brotherly love? From the pointof view of talent, why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar whostirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes me shed tearsover imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars is burdensometo the state, of how many other professions that people encourage, mayyou not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to whom I givealms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In short, whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to thebeggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to sufferinghumanity or to its image. [73] Nothing could be more admirablyillustrative of the author's confidence that the first thing for us todo is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shallbe added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necker, --a sort ofJulie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of thisdoctrine on the great stage of affairs, --was hailed to power to wardoff the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moralsentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resourceswas driven away as an economist and a philosopher. 

At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for thetriumph of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by thedreams in which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was savedby the fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which hefilled the most generous of her children. No wide movement, we may besure, is thoroughly understood until we have mastered both itsmaterial and its ideal sides. Materially, Rousseau's work wasinevitably fraught with confusion because in this sphere not to bescientific, not to be careful in tracing effects to their true causes, is to be without any security that the causes with which we try todeal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman statesman whohad gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying theeconomic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasingcapital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But themoral nature of man is redeemed by teaching that may have no bearingon economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has tobe corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in thecontrary direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, theprocesses are very complex. In measuring a man's influence within itwe have to balance. Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent inleading men and women to desire simple lives, and a more harmonioussocial order. Was this eminent benefit more than counterbalanced bythe eminent disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectualdirection? By commending irrational retrogression from active use ofthe understanding back to dreamy contemplation?

To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproachwant of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodnessand effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, tosentimental but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence thatformed the opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe aplace in the temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every manwho has kindled in his generation a brighter flame of moralenthusiasm, and a more eager care for the realisation of good andvirtuous ideals. 

III. 

The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and thepersecution which befell its author in consequence, recalls us to thedistinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, andcarries us away from light into the thick darkness of politicalintrigue, obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at oncetyrannical and decrepit. It is almost impossible for us to realise theexistence in the same society of such boundless license of thought, and such unscrupulous restraint upon its expression. Not one ofRousseau's three chief works, for instance, was printed in France. Thewhole trade in books was a sort of contraband, and was carried on withthe stealth, subterfuge, daring, and knavery that are demanded incontraband dealings. An author or a bookseller was forced to be ascareful as a kidnapper of coolies or the captain of a slaver would bein our own time. He had to steer clear of the court, of theparliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of the kingand the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all ofthat organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times andplaces where they raise their masked heads, --the bishops andecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot produced hiscomedy to please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760). Madame de Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg, instigated and protected him, for Diderot had offended her. [74]Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spitedetected a reference to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still hadrelations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into theBastile. [75] Diderot was thrown for three months into Vincennes, wherewe saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind(1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious doctrine, really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress byhinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment onscientific experiment was of no value. [76]

The New Heloïsa could not openly circulate in France so long as itcontained the words, "I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burnerthan the mistress of a king. " The last word was altered to "prince, "and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Contiand Madame de Boufflers. [77] No work of merit could appear withoutmore or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of slavishmutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental grudgeof people who had influence in high quarters. [78]

If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of theeighteenth century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their moralitywas reduced to an equally low level in dealing not only with thepolice, but with their own accomplices, the book-writers. They excusedthemselves from paying proper sums to authors, on the ground that theywere robbed of the profits that would enable them to pay such sums, bythe piracy of their brethren in trade. But then they all pirated theworks of one another. The whole commerce was a mass of fraud andchicane, and every prominent author passed his life between two fires. He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than robbery andpiracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On theother side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity, alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration. As we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, theirstruggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly revivingand ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wishthat the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some ofthem had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of inconnection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity, self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of humanemancipation and progress. Happily the mutual hate of the Christianfactions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes totheir mutual love, prevented a common union for burning thephilosophers as well as their books. All torments short of this theyendured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without anyhope of being rewarded after their death, as truly good men mustalways be capable of doing. 

Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting itin even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing pressof France, and when we are counting up the contributions ofProtestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to rememberthe indispensable services rendered by the freedom of the press inHolland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenthcentury, as well as the shelter that it gave to the French thinkers inthe seventeenth, including Descartes, the greatest of them all. Themonstrous tediousness of printing a book at Amsterdam or the Hague, the delay, loss, and confusion in receiving and transmitting theproofs, and the subterranean character of the entire process, including the circulation of the book after it was once fairlyprinted, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more impetuoustemper. He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer, tosell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript had thento be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam. Rousseau wrote it out in verysmall characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the careof the chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native ofVaud. In passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of theofficials. They tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious thatthey were handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they hadever meddled with. It was not until the chaplain claimed it in thename of ambassadorial privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to goon its way to the press. [79] Rousseau repeats a hundred times, notonly in the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, howresolutely and carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of thecountry in which he lived. The French government was anxious enough onall grounds to secure for France the production of the books of whichFrance was the great consumer, but the severity of its censorshipprevented this. [80] The introduction of the books, when printed, wastolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly haveendured to be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature. By agreater inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once foundadmission into the country, was also connived at. Thus M. DeMalesherbes, out of friendship for Rousseau, wished to have an editionof the New Heloïsa printed in France, and sold for the benefit of theauthor. That he should have done so is a curious illustration of thelow morality engendered by a repressive system imperfectly carriedout. For Rousseau had sold the book to Rey. Rey had treated with aFrench bookseller in the usual way, that is, had sent him half theedition printed, the bookseller paying either in cash or other booksfor all the copies he received. Therefore to print an independentedition in Paris was to injure, not Rey the foreigner, but the Frenchbookseller who stood practically in Rey's place. It was setting twoFrench booksellers to ruin one another. Rousseau emphatically declinedto receive any profit from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes, you sold to Rey a right which you had not got, the right of soleproprietorship, excluding the competition of a pirated reprint. Then, answered Rousseau, if the right which I sold happens to prove lessthan I thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of mymistake, I owe to Rey compensation for any loss that he maysuffer. [81]

The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of reason was shown onnumerous occasions. As director of the book trade he was really thecensor of the literature of the time. [82] The story of his service toDiderot is well known--how he warned Diderot that the police wereabout to visit his house and overhaul his papers, and how when Diderotdespaired of being able to put them out of sight in his narrowquarters, Malesherbes said, "Then send them all to me, " and took careof them until the storm was overpast. The proofs of the New Heloïsacame through his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent inthe affairs relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrustedthe whole matter to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confidentthat, in acting through persons of such authority and position, heshould be protected against any unwitting illegality. Instead of beingsent to Rey, the manuscript was sold to a bookseller in Paris for sixthousand francs. [83] A long time elapsed before any proofs reached theauthor, and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed inFrance as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes was in some sortthe director of the enterprise, the author felt no alarm. Duclos cameto visit him one day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the SavoyardVicar's Profession of Faith. "What, citizen, " he cried, "and that ispart of a book that they are printing at Paris! Be kind enough not totell any one that you read this to me. "[84] Still Rousseau remainedsecure. Then the printing came to a standstill, and he could not findout the reason, because Malesherbes was away, and the printer did nottake the trouble to answer his letters. "My natural tendency, " hesays, and as the rest of his life only too abundantly proved, "is tobe afraid of darkness; mystery always disturbs me, it is utterlyantipathetic to my character, which is open even to the pitch ofimprudence. The aspect of the most hideous monster would alarm melittle, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a figure in awhite sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life. "[85] So he atonce fancied that by some means the Jesuits had got possession of hisbook, and knowing him to be at death's door, designed to keep theEmilius back until he was actually dead, when they would publish atruncated version of it to suit their own purposes. [86] He wroteletter upon letter to the printer, to Malesherbes, to Madame deLuxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did not come exactly whenhe expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If he dropped hisconviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his book and thedefilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a similardesign upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were acquitted, then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to rememberthat all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant pain, and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes threwoff the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in theirstead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mildclimate and among a gentle people he should peacefully end hisdays. [87] At other times he was fond of supposing M. De Luxembourgnot a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire livingin some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of books, but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with thesquire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to thehappiness of theirs. [88] Alas, in spite of all his precautions, he hadunwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs. He and his bookwere sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a persecution setin, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by giving hisreason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never recovered. 

Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits. That formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal torecognise her power and position, --a manly policy, as creditable totheir moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had madethem powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they hadtaken in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments hadalways been their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy withwhich corporations of lawyers always regard corporations ofecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, whichhad been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasionof special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of theparliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which thesystem of confessional tickets was at this time being carried out. Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of allretrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; andwas unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At lasthe gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercialbankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion oftheir fall, and nothing could save them. "I only know one man, " saidGrimm, "in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits infine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe, and this man is M. Rousseau. " The parliaments went to work withalacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as theywere to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were noallies of the one even when destroying the other. 

Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations ofinnovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stampof rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to theschool of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of theirnumber, like Voltaire or Helvétius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762. On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to beburnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. ForRousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; hecourageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all hisworks, [89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty inidentifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were allegedirreligious tendencies to be found in the book. [90]

The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-generaldemanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were leastlikely to defend Rousseau. [91] The author was charged with saying notonly that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that theChristian religion does not exist--paradox too flagrant even for thewriter of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced eitherthat the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the name of theauthor was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared no worse, but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man ofletters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment. 

The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work wascreating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, buthe could not believe that the only man in France who believed in Godwas to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity. [92] On the 8thof June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner inthe fields. "Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night inmy bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and triedto fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. Myordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read itcontinuously through at least five or six times in this way. Thatnight, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading, and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite ofEphraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The storyaffected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, whenall at once I was roused by lights and noises. "[93]

It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot hasteto carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of theproposed decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to besure that if he were seized and examined, her own share and that ofMalesherbes in the production of the condemned book would be madepublic, and their position uncomfortably compromised. It was to theirinterest that he should avoid arrest by flight, and they had nodifficulty in persuading him to fall in with their plans. After atearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sightfor seventeen years, and many embraces from the greater ladies of thecastle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched on the first stageof eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to be driven fromplace to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates andreligious doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his owndiseased imagination, until at length his whole soul became the homeof weariness and torment. 

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Conf. _, x. 62. 

[2] _Conf. _, x. 

[3] _Ib. _ x. 70. 

[4] Louis François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776), wasgreat-grandson of the brother of the Great Condé. He performedcreditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession (in Piedmont1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as director ofthe secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was to makeTurkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia primarily, and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate opposition to thecourt, protesting against the destruction of the _parlements_ (1771), and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally he hadthe honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his deathbed. See Martin's _Hist. De France_, xv. And xvi. 

[5] _Conf. _, 97. _Corr. _, v. 215. 

[6] _Corr. _, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760. 

[7] _Conf. _, x. 98. 

[8] The reader will distinguish this correspondent of Rousseau's, _Comtesse_ de Boufflers-Rouveret (1727-18--), from the _Duchesse_ deBoufflers, which was the title of Rousseau's Maréchale de Luxembourgbefore her second marriage. And also from the _Marquise_ de Boufflers, said to be the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at Lunéville, andthe mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the intimate ofVoltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage toNapoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII. ). See Jal's_Dict. Critique_, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our presentComtesse de Boufflers (_Nouveaux Lundis_, iv. 163). She is the Madamede Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his Templechambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable manner(Boswell's _Life_, ch. Li. P. 467). Also much talked of in H. Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768. 

[9] Streckeisen, ii. 32. 

[10] _Conf. _, x. 71. 

[11] For instance, _Corr. _ ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759. 

[12] Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc. 

[13] _Ib. _, 29. 

[14] _Conf. _, x. 99. 

[15] _Ib. _, x. 57. 

[16] _Ib. _, xi. 119. 

[17] _Corr. _, ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761. 

[18] _Ib. _, ii. 102, 176, etc. 

[19] _Conf. _, x. 60. 

[20] _Corr. _, ii. 12. 

[21] As M. St. Marc Girardin has put it: "There are in all Rousseau'sdiscussions two things to be carefully distinguished from one another;the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the controversy. The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions are full ofgood sense. " _Rev. Des Deux Mondes_, Aug. 1852, p. 501. 

[22] _Corr. _, ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761. 

[23] _Ib. _, 1766. _Oeuv. _, lxxv. 364. 

[24] _Corr. _, ii. 32. (1758. )

[25] _Corr. _, ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779. 

[26] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 102. 

[27] 4th Letter, p. 375. 

[28] _Mém. _, ii. 299. 

[29] _Corr. _, ii. 98. July 10, 1759. 

[30] _Corr. _, ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759. 

[31] _Ib. _, ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761. 

[32] _Ib. _, ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761. 

[33] _Ib. _, ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761. 

[34] _Nouv. Hél. _, III. Xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed essays on"Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul" were published inLondon:--"With Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poisoncontained in these Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, TwoLetters on Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa. " In the preface the readeris told that these "two very masterly letters have been muchcelebrated. " See Hume's _Essays_, by Green and Grose, i. 69, 70. 

[35] _Corr. _, iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763. 

[36] _Corr. _, ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761. 

[37] P. 294. Jan. 11, 1762. 

[38] Madame Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife of a manin the financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as much of herfortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775. After thatshe resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de Franqueville. Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, _Causeries_, ii. 63. 

[39] _Corr. _, ii. 214. _Conf. _, ix. 289. 

[40] English translations of Rousseau's works appeared very speedilyafter the originals. A second edition of the Heloïsa was called for asearly as May 1761. See _Corr. _ ii. 223. A German translation of theHeloïsa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six duodecimos. 

[41] For instance, _Corr. _, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762. 

[42] Choderlos de La Clos: 1741-1803. 

[43] Journal, iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857. )

[44] _Nouv. Hél. _, III. Xiv. 48. 

[45] _E. G. _ Letters, 40-46. 

[46] Madame de Staël (1765-1817), in her _Lettres sur les écrits et lecaractère de J. J. Rousseau_, written when she was twenty, and herfirst work of any pretensions. _Oeuv. _, i. 41. Ed. 1820. 

[47] Nowhere more pungently than in a little piece of some half-dozenpages, headed, _Prédiction tirée d'un vieux Manuscrit_, the form ofwhich is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about Frenchmusic, _Le petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda_, though it seems to me tobe superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few verses from thesupposed prophecy of the man who should come--and of what he shoulddo. "Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et plusieurs croiront en lui. Et il leur dira: Vous êtes des scélérats et des fripons, vos femmessont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens vivre parmi vous. Et ilajoutera tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le pays où je suis né, etje n'habiterai jamais le pays où je suis né. . . . Et il dira aussi qu'ilest impossible d'avoir des moeurs, et de lire des Romans, et il feraun Roman; et dans son Roman le vice sera en action et la vertu enparoles, et ses personages seront forcenés d'amour et de philosophie. Et dans son Roman on apprendra l'art de suborner philosophiquement unejeune fille. Et l'Ecolière perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et ellefera avec son maître des sottises et des maximes. . . . Et le bel Amiétant dans un Bateau seul avec sa Maîtresse voudra le jetter dansl'eau et se précipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de laPhilosophie et de la Vertu, " and so on, humorously enough in its way. 

[48] See passages in Goncourt's _La Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 380. 

[49] Musset-Pathay, II. 361. See Madame Roland's _Mém. _, i. 207. 

[50] _Corr. _, March 3, and March 19, 1761. The criticisms of Ximénès, a thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were entirely literary, and were directed against the too strained and highly coloured qualityof the phrases--"baisers âcres"--among them. 

[51] _Nouv. Hél. _, V. V. 115. 

[52] VI. Vii. 

[53] VI. Vi. 

[54] Michelet's _Louis XV. Et Louis XVI. _, p. 58. 

[55] See Hettner's _Literaturgeschichte_, II. 486. 

[56] IV. Xi. 

[57] IV. Xvii. See vol. Iii. 423. 

[58] In 1816. Moore's _Life_, iii. 247; also 285. And the note to thestanzas in the Third Canto, --a note curious for a slight admixture oftranscendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron, who, sentimental thoughhe was, usually rejoiced in a truly Voltairean common sense. 

[59] "The present fashion in France, of passing some time in thecountry, is new; at this time of the year, and for many weeks past, Paris is, comparatively speaking, empty. Everybody who has a countryseat is at it, and such as have none visit others who have. Thisremarkable revolution in the French manners is certainly one of thebest customs they have taken from England; and its introduction waseffected the easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau'swritings. Mankind are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, whenliving, was hunted from country to country, to seek an asylum, with asmuch venom as if he had been a mad dog; thanks to the vile spirit ofbigotry, which has not received its death wound. Women of the firstfashion in France are now ashamed of not nursing their own children;and stays are universally proscribed from the bodies of the poorinfants, which were for so many ages torture to them, as they arestill in Spain. The country residence may not have effects equallyobvious; but they will be no less sure in the end, and in all respectsbeneficial to every class in the state. " Arthur Young's _Travels_, i. 72. 

[60] _Causeries_, xi. 195. 

[61] _Nouv. Hél. _, V. Iii. "You remember Rousseau's description of anEnglish morning: such are the mornings I spend with these goodpeople. "--Cowper to Joseph Hill, Oct. 25, 1765. _Works_, iii. 269. Ina letter to William Unwin (Sept. 21, 1779), speaking of his beingengaged in mending windows, he says, "Rousseau would have been charmedto have seen me so occupied, and would have exclaimed with rapturethat he had found the Emilius who, he supposed, had subsisted only inhis own idea. " For a description illustrative of the likeness betweenRousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see letter to Newton(Sept. 18, 1784, v. 78), and compare it with the description of LesCharmettes, making proper allowance for the colour of prose. 

[62] IV. X. 260. 

[63] V. Ii. 37. 

[64] V. Ii. 47-52. 

[65] Rousseau considered that the Fourth and Sixth parts of the NewHeloïsa were masterpieces of diction. _Conf. _ ix. 334. 

[66] VI. Viii. . 298. _Conf. _, xi. 106. 

[67] The La Bédoyère case, which began in 1745. See Barbier, iv. 54, 59, etc. 

[68] III. Xviii. 84. 

[69] III. Xx. 116. In the letter to Christopher de Beaumont (p. 102), he fires a double shot against the philosophers on the one hand, andthe church on the other; exalting continence and purity, of which thephilosophers in their reaction against asceticism thought lightly, andexalting marriage over the celibate state, which the churchmenassociated with mysterious sanctity. 

[70] I. Lxii. 

[71] V. Ii. 

[72] V. Vii. 141. 

[73] V. Ii. 31-33. 

[74] For the Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviii. 58. 

[75] Morellet's _Mém. _, i. 89-93. Rousseau, _Conf. _, x. 85, etc. This_Vision_ is also in the style of Grimm's _Pétit Prophète_, like thepiece referred to in a previous note, vol. Ii. P. 31. 

[76] Madame de Vandeul's _Mém. Sur Diderot_, p. 27. Rousseau, _Conf. _, vii. 130. 

[77] _Nouv. Hél. _, V. Xiii. 194. _Conf. _, x. 43. 

[78] The reader will find a fuller mention of the French book trade inmy _Diderot_, ch. Vi. 

[79] _Conf. _, xi. 127. 

[80] See a letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, Nov. 5, 1760. _Corr. _, ii. 157. 

[81] _Corr. _, ii. 157. 

[82] C. G. De Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721--guillotined, 1794), son of the chancellor, and one of the best instructed and mostenlightened men of the century--a Turgot of the second rank--wasDirecteur de la Librairie from 1750-1763. The process was this: a bookwas submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's reportthe director gave or refused permission to print, or requiredalterations. Even after these formalities were complied with, the bookwas liable to a decree of the royal council, a decree of theparliament, or else a _lettre-de-cachet_ might send the author to theBastile. See Barbier, vii. 126. 

After Lord Shelburne saw Malesherbes, he said, "I have seen for thefirst time in my life what I never thought could exist--a man whosesoul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet who is full of lifeand ardour. " Mdlle. Lespinasse's _Lettres_, 90. 

[83] See note, p. 132. 

[84] _Conf. _, xi. 134. 

[85] _Conf. _, xi. 139. 

[86] _Ib. _, xi. 139. _Corr. _, ii. 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761, etc. 

[87] _Conf. _, xi. 150. 

[88] Fourth Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377. 

[89] With one trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the Opera ofOmphale (1752): _Écrits sur la Musique_, p. 337. 

[90] See Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857). Asuccinct contemporary account of the general situation is to be foundin D'Alembert's little book, the _Destruction des Jésuites_. 

[91] Grimm, for instance: _Corr. Lit. _, iii. 117. 

[92] _Corr. _, ii. 337. June 7, 1672. _Conf. _, xi. 152, 162. 

[93] _Conf. _, xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in _Judges_, ch. Xix. 

CHAPTER II. 

PERSECUTION. [94]

Those to whom life consists in the immediate consciousness oftheir own direct relations with the people and circumstances that arein close contact with them, find it hard to follow the moods of a manto whom such consciousness is the least part of himself, and suchrelations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was no sooner inthe post-chaise which was bearing him away towards Switzerland, thanthe troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a pale anddistant past, and he returned to a world where was neither parliament, nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal arrest. Hetook up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it, andagain fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. Hisdream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, andbefore the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassionedversion of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual finesonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himselfalways preserved a certain tenderness for it. [95] The contrastbetween this singular quietism and the angry stir that markedVoltaire's many flights in post-chaises, points like all else to theprofound difference between the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrillcries under any personal vexation, this calm utterance:--"Though theconsequences of this affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes fromwhich I shall never come up again so long as I live, I bear thesegentlemen no grudge. I am aware that their object was not to do me anyharm, but only to reach ends of their own. I know that towards me theyhave neither liking nor hate. I was found in their way, like a pebblethat you thrust aside with the foot without even looking at it. Theyought not to say they have performed their duty, but that they havedone their business. "[96] A new note from a persecuted writer. 

Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him thathe was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passingoutbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and activeresentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throngof phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all senseof more actual impression. "It is amazing, " he wrote, "with what easeI forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as theanticipation of it alarms and confuses me when I see it coming, sothe memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the momentafter it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itselfincessantly in anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes adiversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those whichhave gone. I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have suffered inforeseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary, being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and broodand ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever Iwish. "[97] The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. "Iconcern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern aboutthe offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him, on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure hewould do me no more, what he had already done would be forgottenstraightway. " Though he does not carry the analysis any further, wemay easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he calledhis natural ingratitude. Kindness was not much more vividly understoodby him than malice. It was only one form of the troublesomeinterposition of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry backfrom it to the real world of his dreams. If any man called practicalis tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in hischaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making thatjourney through France less than thirty years later might have seenthe castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a mostrighteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from theland to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred ofimprovement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion oftoilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping withpassionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thoughtof as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partiallyforesaw and helped to prepare, [98] while the common politicians, likeChoiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game--the elemental forcesrising unseen into tempest around them. 

He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at thehouse of an old friend at Yverdun, [99] where native air, the beauty ofthe spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired allweariness and fatigue. [100] Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincerefeeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates tooclosely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroyhim. [101] A post or two later brought worse news. The Council atGeneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to bepublicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author, if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June19). [102] Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the freeGovernment which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could havecondemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristicmanner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken hispart. [103] Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another. Histwo books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau wasinformed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its wayadmonishing him to quit the canton within the space of fifteendays. [104] This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village inthe principality of Neuchâtel (July 10), then part of the dominions ofthe King of Prussia. [105] Rousseau had some antipathy to Frederick, both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, andbecause his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under footrespect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He hadcomposed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like aphilosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriouslybeing words of equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also apassage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which wascommonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians. StillRousseau was acute enough to know that mean passions usually only rulethe weak, and have little hold over the strong. He boldly wrote bothto the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of the principality, informing them that he was there, and asking permission to remain inthe only asylum left for him upon the earth. [106] He compared himselfloftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in avein that must have amused the strong man. "I have said much ill ofyou, perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, fromGeneva, from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in yourstates. Perhaps I was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy ofwhich you are worthy. Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and Iseek none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty that I amin your power, and that I am so of set design. Your majesty willdispose of me as shall seem good to you. "[107] Frederick, though noadmirer of Rousseau or his writings, [108] readily granted the requiredpermission. He also, says Lord Marischal, "gave me orders to furnishhim his small necessaries if he would accept them; and though thatking's philosophy be very different from that of Jean Jacques, yet hedoes not think that a man of an irreproachable life is to bepersecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs to buildhim a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not accept, nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him. "[109] When theoffer of the flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in asdelicate terms as possible, Rousseau declined the gift on groundswhich may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather touchingsimplicity. [110] "I have enough to live on for two or three years, " hesaid, "but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the presentcondition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, goand eat grass and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread fromhim. "[111] Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world ofletters, and one very honourable for the person concerned. [112] And werecognise its dignity the more when we contrast it with the basenessof Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia whileFrederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet wassportively exulting to all his correspondents in the maliciousexpectation that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussiahimself a pension. [113] And Rousseau was a poor man, living among thepoor and in their style. His annual outlay at this time was covered bythe modest sum of sixty louis. [114] What stamps his refusal ofFrederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only didnot refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it. Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him. Joyfully, replied Rousseau, "but as I cannot subsist without the aidof my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that itmight otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time fornothing. "[115] In the same year, we may add, when the tremendousstruggle of the Seven Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote asecond terse epistle to the king, and with this their directcommunication came to an end. "Sire, you are my protector and mybenefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to give mebread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take thatsword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done itswork only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career forkings of your stuff, and you are still far from the term; timepresses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom well your heart, OFrederick! Can you dare to die without having been the greatest ofmen? Would that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubtable, covering his states with multitudes of men to whom he should be afather; then will J. J. Rousseau, the foe of kings, hasten to die atthe foot of his throne. "[116] Frederick, strong as his interest was inall curious persons who could amuse him, was too busy to answer this, and Rousseau was not yet recognised as Voltaire's rival in power andpopularity. 

Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flatbottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between thegorges of the Jura and the Lake of Neuchâtel, and is famous in our dayfor its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley, with the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst ofit, is nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. Inwinter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and thesurrounding hills admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early. Rousseau's description, accurate and recognisable as it is, [117]strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece ofscenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines, changes of light, soft variations of colour; the landscape lives forhim with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all ofwhich the swift passing stranger is very cold. 

His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the otherhouses, and his walks, which were at least as important to him as thehome in which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streamingcascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humblesort, and here that interest in plants which had always been strong inhim, began to grow into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feelingabout them, that when in his botanical expeditions he came across asingle flower of its kind, he could never bring himself to pluck it. His sight, though not good for distant objects, was of the very finestfor things held close; his sense of smell was so acute and subtlethat, according to a good witness, he might have classified plants byodours, if language furnished as many names as nature suppliesvarieties of fragrance. [118] He insisted in all botanising and otherwalking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the heat of thedog-days; he declared that the action of the sun did him good. Whenthe days began to turn, the summer was straightway at an end for him:"My imagination, " he said, in a phrase which went further through hislife than he supposed, "at once brings winter. " He hated rain as muchas he loved sun, so he must once have lost all the mystic fascinationof the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through pale showers, andnow again must have lost the sombre majesty of the pines of his valleydripping in torn edges of cloud, and all those other sights inlandscape that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense. 

One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat ofLord Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendshipwhich he felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. Andthe sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for thestrange refugee who had come to him for shelter, or shall we call it akind of shaggy compassion, as of a faithful inarticulate creature. Hisletters, which are numerous enough, abound in expressions of heartygood-will. These, if we reflect on the genuine worth, veracity, penetration, and experience of the old man who wrote them, may fairlybe counted the best testimony that remains to the existence ofsomething sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character. [119] It ishere no insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely andweather-beaten Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee'srectitude of heart and true sensibility. [120]

He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, whohad joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a truesolicitude and considerateness both for her and for him. [121] It washis constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacquesshould accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trioof philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry isshown by the pains he took in settling the route for the journey. [122]The plan only fell through in consequence of Frederick's cordialurgency that his friend should end his days with him; he returned toPrussia and lived at Sans Souci until the close, always retainingsomething of his good-will for "his excellent savage, " as he calledthe author of the Discourses. They had some common antipathies, including the fundamental one of dislike to society, and especially tothe society of the people of Neuchâtel, the Gascons of Switzerland. "Rousseau is gay in company, " Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, "polite, and what the French call _aimable_, and gains ground daily in theopinion of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue topersecute him, and he is pestered with anonymous letters. "[123]

Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand. Voltaire had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling ofGeneva against its too famous citizen, [124] though for a man of lessenergy the affair of the Calas, which he was now in the thick of, might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard hefound it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for theunfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tastingpersecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was afalse brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could takehis part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause. [125]On the whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word, thoughnot very categorically given, [126] that he had nothing to do with theaction taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequatelyexplained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva, which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books, [127]and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of theirtown a man whose democratic tendencies they now knew so well and sojustly dreaded. [128] Moultou, a Genevese minister, in the full tideof devotion and enthusiasm for the author of Emilius, met Voltaire atthe house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out well, cried thepatriarch; "the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you have done ill towrite what you have written; promise for the future to respect thereligion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and perhaps hewill say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or two tohis book. " "Never, " cried the ardent Moultou; "Jean Jacques never putshis name to works to disown them after. "[129] Voltaire disowned hisown books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudgeto Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards, professed an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and wouldtalk of nothing else. "I swear to you, " wrote Moultou, "that I couldnot understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; Icould have sworn that he loved you. "[130] And there really was noacting in it. The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealingwith "one all fire and fickleness, a child. "

Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band ofprofessed unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. Thedoctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by thelawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter ofcourse. In the same spirit of generous emulation, Christopher deBeaumont, "by the divine compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of SaintCloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost, " hadissued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful documents in whichbishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last centuryand a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead anddecomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually inproportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and anarchbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedomin superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762)is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from themandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man, after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau nevershowed the substantial quality of his character more surely andunmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austereself-command, such closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure inreading the matchless banter with which Voltaire assailed histheological enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont werealise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire hadgiven us. We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, whileVoltaire only made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre, thecrosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, theDuke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the HolyGhost, is restored from the disguises of his enchantment, and becomesa human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing a man. Voltaireoften sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised thearchbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressedhim as an equal. "Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? Whatcommon tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? Andwhat is there between me and you?" And he persevered in this distantlofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. Wefeel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This wasbecause, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered ofdreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in hischaracter. He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently, that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rankand post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands andought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and wordsheedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the mostsacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; thatour passage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to bewasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect forothers. All this was actually his mind. And hence the littledifficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to hisother antagonists, on a worthy level. 

Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with whichhe had been condemned, and of the persecution which was inflicted onhim by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of highremonstrance. "You accuse me of temerity, " he cried; "how have Iearned such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even thatwith so much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that withso much respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you, my lord, how do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom youspeak with such scanty justice and so little decency, with so smallrespect and so much levity? You call me impious, and of what impietycan you accuse me--me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except topay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor of man except topersuade all men to love one another? The impious are those whounworthily profane the cause of God by making it serve the passions ofmen. The impious are those who, daring to pass for the interpreters ofdivinity, and judges between it and man, exact for themselves thehonours that are due to it only. The impious are those who arrogate tothemselves the right of exercising the power of God upon earth, andinsist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at their own goodwill and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels read in thechurch. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears ofindignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shallrender an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you havedared to put his house. . . . My lord, you have publicly insulted me:you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were aprivate person like myself, so that I could cite you before anequitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with mybook, and you with your mandate, assuredly you would be declaredguilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as thewrong was public. But you belong to a rank that relieves you from thenecessity of being just, and I am nothing. Yet you who profess thegospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you knowwhat your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have done: I have nothingmore to say to you, and I hold my peace. "[131]

The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For thisis a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding hisopinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, shouldhave been one of the keenest and most trenchant of thecontroversialists of a very controversial time. Some of his strokes indefence of his first famous assault on civilisation are as hard, asdirect, and as effective as any in the records of polemicalliterature. We will give one specimen from the letter to theArchbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argumentthat is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The SavoyardVicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voiceof God, on account of the long distance of time between us, and thequestionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishopthus:--"But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier thanthose of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himselfknown the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, andheroes he extols with such assurance? How many generations of menbetween him and the historians who have preserved the memory of theseevents?" First, says Rousseau in answer, "it is in the order of thingsthat human circumstances should be attested by human evidence, andthey can be attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome andSparta existed, because contemporaries assure me that they existed. Insuch a case this intermediate communication is indispensable. But whyis it necessary between God and me? Is it simple or natural that Godshould have gone in search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?Second, nobody is obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, andnobody will be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every factof which we are not witnesses is only established by moral proofs, andmoral proofs have various degrees of strength. Will the divine justicehurl me into hell for missing the exact point at which a proof becomesirresistible? If there is in the world an attested story, it is thatof vampires; nothing is wanting for judicial proof, --reports andcertificates from notables, surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But whobelieves in vampires, and shall we all be damned for not believing?Third, _my constant experience and that of all men is stronger inreference to prodigies than the testimony of some men_. "

He then strikes home with a parable. The Abbé Pâris had died in theodour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went onat his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy weremade whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitantof the Rue St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, "Mylord, I know that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean dePâris, nor in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to workupon his tomb in the sight of the most enlightened and most populouscity in the world; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have justseen the saint in person raised from the dead in the spot where hisbones were laid. " The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detailof such a circumstance that could strike a beholder. "I am persuadedthat on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating himwho testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, hisconfessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from hisspeech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when havingno confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion thathe is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are aconvulsionary, and have seen Saint Pâris resuscitated. There isnothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many other wonders!" Theman would insist that the miracle had been seen equally by a number ofother people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of soundsense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some would send theman to Bedlam, "but you after a grave reprimand, will be content withsaying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of soundsense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not knowhow many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist. Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: Igive you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you tomake your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any othersensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that evenaccording to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofswhich are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moralpossibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another orderand purely supernatural. "[132]

Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Pariswas less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministersat his gates. "If I had declared for atheism, " he says bitterly, "theywould at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me inpeace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watchover me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a highfavour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and Ishould have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israelwould not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity wouldnot have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken thetrouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway, an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off ifsome good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle. Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and tormentme to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge atme from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of theirsermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed theirimportunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a callto lay me in my very grave with weariness. "[133]

He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilantneighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known. It was at Neuchâtel that the controversy as to the eternal punishmentof the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. Thepeace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended, magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederickpromulgated his famous bull:--"Let the parsons who make for themselvesa cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire anddeserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful, enjoy the plenitude of his mercy. "[134] When Rousseau came within theterritory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris, Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission thatsaved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was ofthe less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not, without failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglectthe public profession of the faith to which he had been restored eightyears before, attended the religious services with regularity. He evenwrote to the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, andprotesting the sincerity of his union with the reformedcongregation. [135] The result of this was that the pastor came to tellhim how great an honour he held it to count such a member in hisflock, and how willing he was to admit him without further examinationto partake of the communion. [136] Rousseau went to the ceremony witheyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may respecthis mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly moreedifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite, merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury. 

In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three yearsof his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what hecalls the inactive chattering of the parlour--people sitting in frontof one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except thetongue--he learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillowabout with him, or sat at his own door working like the women of thevillage, and chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of hiswork to young women about to marry, always on the condition that theyshould suckle their children when they came to have them. If a littlewhimsical, it was a harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanterto think of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than ofnoblemen making it the business of their lives to run after ribands. Asociety clothed in breeches was incensed about the same time byRousseau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest, the furredbonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There was nothing very wonderfulin this departure from use. An Armenian tailor used often to visitsome friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him, and reflected thatsuch a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the circumstancesof his bodily disorder. [137] Here was a solid practical reason forwhat has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain. Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham hadfor coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and adesire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do withRousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits likethe Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so. We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it wasso or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would bevery little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities ofthis kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality ofarticulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love byreducing all action out of the common course to a series of variationson the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity ofexperience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil aboutunknowable trifles. 

During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own. Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or bycuriosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments, came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sendingpeople to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. "Ihad never been free from strangers for six weeks, " he writes. "Twodays after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six dayslater, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese, recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell illagain, and he has only just gone away. "[138] One visitor, writing hometo his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage, describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch us withsurprise:--"Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what truepoliteness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity andcheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a differentpicture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave andsometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of greatmildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the likeof which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takesan interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about himspeaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlastinggrumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats andjokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper. "[139] He was not socivil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers witha word of most sardonic roughness. [140] But he could also be verygenerous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on anoutcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happensrarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment, nor to exact it. "[141] He received hundreds of letters, some seekingan application of his views on education to a special case, otherscraving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he hadbeen at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage ofletters, which after all contained little more than reproaches, insults, menaces, imbecilities. [142]

Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that withthe Prince of Würtemberg, then living near Lausanne. [143] The princehad a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that herupbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might pleaseto direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend todirect the education of princes or princesses. [144] His undauntedcorrespondent sent him full details of his babe's habits andfaculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with thefondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested, and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture andadmonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal, but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thoughthe had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any ratespoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, hiseagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagernessin trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple andmethodical way to please his master, his discipular patience whenRousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fondof his wife, --all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deservesa place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power whichRousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humaneeducation had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, closeand direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places. But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one, and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His princesent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endlesswith their details of the nursery, may well have become a littletedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone. [145]The famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy whocould have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose. [146]People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unluckyphilosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friendswhose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal ofglory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks. 

It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon andBoswell in the list of the multitudes with whom he had to do at thistime. [147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had justreturned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him thathis father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of anobscure Swiss pastor. He had just "yielded to his fate, sighed as alover, and obeyed as a son. " "How sorry I am for our poor MademoiselleCurchod, " writes Moultou to Rousseau; "Gibbon whom she loves, and towhom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has cometo Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his oldpassion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter thatmakes my heart ache. " He then entreats Rousseau to use his influencewith Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extollingto him the lady's worth and understanding. [148] "I hope Mr. Gibbonwill not come, " replied the sage; "his coldness makes me think ill ofhim. I have been looking over his book again [the _Essai sur l'étudede la littérature_, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and isstrained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do notthink he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either. "[149] WhetherGibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what hadbeen said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp thatthis extraordinary man should have been less precipitate incondemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger. [150]

Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson "rolling his majestic frame inhis usual manner" on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on histravels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to LordMarischal, and here his indomitable passion for making the personalacquaintance of any one who was much talked about, naturally led himto seek so singular a character as the man who was now at Motiers. What Rousseau thought of one who was as singular a character ashimself in another direction, we do not know. [151] Lord Marischalwarned Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but fullof visionary ideas, even having seen spirits--a serious proof ofunsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere ofFrederick's court at Berlin. "I only hope, " says the sage Scot, of theScot who was not sage, "that he may not fall into the hands of peoplewho will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception yougave him. "[152] As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell toa place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously. Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this isthe proper place for us very briefly to speak. 

The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert theirindependence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, whichhad begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli(1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle thegovernment of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said, "There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and thatis the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which thisbrave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty, entitle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach themhow to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle willone day astonish Europe, "[153]--a presentiment that in a sense cametrue enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on thelittle island seven years later than the publication of this passage. Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for thepurpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions anda code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief inthe application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had nointention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only ofinducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing ahistory of their exploits. [154] Rousseau, however, did not understandthe invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very ideaof such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he enteredinto it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself withTheresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a yearhe would collect the necessary information as to the manners andopinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he wouldproduce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free andvalorous people. [155] In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) heurged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, withresults which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768), and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a longday afterwards. "Mind your own affairs, " at length cried Johnsonsternly to him, "and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you wouldempty your head of Corsica. "[156] At the end of 1765, the immortalhero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero atMotiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letterin wonderful French. "You will forget all your cares for many anevening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepestobligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has done memarvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch hadsunk into my soul. . . . I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; ifyou, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen tohelp them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which theyhave acquired with so much heroism--if you have cooled towards thesegallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I cansay. "[157]

Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out ofRousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some otherenemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgusof Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temperfound what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidentswith which we certainly need not concern ourselves. [158] Next, a veryreal storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a newplace of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. ForFrance having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance ofthe Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoesesenate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)--an iniquitoustransaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking tojustice, humanity, reason, and policy. [159] Civilisation would havebeen saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availedherself of her equity, and so have delivered France from theacquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged astate. [160]

The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Genevainto two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between hispartisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was politicalrather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protestagainst the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and thequarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between thepopular and aristocratic parties. This strife, after coming to aheight for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacificationof 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and theroots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of theauthority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau hadbeen condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute, and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popularside that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs hadcondemned was more like Christianity than the religion of theoligarchs who condemned it. 

Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involvedin its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who wereengaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about hisears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved tofancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day. But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveyswith clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods ofthe world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who iswrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men abouthim, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he hasmeasured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among theelements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one whois penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of hisfellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and self-sufficience true. The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under longpersecution far surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachersof the time. In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in alldue forms his rights of burgess-ship and citizenship in the city andrepublic of Geneva. [161] And at length he broke forth against hisGenevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a longbut extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which hisenemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If anyone now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal thetreatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authoritiesof his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcibleletters. The second part of them may interest the student of politicalhistory by its account of the working of the institutions of thelittle republic. We seem to be reading over again the history of aGreek city; the growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasingnumber of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfairproportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislativeand administrative function (including especially the judicial) by theoligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchicends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed bymetabolé or overthrow of the established constitution, ending inforeign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens would have treatedany Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just assternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the SocialContract that did appear, and for just the same reasons. 

Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body ofburgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legalright, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council thatthe laws had been broken in his case. The Council in return availeditself of an equally legal right, its _droit négatif_, and declined toentertain the representation, without giving any reasons. Unfortunately for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his newvindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnationand burning of his manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered theLetters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and thesame faggot served for that and for Voltaire's PhilosophicalDictionary (April 1765). [162] It was also burned at the Hague (Jan. 22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that atParis it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclopædists andtheir flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal ofthe magistrates in motion. [163] The vanity and egoism of rationalisticsects can be as fatal to candour, justice, and compassion as theintolerant pride of the great churches. 

Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapesthan this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsestcalumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent itto Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that itwas by a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in freshmortification, for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declinedto accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimoniousdeclarations, explanations, protests. [164] Then the clergy ofNeuchâtel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity ofinflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they mightmore charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting tormentswhich were so precious to their religious imagination. They began topress the pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom hehad hitherto been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had beenliberal enough to admit his singular parishioner to the communion, inspite of the Savoyard Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist thebigotry of the professional body to which he belonged. He warnedRousseau not to present himself at the next communion. The philosopherinsisted that he had a right to do this, until formally cast out bythe consistory. The consistory, composed mainly of a body of peasantsentirely bound to their minister in matters of religion, cited him toappear, and answer such questions as might test his loyalty to thefaith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of all that hehad written, which he intended to speak to his rustic judges. The eveof the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his discourse byheart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences. So he fellback on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he had overtongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in whomirritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat toprofessional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication, but there appears to have been some indirect interference with theproceedings of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuchâtel, and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back. [165] Other weapons were notwanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours among his flock thatRousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all, that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine thatwomen have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to thehonest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in veryflesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness tosuch an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of hisneighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble nowand again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions werebelieved to be devoted to search for noxious herbs, and a man whodied in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have beenpoisoned by him. [166] If persons went to the post-office for lettersfor him, they were treated with insult. [167] At length the fermentagainst him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone wasfound placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one nightan attempt was made to stone him in his house. [168] Popular hate shownwith this degree of violence was too much for his fortitude, and aftera residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), hefled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where. 

In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in thelake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory. Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, withsomething of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of thesun. He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle ofSt. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whosegovernment had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for alittle ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought ofjurisdictions and proscriptive decrees. 

The spot where he now found peace for a brief space usuallydisappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearyinghimself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonicthat he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and seesonly tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than ahigh grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimicvales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of bluewater at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, with tiredmowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the sun, in a stillnessfaintly broken by the timid lapping of the water in the sedge, or therustling of swift lizards across the heated sand, while the Bernesesnow giants line a distant horizon with mysterious solitary shapes, itis easy to know what solace life in such a scene might bring to a mandistracted by pain of body and pain and weariness of soul. Rousseauhas commemorated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect of allhis compositions. [169]

 "I found my existence so charming, and led a life so agreeable to my humour, that I resolved here to end my days. My only source of disquiet was whether I should be allowed to carry my project out. In the midst of the presentiments that disturbed me, I would fain have had them make a perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me in it for all the rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off all chance and all hope of leaving it; to forbid me holding any communication with the mainland, so that, knowing nothing of what was going on in the world, I might have forgotten the world's existence, and people might have forgotten mine too. They only suffered me to pass two months in the island, but I could have passed two years, two centuries, and all eternity, without a moment's weariness, though I had not, with my companion, any other society than that of the steward, his wife, and their servants. They were in truth honest souls and nothing more, but that was just what I wanted. . . . Carried thither in a violent hurry, alone and without a thing, I afterwards sent for my housekeeper, my books, and my scanty possessions, of which I had the delight of unpacking nothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as they had come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on ending my days, exactly as if it were an inn whence I must needs set forth on the morrow. All things went so well, just as they were, that to think of ordering them better were to spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to leave my books safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be without even a case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to take up a pen for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the steward's inkstand, and hurried to give it back to him with all the haste I could, in the vain hope that I should never have need of the loan any more. Instead of meddling with those weary quires and reams and piles of old books, I filled my chamber with flowers and grasses, for I was then in my first fervour for botany. Having given up employment that would be a task to me, I needed one that would be an amusement, nor cause me more pains than a sluggard might choose to take. I undertook to make the _Flora petrinsularis_, and to describe every single plant on the island, in detail enough to occupy me for the rest of my days. In consequence of this fine scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took in company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systema Naturæ under my arm, to visit some district of the island. I had divided it for that purpose into small squares, meaning to go through them one after another in each season of the year. At the end of two or three hours I used to return laden with an ample harvest, a provision for amusing myself after dinner indoors, in case of rain. I spent the rest of the morning in going with the steward, his wife, and Theresa, to see the labourers and the harvesting, and I generally set to work along with them; many a time when people from Berne came to see me, they found me perched on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my waist; I kept filling it with fruit and then let it down to the ground with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning and the good humour that always comes from exercise, made the repose of dinner vastly pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up too long, and fine weather invited me forth, I could not wait, but was speedily off to throw myself all alone into a boat, which, when the water was smooth enough, I used to pull out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full length in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the sky, I let myself float slowly hither and thither as the water listed, sometimes for hours together, plunged in a thousand confused delicious musings, which, though they had no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that account a hundred times dearer to me than all that I had found sweetest in what they call the pleasures of life. Often warned by the going down of the sun that it was time to return, I found myself so far from the island that I was forced to row with all my might to get in before it was pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the midst of the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green shores of the island, where the clear waters and cool shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of my most frequent expeditions was from the larger island to the less; there I disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes in mimic rambles among wild elders, persicaries, willows, and shrubs of every species, sometimes settling myself on the top of a sandy knoll, covered with turf, wild thyme, flowers, even sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown there in old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They might multiply in peace without either fearing anything or harming anything. I spoke of this to the steward. He at once had male and female rabbits brought from Neuchâtel, and we went in high state, his wife, one of his sisters, Theresa, and I, to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of our colony was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not prouder than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in triumph from our island to the smaller one. . . . 

 When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my afternoon in going up and down the island, gathering plants to right and left; seating myself now in smiling lonely nooks to dream at my ease, now on little terraces and knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and ravishing prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one side by the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting into rich and fertile plains up to the feet of the pale blue mountains on their far-off edge. 

 As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high ground and sit on the beach at the water's brink in some hidden sheltering place. There the murmur of the waves and their agitation, charmed all my senses and drove every other movement away from my soul; they plunged it into delicious dreamings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux and reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir-swelling and falling at intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for the internal movements which my musings extinguished; they were enough to give me delight in mere existence, without taking any trouble of thinking. From time to time arose some passing thought of the instability of the things of this world, of which the face of the waters offered an image; but such light impressions were swiftly effaced in the uniformity of the ceaseless motion, which rocked me as in a cradle; it held me with such fascination that even when called at the hour and by the signal appointed, I could not tear myself away without summoning all my force. 

 After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all together for a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the freshness of the air from the lake. We sat down in the arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old song, and then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day, and only craving another that should be exactly like it on the morrow. . . . 

 All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it keeps a form constant and determinate; our affections, fastening on external things, necessarily change and pass just as they do. Ever in front of us or behind us, they recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future that in many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing solid to which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little more than a pleasure that comes and passes away; as for the happiness that endures, I cannot tell if it be so much as known among men. There is hardly in the midst of our liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could tell us with real truth--"_I would this instant might last for ever_. " And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state that all the time leaves the heart unquiet and void, that makes us regret something gone, or still long for something to come?

 But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation solid enough to comport with perfect repose, and with the expansion of its whole faculty, without need of calling back the past, or pressing on towards the future; where time is nothing for it, and the present has no ending; with no mark for its own duration and without a trace of succession; without a single other sense of privation or delight, of pleasure or pain, of desire or apprehension, than this single sense of existence--so long as such a state endures, he who finds himself in it may talk of bliss, not with a poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as people find in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness full, perfect, and sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious unfilled void. Such a state was many a day mine in my solitary musings in the isle of St. Peter, either lying in my boat as it floated on the water, or seated on the banks of the broad lake, or in other places than the little isle on the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet murmuring over a gravel bed. 

 What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing outside of one's self, nothing except one's self and one's own existence. . . . But most men, tossed as they are by unceasing passion, have little knowledge of such a state; they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then retain no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is too weak to let them feel its charm. It would not even be good in the present constitution of things, that in their eagerness for these gentle ecstasies, they should fall into a disgust for the active life in which their duty is prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase. But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing here below that is useful and good either for himself or for other people, may in such a state find for all lost human felicities many recompenses, of which neither fortune nor men can ever rob him. 

 'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all souls, nor in all situations. The heart must be in peace, nor any passion come to trouble its calm. There must be in the surrounding objects neither absolute repose nor excess of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement without shock, without interval. With no movement, life is only lethargy. If the movement be unequal or too strong, it awakes us; by recalling us to the objects around, it destroys the charm of our musing, and plucks us from within ourselves, instantly to throw us back under the yoke of fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to gloom. It offers an image of death: then the help of a cheerful imagination is necessary, and presents itself naturally enough to those whom heaven has endowed with such a gift. The movement which does not come from without then stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true; but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas, without agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim the surface. This sort of musing we may taste whenever there is tranquillity about us, and I have thought that in the Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object struck my sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice pleasurable day. 

 But it must be said that all this came better and more happily in a fruitful and lonely island, where nothing presented itself to me save smiling pictures, where nothing recalled saddening memories, where the fellowship of the few dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without being exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I was free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings of my taste or to the most luxurious indolence. . . . As I came out from a long and most sweet musing fit, seeing myself surrounded by verdure and flowers and birds, and letting my eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed a wide expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these attractive objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly recovered myself and recognised what was about me, I could not mark the point that cut off dream from reality, so equally did all things unite to endear to me the lonely retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not come back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in the beloved island, never to quit it, never again to see in it one dweller from the mainland, to bring back to me the memory of all the woes of every sort that they have delighted in heaping on my head for all these long years?. . . Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above this atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly intelligences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long taken. "

The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, camesoon to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptlydisturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the islandand their territory within fifteen days. He represented to theauthorities that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither togo, and that travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to hislife. He even made the most extraordinary request that any man insimilar straits ever did make. "In this extremity, " he wrote to theirrepresentative, "I only see one resource for me, and however frightfulit may appear, I will adopt it, not only without repugnance, but witheagerness, if their excellencies will be good enough to give theirconsent. It is that it should please them for me to pass the rest ofmy days in prison in one of their castles, or such other place intheir states as they may think fit to select. I will there live at myown expense, and I will give security never to put them to any cost. Isubmit to be without paper or pen, or any communication from without, except so far as may be absolutely necessary, and through the channelof those who shall have charge of me. Only let me have left, with theuse of a few books, the liberty to walk occasionally in a garden, andI am content. Do not suppose that an expedient, so violent inappearance, is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm at thismoment; I have taken time to think about it, and it is only afterprofound consideration that I have brought myself to this decision. Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution, mysituation is still more so. The distracted life that I have been madeto lead for several years without intermission would be terrible for aman in full health; judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worndown with weariness and misfortune, and who has now no wish save onlyto die in a little peace. "[170]

That the request was made in all sincerity we may well believe. Thedifference between being in prison and being out of it was really notconsiderable to a man who had the previous winter been confined to hischamber for eight months without a break. [171] In other respects theworld was as cheerless as any prison could be. He was an exile fromthe only places he knew, and to him a land unknown was terrible. Hehad thought of Vienna, and the Prince of Würtemburg had sought therequisite permission for him, but the priests were too strong in thecourt of the house of Austria. [172] Madame d'Houdetot offered him aresting-place in Normandy, and Saint Lambert in Lorraine. [173] Hethought of Potsdam. Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. Hewondered if he should have strength to cross the Alps and make his wayto Corsica. Eventually he made up his mind to go to Berlin, and hewent as far as Strasburg on his road thither. [174] Here he began tofear the rude climate of the northern capital; he changed his plans, and resolved to accept the warm invitations that he had received tocross over to England. His friends used their interest to procure apassport for him, [175] and the Prince of Conti offered him anapartment in the privileged quarter of the Temple, on his way throughParis. His own purpose seems to have been irresolute to the last, buthis friends acted with such energy and bustle on his behalf that theEnglish scheme was adopted, and he found himself in Paris (Dec. 17, 1765), on his way to London, almost before he had deliberatelyrealised what he was doing. It was a step that led him into many fatalvexations, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile we may pause toexamine the two considerable books which had involved his life in allthis confusion and perplexity. 

FOOTNOTES:

[94] June, 1762-December, 1765. 

[95] _Conf. _, xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume of hisworks entitled _Mélanges_. 

[96] _Corr. _, iii. 416. 

[97] _Conf. _, xi. 172. 

[98] For a remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see _Conf. _, xi. 136. 

[99] M. Roguin. June 14, 1762. 

[100] _Corr. _, ii. 347. 

[101] Streckeisen, i. 35. 

[102] His friend Moultou wrote him the news, Streckeisen, i. 43. Geneva was the only place at which the Social Contract was burnt. Herethere were peculiar reasons, as we shall see. 

[103] _Corr. _, ii. 356. 

[104] _Ib. _, ii. 358, 369, etc. 

[105] The principality of Neuchâtel had fallen by marriage (1504) tothe French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certaininterruptions retained it until the extinction of the line by thedeath of Marie, Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arosewith fifteen varieties of far-off title, as well as a party forconstituting Neuchâtel a Republic and making it a fourteenth canton. (Saint Simon, v. 276. ) The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to theProtestant house of Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV. , as heir of thepretensions of the extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace ofUtrecht (1713), Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for thecession by Prussia of the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held ituntil 1806. The disturbed history of the connection between Prussiaand Neuchâtel from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of theSwiss Confederation, down to 1857, does not here concern us. 

[106] _Corr. _, ii. 370. 

[107] _Corr. _, ii. 371. July 1762. 

[108] D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of thephilosophers, to Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765. 

[109] Letter to Hume; Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105, corroborating_Conf. _, xii. 196. 

[110] Marischal to J. J. R. ; Streckeisen, ii. 70. 

[111] _Corr. _, iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762. 

[112] Burton's _Life_, ii. 113. 

[113] Voltaire's _Corr. _ (1758). _Oeuv. _, lxxv. Pp. 31 and 80. 

[114] _Conf. _, xii. 237. 

[115] _Corr. _, iii. 41. Nov. 11, 1762. 

[116] _Corr. _, iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762. 

[117] _Ib. _, iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763. 

[118] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, etc. 

[119] George Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of Frederick's famousfield-marshal, James Keith. They had taken part in the Jacobite risingof 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James Keith brought hisbrother into the service of the King of Prussia, who sent him asambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards made him Governor of Neuchâtel(1754), and eventually prevailed on the English Government toreinstate him in the rights which he had forfeited by his share in therebellion (1763). 

[120] Streckeisen, ii. 98, etc. 

[121] One of Rousseau's chief distresses hitherto arose from theindigence in which Theresa would be placed in case of his death. Rey, the bookseller, gave her an annuity of about £16 a year, and LordMarischal's gift seems to have been 300 louis, the only money thatRousseau was ever induced to accept from any one in his life. SeeStreckeisen, ii. 99; _Corr. _, iii. 336. The most delicate and sincereof the many offers to provide for Theresa was made by Madame deVerdelin (Streckeisen, ii. 506). The language in which Madame deVerdelin speaks of Theresa in all her letters is the best testimony tocharacter that this much-abused creature has to produce. 

[122] _Ib. _, 90, 92, etc. Summer of 1763. 

[123] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762. 

[124] The Confessions are not our only authority for this. SeeStreckeisen, ii. 64; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762. 

[125] Voltaire's _Corr. _ _Oeuv. _, lxvii. 458, 459, 485, etc. 

[126] To D'Alembert, Sept. 15, 1762. 

[127] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87. 

[128] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87. 

[129] Streckeisen, i. 50. 

[130] _Ib. _, i. 76. 

[131] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 163-166. 

[132] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 130-135. 

[133] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, p. 93. 

[134] Carlyle's _Frederick_, Bk. Xxi. Ch. Iv. Rousseau, _Corr. _, iii. 102. 

[135] _Corr. _, iii. 57. Nov. 1762. To M. Montmollin. 

[136] _Conf. _, xii. 206. 

[137] _Conf. _, xii. 198. 

[138] _Corr. _, iii. 295. Dec. 25, 1763. 

[139] Quoted in Musset-Pathay, ii. 500. 

[140] For instance, _Corr. _, iii. 249. 

[141] _Ib. _, iii. 364, 381. 

[142] _Corr. _, iii. 181-186, etc. 

[143] Prince Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning dukefrom 1733 to 1737); a younger brother of Charles Eugene, known asSchiller's Duke of Würtemberg, who reigned up to 1793. FrederickEugene, known in the Seven Years' War, was another brother. Rousseau'scorrespondent became reigning duke in 1793, but only lived a year anda half afterwards. 

[144] _Corr. _, iii. 250. Sept. 29, 1763. 

[145] The prince's letters are given in the Streckeisen collection, vol. Ii. 

[146] Streckeisen, ii. 202. 

[147] Possibly Wilkes also; _Corr. _, iv. 200. 

[148] Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763. 

[149] _Corr. _, iii. 202. June 4, 1763. 

[150] _Memoirs of my Life_, p. 55, _n. _ (Ed. 1862). Necker(1732-1804), whom Mdlle. Curchod ultimately married, was an eageradmirer of Rousseau. "Ah, how close the tender, humane, and virtuoussoul of Julie, " he wrote to her author, "has brought me to you. Howthe reading of those letters gratified me! how many good emotions didthey stir or fortify! How many sublimities in a thousand places inthese six volumes; not the sublimity that perches itself in theclouds, but that which pushes everyday virtues to their highestpoint, " and so on. Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333. 

[151] Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters, Ibelieve; once (_Corr. _, iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which Humewas suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70) as the bearerof a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262. 

[152] Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765. 

[153] Bk. Ii. Ch. X. 

[154] Boswell's _Account of Corsica_, p. 367. 

[155] The correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has beenpublished in the _Oeuvres et Corr. Inédites de J. J. R. _, 1861. See pp. 35, 43, etc. 

[156] Boswell's _Life_, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 1866). 

[157] _"Je suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec pitié!"_Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from a Scotchlord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa toEngland, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. "This young gentleman, "writes Hume, "very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad--hassuch a rage for literature that I dread some circumstance fatal to ourfriend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who was firstmarried to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age marrieda young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret whichwould convey to him eloquence and genius. " Burton's _Life_, ii. 307, 308. Boswell mentions that he met Rousseau in England (_Account ofCorsica_, p. 340), and also gives Rousseau's letter introducing him toPaoli (p. 266). 

[158] To Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc. 

[159] _Corr. _, vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770. 

[160] It may be worth noticing, as a link between historic personages, that Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a _Lettre à MatteoButtafuoco_ (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseaucorresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the islandto France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, andfinally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party. 

[161] _Corr. _, iii. 190. To the First Syndic, May 12, 1763. 

[162] Grimm's _Corr. Lit. _, iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion of hisbook's companion at the stake, see _Corr. _, iii. 442. 

[163] Streckeisen, ii. 526. 

[164] There appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong inattributing to Vernes the _Sentimens des Citoyens_. 

[165] _Corr. _, iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August); also_Conf. _, xii. 245. 

[166] Note to M. Auguis's edition, _Corr. _, v. 395. 

[167] _Corr. _, iv. 204. 

[168] _Conf. _, xii. 259. This lapidation has sometimes been doubted, and treated as an invention of Rousseau's morbid suspicion. Theofficial documents prove that his account was substantially true (seeMusset-Pathay, ii. 559. )

[169] The fifth of the _Rêveries_. See also _Conf. _, 262-279, and_Corr. _, iv. 206-224. His stay in the island was from the second weekin September down to the last in October, 1765. 

[170] _Corr. _, iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765. 

[171] _Ib. _, iv. 136, etc. April 27, 1765. 

[172] Streckeisen-Moultou, ii. 209, 212. 

[173] _Ib. _, ii. 554. 

[174] He arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November, left itabout the end of the first week in December, and arrived in Paris onthe 16th of December 1765. A sort of apocryphal tradition is said tolinger in the island about Rousseau's last evening on the island, howafter supper he called for a lute, and sang some passably bad verses. See M. Bougy's _J. J. Rousseau_, p. 179 (Paris: 1853. )

[175] Madame de Verdelin to J. J. R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The ministereven expressed his especial delight at being able to serve Rousseau, so little seriousness was there now in the formalities of absolution. _Ib. _ 547. 

CHAPTER III. 

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 

The dominant belief of the best minds of the latter half ofthe eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the illimitablepossibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general overthrowof the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement ofhuman perfectibility. They differed as to the details of thephilosophy of government which they deduced from this philosophy ofsociety, but the conviction that a golden era of tolerance, enlightenment, and material prosperity was close at hand, belonged tothem all. Rousseau set his face the other way. For him the golden erahad passed away from our globe many centuries ago. Simplicity had fledfrom the earth. Wisdom and heroism had vanished from out of the mindsof leaders. The spirit of citizenship had gone from those who shouldhave upheld the social union in brotherly accord. The dream of humanperfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet, was to Rousseau a sourand fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do was to turn theireyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to walk for aspace in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardlysucceed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plagueof universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placedthe centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rationalexamination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effortto modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrogradeaspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We canhardly wonder, when we think of the intense exaltation of spiritproduced both by the perfectibilitarians and the followers ofRousseau, and at the same time of the political degradation andmaterial disorder of France, that so violent a contrast between theideal and the actual led to a great volcanic outbreak. Alas, thecrucial difficulty of political change is to summon new force withoutdestroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken so manygenerations to erect. The Social Contract is the formal denial of thepossibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty. 

"Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantageswhich he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great, his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, hissentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree, that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade himbelow that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to blesswithout ceasing the happy moment which rescued him from it for ever, and out of a stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and aman. "[176] The little parenthesis as to the frequent degradationproduced by the abuses of the social condition, does not prevent usfrom recognising in the whole passage a tolerably complete surrenderof the main position which was taken up in the two Discourses. Theshort treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry into the justfoundations and most proper form of that very political society, whichthe Discourses showed to have its foundation in injustice, and to beincapable of receiving any form proper for the attainment of the fullmeasure of human happiness. 

Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted anddefined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principalobjects of every system of legislation are declared to be liberty andequality. By equality we are warned not to understand that the degreesof power and wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respectof power, such power should be out of reach of any violence, and beinvariably exercised in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches, that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poorenough to sell himself. Do you say this equality is a mere chimera? Itis precisely because the force of things is constantly tending todestroy equality, that the force of legislation ought as constantly tobe directed towards upholding it. [177] This is much clearer than theindefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the secondDiscourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality beforethe law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly freecommunity. 

The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract thetendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions amongdifferent members of a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does itcover and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old _seisachtheia_ ofSolon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his landor his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius andthe Gracchi? Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law asthat which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son? We canonly criticise accurately a general idea of this sort in connectionwith specific projects in which it is applied. As it stands, it is nomore than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle ofpublic policy. It assumes the existence of property just as completelyas the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives noencouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality inbeing without property. There is no element of communism in aprinciple so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moralclaim of men to have equality of opportunity. This ideal stampeditself on the minds of Robespierre and the other revolutionaryleaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church andother lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buyin. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to workin the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known thatthe most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of therevolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the twoextreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-classfreeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there isundoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin isan illustration on the largest scale in history of the force oflegislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that hadbecome unbearable. [178]

Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more extravagant elements ofthe old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of thefundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors. "If the sea, " he says in one place, "bathes nothing but inaccessiblerocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live allthe more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly morehappily. "[179] Apart from an outburst like this, the central idearemained the same, though it was approached from another side and withdifferent objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost none ofits perilous attraction, though it was hung in a slightly changedlight. It remained the starting-point of the right and normalconstitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-pointof the denunciation of civil society as incapable of rightconstitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally withthe Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historicmethod which traces the present along a line of ascertainedcircumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbrokencontinuation of that line. The opening words, which sent such a thrillthrough the generation to which they were uttered in two continents, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains, " tell us at theoutset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method ofpositive observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducingpractical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any otherthan an abstract and phantasmatic existence. How is a man born free?If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is borninto a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a stateof social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more orless of freedom which this state may ultimately permit to him, dependsupon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among Romans andAthenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at perfectliberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive thecircumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A childwas not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the_patria potestas_ was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back, was he born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abrahamhad full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing hisdaughter. 

But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not opento such testimony. "My principles, " he said in contempt of Grotius, "are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the natureof things and are based on reason. "[180] He does indeed in one placeexpress his reverence for the Judaic law, and administers a justrebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only successfulimpostors in the old legislators. [181] But he paid no attention tothe processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression, nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of thesocial state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civilgovernment haunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taughthim that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded thedifficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the soncomes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a freeman too. [182] What of the old Roman use permitting a father to sellhis son three times? In the same metaphysical spirit Locke had laiddown the absolute proposition that "conjugal society is made by avoluntary compact between man and woman. "[183] This is true of a smallnumber of western societies in our own day, but what of the primitiveusages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase, and therest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon government inthe seventeenth century that they did not make good out of their ownconsciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitivecommunities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they didnot realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as aconsequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiatedall their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is notnaturally free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, andit was so because Filmer consulted and appealed to the most authenticof the historic records then accessible. [184]

It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberatelyput aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons, and it shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered byabstract prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge ofthe antidote; because Rousseau in several places not only admits, butinsists upon, the necessity of making institutions relative to thestate of the community, in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation, morality, character. "It is in view of such relations as these that wemust assign to each people a particular system, which shall be thebest, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it isdestined. "[185] In another place he calls attention to manners, customs, above all to opinion, as the part of a social system on whichthe success of all the rest depends; particular rules being only thearching of the vault, of which manners, though so much tardier inrising, form a key-stone that can never be disturbed. [186] This wasexcellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great truths, which men may hold in their minds without appreciating their fullvalue. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have oldroots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connectedwith the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn theyprepare modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical, impatient humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of thehistory of social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort thathe should be able to see a picture of perfect order and logical systemat both ends of his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with, his ideal state of nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that tothe social state. He swept away in his imagination the whole series ofactual incidents between present and past; and he constructed a systemwhich might be imposed upon all societies indifferently by alegislator summoned for that purpose, to wipe out existing uses, laws, and institutions, and make afresh a clear and undisturbed beginning ofnational life. The force of habit was slowly and insensibly to besubstituted for that of the legislator's authority, but the existenceof such habits previously as forces to be dealt with, and theexistence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of humannature and social possibility, are facts of which the author of theSocial Contract takes not the least account. 

Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of oldfact which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactlythe most unfortunate that a student in need of the historic methodcould possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations which arescantily dispersed in his pages, --and we must remark that they are nomore than illustrations for conclusions arrived at quite independentlyof them, and not the historical proof and foundations of hisconclusions, --are nearly all from the annals of the small states ofancient Greece, and from the earlier times of the Roman republic. Wehave already pointed out to what an extent his imagination was struckat the time of his first compositions by the tale of Lycurgus. Theinfluence of the same notions is still paramount. The hopelessness ofgiving good laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demonstrated bythe case of Minos, whose legislation failed in Crete because thepeople for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and by the furtherexample of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians andCyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never sufferequality. [187] The writer is thinking of Plato's Laws, when he saysthat just as nature has fixed limits to the stature of a well-formedman, outside of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so withreference to the best constitution for a state, there are bounds toits extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of goodgovernment, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. Thefurther the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, andin general a small state is proportionally stronger than a largeone. [188] In the remarks with which he proceeds to corroborate thisposition, we can plainly see that he is privately contrasting anindependent Greek community with the unwieldy oriental monarchyagainst which at one critical period Greece had to contend. He hadnever realised the possibility of such forms of polity as the RomanEmpire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took suchenormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of stateswhich came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant ofhis own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argumentthat a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen manis neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle'sargument to the same effect, on the ground that beauty demands size, and there must not be too great nor too small size, because a shipsails badly if it be either too heavy or too light. [189] And whenRousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, andtalks about the right size of its territory, [190] who does not thinkof the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribedto Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper number for the perfectlyformed state?[191] The prediction of the short career which awaits astate that is cursed with an extensive and accessible seaboard, corresponds precisely with the Athenian Stranger's satisfaction thatthe new city is to be eighty stadia from the coast. [192] When Rousseauhimself began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praisedthe selection of Corte as the chief town of a patrioticadministration, because it was far from the sea, and so itsinhabitants would long preserve their simplicity and uprightness. [193]And in later years still, when meditating upon a constitution forPoland, he propounded an economic system essentially Spartan; thepeople were enjoined to think little about foreigners, to givethemselves little concern about commerce, to suppress stamped paper, and to put a tithe upon the land. [194]

The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region. We are againreferred to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usuallyconfided to a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws. Hisexperience in Venice and the history of his native town supplementedthe examples of Greece. Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate forher, and "those who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scantyidea of the extent of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts, in which he had so large a part, do him as much honour as hisInstitutes. "[195] Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see thegrowth of government and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing fromthe growth of all the other parts and organs of society, and advancingin more or less equal step along with them. He could begin withnothing short of an absolute legislator, who should impose a systemfrom without by a single act, a structure hit upon once for all by hisindividual wisdom, not slowly wrought out by many minds, with popularassent and co-operation, at the suggestion of changing socialcircumstances and need. [196]

All this would be of very trifling importance in the history ofpolitical literature, but for the extraordinary influence whichcircumstances ultimately bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was thegospel of the Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party inFrance during the first months of the year 1794 is only fullyintelligible when we look upon it as the result and practicalapplication of Rousseau's teaching. The conception of the situationentertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was entirely moulded on allthis talk about the legislators of Greece and Geneva. "The transitionof an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which naturerose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion apeople whom you wish to make free--destroy its prejudices, alter itshabits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires. The state therefore must lay hold on every human being at his birth, and direct his education with powerful hand. Solon's weak confidencethrew Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's severity founded therepublic of Sparta on an immovable basis. "[197] These words, whichcome from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well betaken for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of theinstitutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country, reveal a man with the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in everyline he wrote. [198] When on the eve of the Thermidorian revolutionwhich overthrew him and his party, he insisted on the necessity of adictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by which he should atlength obtain the necessary power for forcing his regeneratingprojects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he namedas the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would lendthe full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas whichthey had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks towhom Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction. [199] Nodoubt the condition of France after 1792 must naturally have struckany one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social Contract tolook beneath the surface of the society with which the Convention hadto deal, as urgently inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The oldorder in church and state had been swept away, no organs for theperformance of the functions of national life were visible, the moralideas which had bound the social elements together in the extinctmonarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A politician who had foryears been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and Calvin, especially ifhe lived in a state with such a tradition of centralisation as ruledin France, was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the momentfor a splendid repetition on an immense scale of those immortalachievements. The futility of the attempt was the practical and evermemorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical method. It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived inGeneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, andaccepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was avery different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-fivemillions of a heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variationsof temperament, faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomabledistractions. The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sentstranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not until he had sethis foot upon their neck; and even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begunlife like the rest of his generation by writing Rousseauite essays, made a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal shape ofthe Concordat. 

Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point ofview of a small territory with a limited population. "You must not, "he says in one place, "make the abuses of great states an objection toa writer who would fain have none but small ones. "[200] Again, when hesaid that in a truly free state the citizens performed all theirservices to the community with their arms and none by money, and thathe looked upon the corvée (or compulsory labour on the public roads)as less hostile to freedom than taxes, [201] he showed that he wasthinking of a state not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish. This was not the only defect of his schemes. They assumed a sort ofstate of nature in the minds of the people with whom the lawgiver hadto deal. Saint Just made the same assumption afterwards, and trustedto his military school to erect on these bare plots whateversuperstructure he might think fit to appoint. A society that had forso many centuries been organised and moulded by a powerful andenergetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the samemoral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was notin the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was notprepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship formarriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, andthe other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. Thetwelve apostles went among people who were morally swept andgarnished, and they went armed with instruments proper to seize theimagination of their hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorantand simple, poor fishermen in one scene, labourers and women inanother, for the good reason that new ideas only make way on groundthat is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices. But Francein 1793 was in no condition of this kind. Opinion in all its sphereswas deepened by an old and powerful organisation, to a degree whichmade any attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation appearedto have been abolished, quite hopeless until the lapse of three orfour hundred years had allowed due time for dissolution. After all itwas not until the fourth century of our era that the work of even thetwelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly. As for theLycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a personality everexisted out of the region of myth, he came to his people armed with anoracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself regarded ashaving a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions could wellbe made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of thedeath of Voltaire. 

Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as thedesperate absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, whichconstituted the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into thehands of men who surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts. The Social Contract is worked out precisely in that fashion which, ifit touches men at all, makes them into fanatics. Long trains ofreasoning, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on everyhand of qualifying propositions and multitudinous limitations, areessential to science, and produce treatises that guide the wisestatesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives fervour to asect. There are always large classes of minds to whom anything in theshape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly fascinating, andto whom the qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of atheoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such persons alwayscome to the front for a season in times of distraction, when the partythat knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the bestchance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed theirtemperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarilyslow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance witha speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has amagical potency over men who insist on having politics and theologydrawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid. 

Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his systemfrom the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, heassumes that analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring newknowledge about things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositionsfor the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contractare mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightestattempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to benot only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with realhuman nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks intothe word, or into his own verbal notion, and tells us what is to befound in that, whereas we need to be told the marks and qualities thatdistinguish the object which the word is meant to recall. Hence ariseshis habit of setting himself questions, with reference to which wecannot say that the answers are not true, but only that the questionsthemselves were never worth asking. Here is an instance of his methodof supposing that to draw something from a verbal notion is to findout something corresponding to fact. "We can distinguish in themagistrate three essentially different wills: 1st, the will peculiarto him as an individual, which only tends to his own particularadvantage; 2nd, the common will of the magistrates, which refers onlyto the advantage of the prince [_i. E. _ the government], and this wemay name corporate will, which is general in relation to thegovernment, and particular in relation to the state of which thegovernment is a part; 3rd, the will of the people or sovereign will, which is general, as well in relation to the state considered as awhole, as in relation to the government considered as part of thewhole. "[202] It might be hard to prove that all this is not true, butthen it is unreal and comes to nothing, as we see if we take thetrouble to turn it into real matter. Thus a member of the BritishHouse of Commons, who is a magistrate in Rousseau's sense, has threeessentially different wills: first, as a man, Mr. So-and-so; second, his corporate will, as member of the chamber, and this will is generalin relation to the legislature, but particular in relation to thewhole body of electors and peers; third, his will as a member of thegreat electoral body, which is a general will alike in relation to theelectoral body and to the legislature. An English publicist isperfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind, if he chooses to doso, and nobody will take the trouble to deny them. But they arenonsense. They do not correspond to the real composition of a memberof parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon any parteither of the theory of government in general, or the working of ourown government in particular. Almost the same kind of observationmight be made of the famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty. "Sovereignty, being only the exercise of the general will, can neverbe alienated, and the sovereign, who is only a collective being, canonly be represented by himself: the power may be transmitted, but notthe will;"[203] sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle, butin object;[204] and so forth. We shall have to consider these remarksfrom another point of view. At present we refer to them asillustrating the character of the book, as consisting of a number ofexpansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with thefacts of which the words are representatives. This way of treatingpolitical theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude andprecision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burkepoured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics andalgebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seemingdemonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau'sdisciples with a supreme and undoubting confidence which leaves themodern student of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinnessof Robespierre's ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when weremember that he had not trained himself to look upon it as the art ofdealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostilepassions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre andunsubstantial argumentation as the following:--"Let us suppose thestate composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only beconsidered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his qualityas subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign isto the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each memberof the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of thesovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his ownentirety. If the people be composed of a hundred thousand men, thecondition of the subjects does not change, and each of them bearsequally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to ahundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing them up. Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of thesovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whenceit follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does libertydiminish. "[205]

Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the deep charm whichtheir assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds ofwhich England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptistsand Fifth Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there weremaxims in the Social Contract of remarkable convenience for themembers of a Committee of Public Safety. "How can a blind multitude, "the writer asks in one place, "which so often does not know its ownwill, because it seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itselfan undertaking so vast and so difficult as a system oflegislation?"[206] Again, "as nature gives to each man an absolutepower over all his members, so the social pact gives to the bodypolitic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this samepower which, when directed by the general will, bears, as I have said, the name of sovereignty. "[207] Above all, the little chapter on adictatorship is the very foundation of the position of theRobespierrists in the few months immediately preceding their fall. "Itis evidently the first intention of the people that the state shouldnot perish, " and so on, with much criticism of the system ofoccasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome. [208]Yet this does not in itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrineof Prerogative, as a corrective for the slowness and want of immediateapplicability of mere legal processes in cases of state emergency; andit is worth noticing again and again that in spite of the shriekingsof reaction, the few atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisiblespeck compared with the atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawfulkings, perpetrated in accordance with their notion of what constitutedpublic safety. So far as Rousseau's intention goes, we find in hiswritings one of the strongest denunciations of the doctrine of publicsafety that is to be found in any of the writings of the century. "Isthe safety of a citizen, " he cries, "less the common cause than thesafety of the state? They may tell us that it is well that one shouldperish on behalf of all. I will admire such a sentence in the mouth ofa virtuous patriot, who voluntarily and for duty's sake devoteshimself to death for the salvation of his country. But if we are tounderstand that it is allowed to the government to sacrifice aninnocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold this maxim forone of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented, and the mostdangerous that can be admitted. "[209] It may be said that theTerrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolouson the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot justlydraw a capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannotfairly be said to have had a share in the responsibility for the morecriminal part of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder ofChristianity is responsible for the atrocities that have beencommitted by the more ardent worshippers of his name, and justified bystray texts caught up from the gospels. Helvétius had said, "Allbecomes legitimate and even virtuous on behalf of the public safety. "Rousseau wrote in the margin, "The public safety is nothing unlessindividuals enjoy security. "[210] The author of a theory is notanswerable for the applications which may be read into it by thepassions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Suchapplications show this much and no more, that the theory wasconstructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of humannature, with too narrow a view of the conditions of society, andtherefore with an inadequate appreciation of the consequences whichthe theory might be drawn to support. 

It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract, the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, thememorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrineRousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggeratedlanguage of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose thatthey think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century theconstitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with theclergy, had engendered faintly democratic ways of thinking. [211] Amongothers the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrinethat the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, hesays, to be a law, must be directed by reason; law is appointed forthe common good, and not for a special or private good: it followsfrom this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a princerepresenting the multitude, can make a law. [212] A still moreremarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of Padua, physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master'sside, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324). Marsilioin the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately theproposition that laws ought to be made by the "_universitas civium_";he places this sovereignty of the people on the true basis (whichRousseau only took for a secondary support to his original compact), namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the firstplace, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by thebody of the persons affected. "No one knowingly does hurt to himself, or deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or agreat majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest ofthe citizens. "[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or toLocke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine andcorrespondence in dialect may teach us how little true originalitythere can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how ametaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of theeighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classificationof thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed bydifferences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play ofcircumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the samecombinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of suchcircumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thoughtare as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. Itis only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limitsof the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentallyaltering the point of view. 

In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared theright of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is tobe distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to thegreat historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain bythe Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if aprince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them fromharm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. Thesubjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, butthe prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince. " This isobviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popularprinciple, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and tojustify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent needfor practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was stillemphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can befrom the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. Butit plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development ofProtestant principles which produced and necessarily involved theextreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their fullexpansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoidedby a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count itinevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in thesupreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to thesource or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague positionwhich even Lewis XIV. Did not deny, that the object of politicalsociety is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name, published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of thesovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profoundindignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists. [214] Rousseaumentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen'srather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a placein the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to thespirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicatingepiscopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, hadstill been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a lawnatural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, andhad laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, whichpublic approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of whatkind soever, are available by consent, " and so on. [216] The views ofthe Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became thefoundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popularleaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreakof the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principlethat the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements, then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit andimplied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community, to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whomauthority has been delegated. [217] This is a unilateral view of thesocial contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which inRousseau's idea was cardinal. 

Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmedhimself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke'sprinciples. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatlyas Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the importantdifference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was thejustification in theory of a revolution which had already beenaccomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it wasby silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet aspeculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was writtengave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderationwhich savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have notthe wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of thecorresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of thoseconcise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine isthere. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried itsprinciples further than most of those who helped in the Revolution hadany intention to carry them, when he said that "the legislature beingonly a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still inthe people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative. "[218]It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would haveassented to the proposition that the people--and did Locke mean by thepeople the electors of the House of Commons, or all males overtwenty-one, or all householders paying rates?--could by any expressionof their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, orput an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. ButLocke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so tersea label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it. 

Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likelygave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in thecivil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as thefoundation and first condition of the civil state. From this naturallyflowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied asgiven by the people to each new law. We need not quote passages fromLocke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumptionbetween him and the author of the Social Contract. They are found inevery chapter. [219] Such principles were indispensable for the defenceof a Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully markedout by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist andexpositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all thingsa revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. Theyrepresented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to thepolitical changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguishedfrom the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which hadprevailed in the contests of the previous generation. 

Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the firstrank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophyof government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory ofeither of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They wereeach in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought orwas able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles totheir own case or to that of their adversaries. [220] Hebrew precedentsand bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high churchdoctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptanceof a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of asocial constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau wasvery marked, and very singular. There were numerous differencesbetween the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury. The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. Theone described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as astate of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depravedman, the other that they had improved him. [221] But these differencesdid not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in acurious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and theconclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism ofwhich the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobinsupremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbesthe true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conceptionof the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the twotogether he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike thecrowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece ofthe Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellentlywell for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of otherobligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shallpoint out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of thenotion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law inMontesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with adefinition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relationsflowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings havetheir laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts havetheir laws, man has his laws. . . . There is a primitive reason, and lawsare the relations to be found between that and the different beings, and the relations of these different beings among one another. "[222]Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the properdistinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state, and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowingabout the other. [223] Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite thanthis, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the sameconfusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. Butthen Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear, firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuousstudent who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. Andon this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, ason the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look longenough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctivequalities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law isa command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this, because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumptionof contract as the base of the social union. [224] But he did at allevents grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper, and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are nowtaught to name occasional or particular commands. [225] This is worthmentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits ofintellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headedmaster before him, of a very considerable degree of precision ofthought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency forwant of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us nowproceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract. 

1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacleswhich impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are toostrong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keephimself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves byaggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends andprotects with the whole common force the person and property of eachassociate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeyshimself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a socialcompact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common hisperson and his whole power under the supreme direction of the generalwill; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of thewhole. " This act of association constitutes a moral and collectivebody, a public person. 

The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society torepose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in thecorollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them, and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short ofunmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of thedictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance andhuman nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were thematerial out of which the legislator was to devise conventions atpleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to theconditions of society among which they were to work, or to thepassions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out, and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjustto say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took theconsequences. He expressly says in more places than one that thescience of Government is only a science of combinations, applications, and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance. [226] Butto base society on conventions is to impute an element ofarbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make themindependent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed bythe nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of allthe worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation. 

It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was atthis time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in fullpossession of the true view of the limits set by the natural orderingof societies to the power of convention and the function of thelegislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract, a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of thePhysiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with thematerial interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity ofconnecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certainfundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it isimpossible to settle any question about wages or profits, forinstance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming theprinciples of liberty and property. This writer with great consistencyfound the first essential of all social order in conformity ofpositive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, andtheir relations with those material instruments of life, which, andnot convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds, of the perpetuation of our societies. [227] This was wiser thanRousseau's conception of the lawgiver as one who should change humannature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own, to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him. [228] Rousseauonce wrote, in a letter about Rivière's book, that the great problemin politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circlein geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place lawabove man. [229] A more important problem, and not any less difficultfor the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which theauthority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting tocontrol the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseauignored, and that he should do so was only natural in one whobelieved that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly tosuppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all hisspeculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternalauthority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writersfounded the social union. 

2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Eachcitizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relationto individuals _qua_ individuals; he is also as an individual a memberof the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the firstpoint of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the bodypolitic are one and the same thing. [230]

Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has alreadybeen said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, orwhat ought to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than thereis any occasion to carry on here. We need only point out its place asa kind of intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. Itbreaks up the feudal conception of political authority as a propertyof land-ownership, noble birth, and the like, and it associates thisauthority widely and simply with the bare fact of participation in anyform of citizenship in the social union. The later and higher idea ofevery share of political power as a function to be discharged for thegood of the whole body, and not merely as a right to be enjoyed forthe advantage of its possessor, was a form of thought to whichRousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the effectiveness of theblow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism, and which is itsmain title to commemoration in connection with his name. 

The social compact thus made is essentially different from the socialcompact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he callscommonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealthsby acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or restingon hereditary rule. "A commonwealth, " Hobbes says, "is said to beinstituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every onewith every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall begiven by the major part the right to present the person of them all, that is to say, to be their representative; every one . . . Shallauthorise all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly ofmen, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end to livepeaceably among themselves, and be protected against other men. "[231]But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, whoalso remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on thepart of the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution ofcivil society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobodynow believes in the existence of any such compact in either one formor the other, it would be superfluous to inquire which of the two isthe less inaccurate. All we need do is to point out that there wasthis difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the existence of anyelement of contract in the erection of a government; there is only onecontract in the state, he said, and it is that of association. [232]Locke's notion of the compact which was the beginning of everypolitical society is indefinite on this point; he speaks of itindifferently as an agreement of a body of free men to unite andincorporate into a society, and an agreement to set up agovernment. [233] Most of us would suppose the two processes to be asnearly identical as may be; Rousseau drew a distinction, and from thisdistinction he derived further differences. 

Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideasof the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that ofFraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act ofpartnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and theirdescendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be, if the members of the union had only entered it to place theirliberties at the feet of some superior power. Society in the one caseis a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of socialbrotherhood. This impressed itself deeply on the feelings of men likeRobespierre, who were never so well pleased as when they could findfor their sentimentalism a covering of neat political logic. The sameidea of association came presently to receive a still more remarkableand momentous extension, when it was translated from the language ofmere government into that of the economic organisation of communities. Rousseau's conception went no further than political association, asdistinct from subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the frontplace, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all therelations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond. Men hadentered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, notmerely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succourin all its aspects. This naturally included the most important of all, material production. They were not associated merely as equalparticipants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants inall the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness byunited action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternalassociation from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphereof industrial force. 

It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary termbelongs to the same source. All the associates of this act of union, becoming members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, asparticipating in the sovereign authority. [234] The term was infamiliar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it wasRousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort ofsacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the nameof the first of the two classes which constituted the active portionof the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members wereeligible to the chief magistracies. 

3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributesof sovereignty. It is inalienable. [235] It is indivisible. 

These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of someof the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than wascontended for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times byAustin. When Hobbes says that "to the laws which the sovereign maketh, the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil lawshe were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom, "his notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in hisunexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseaumeans no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, thanAustin meant when he declared of the doctrine that the legislativesovereign powers and the executive sovereign powers belong in anysociety to distinct parties, that it is a supposition too palpablyfalse to endure a moment's examination. [236] The way in which thisaccount of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood duringthe revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea ofFederalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemnalliances between nations; for the properties of sovereignty areclearly independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Anothereffect of this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assemblyof the balanced parliamentary system, which the followers ofMontesquieu would fain have introduced on the English model. Whetherthat was an evil or a good, publicists will long continue to dispute. 

4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interestis expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-makingpower, because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring thegeneral will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation orrepresentation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, butthey are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the electionof members of parliament; the members once chosen, the people areslaves, nay, as people they have ceased to exist. [237] It isimpossible for the sovereign to act, except when the people areassembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen eventsmay call for, there must be fixed periodical meetings that nothing caninterrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you haveforgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the peopleas those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations intheir primitive times. What has existed is certainly possible. [238]

It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject shouldhave contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, insteadof pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederatewith his native republic. A historian in our own time has describedwith an enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he sawthe sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzelldischarge the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each inthe majesty of its corporate person. [239] That Rousseau was influencedby the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss confederation, aswell as by that of his own city, we may well believe. Whether he wasor not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that a writerwho was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the history ofa great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a time andfrom societies so remote, that the true conditions of their politicalsystem could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality, while there were, within a few leagues of his native place, communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sensewas actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the fullmeaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, andwhatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been madeplain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect ofthe French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, ofthe only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favouriteapostle of the Revolution was a reality. The constitution of theHelvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty ofpeoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles ofBurgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution, moreover, wasdirectly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it calledrepresentative democracy, for representative democracy was just whatRousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion. 

The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesmanbold enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France, undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place, where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of asmall state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he wouldpresently show how the good order of a small state might be united tothe external power of a great people. Though he never did this, hehints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory ofconfederations, of which the principles were still to beestablished. [240] When he gave advice for the renovation of thewretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things thatthey should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system offederate governments, "the only one that unites in itself all theadvantages of great and small states. "[241] A very few years after theappearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign statesarose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missedthe force alike of the practical example abroad, and of the theory ofthe book which they took for gospel at home. How far they were drivento this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they wouldhave followed the same course without that interference, merely inobedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk somuch deeper into French character than people have been willing toadmit, we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau'simmediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralisedauthority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy. They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lostits spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's scheme, namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the unitshould not be too large to admit of the participation of the personsconcerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they hadrealised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchyinto a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweepingmodification of the old centralised scheme of government, they mighthave saved France. [242] But, once more, men interpret a politicaltreatise on principles which either come to them by tradition; orelse spring suddenly up from roots of passion. [243]

5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is anintermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for theirmutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and themaintenance of civil and political freedom. The members comprising itare called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed, whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince. Ifthe whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, fromwhom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called amonarchy. If there are more persons simply citizens than there aremagistrates, this is an aristocracy. [244] If more citizen magistratesthan simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last governmentis as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first forlarge ones--on the principle that the number of the suprememagistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens. But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasonsfor exceptions to this general rule. 

This common definition of the three forms of governments according tothe mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, thoughadopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate anduninstructive, without some further qualification. Aristotle, forinstance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to theinterests in which the government is carried on, whether the interestof a small body or of the whole of the citizens. [245] Montesquieu'swell-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit ofpointing to conditions of difference among forms of government, outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign. To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies, and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first thenumber of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, thedifference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then hereturned to the first principle of division, and separated a republicinto a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by apart, which is aristocracy. [246] Still, to have introduced the elementof law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more, was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction isenough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vitaldifferences which may exist between one form of government andanother. [247]

The important fact about a government lies quite as much in thequalifying epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the threenames, as in the name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, untilwe have been told whether it is absolute or constitutional; ifabsolute, whether it is administered in the interests of the realm, like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, or in the interests ofthe ruler, like that of an Indian principality under a native prince;if constitutional, whether the real power is aristocratic, as in GreatBritain a hundred years ago, or plutocratic, as in Great Britainto-day, or popular, as it may be here fifty years hence. And so withreference to each of the other two forms; neither name gives us anyinstruction, except of a merely negative kind, until it has been madeprecise by one or more explanatory epithets. What is the commonquality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the Swissconfederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, therepublic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effectbeyond that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty. 

Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than otherwriters on political theory, for the reason that he distinguishes theconstitution of the state from the constitution of the government. Thefirst he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to besovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the onlygenuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers openis as to the form in which the _delegated executive authority_ shallbe organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, herejects as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that eachcitizen knows all the others, manners so simple that the business maybe small and the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortuneso general as not to allow of the overriding of political equality bymaterial superiority, and so forth. [248] Monarchy labours under anumber of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. "One essentialand inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic belowrepublican government, is that in the latter the public voice hardlyever promotes to the first places any but capable and enlightened menwho fill them with honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, arefor the most part small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, inwhom the puny talents which are the secret of reaching substantialposts in courts, only serve to show their stupidity to the public assoon as they have made their way to the front. The people is far lesslikely to make a blunder in a choice of this sort, than the prince, and a man of true merit is nearly as rare in the ministry, as a foolat the head of the government of a republic. "[249] There remainsaristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, andhereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while thethird is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for itis aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtueof election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the othergrounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guaranteesthat the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best andmost natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude, provided you are sure that they will govern the multitude for itsadvantage, and not for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requiresone or two virtues less than a popular executive, it also demandsothers which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the richand content in the poor. For this form comports with a certaininequality of fortune, for the reason that it is well that theadministration of public affairs should be confided to those who arebest able to give their whole time to it. At the same time it is ofimportance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach thepeople that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons ofpreference than wealth. [250] Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronouncedEnglish liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few days oncein seven years when the elections to parliament take place. Yet thisscheme of an elective aristocracy was in truth a very near approachto the English form as it is theoretically presented in our own day, with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the suffrage wereuniversal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our system, inspite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy andnominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of theSocial Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau hadfurther developed his notions of confederation, the United Stateswould most have resembled his type. 

6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. Theseparation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated byJesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of manysubsequent generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous, because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to thespiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even thekings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church, are really its ministers and servants. [251]

The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, andneed not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he laysso much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nortruly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon anotherworld, they must necessarily be indifferent to the success or failureof such enterprises as they may take up in this. [252] In reading theSocial Contract, and some other of the author's writings besides, wehave constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical form ofassertion into something of this kind--"Such and such consequencesought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or thedefinition of a principle, or from such and such motives. " The changeof this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditionalstatement that such and such consequences have actually followed, constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who teststhem by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten, at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took lesstrouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience thanany writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to bemade on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian orecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers ofthe state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of thedebt of Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception. It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christianmonotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recogniseno such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor. Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he adjusted it in a certaindegree to the spirit of his own time, and imposed certainphilosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as follows. 

Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered asof three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, orrite, the true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man. Second, local, civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites, exercises; a theology of a primitive people, exactly co-extensive withall the rights and all the duties of men. Third, a religion like theChristianity of the Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws, two chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory duties, andprevents them from being able to be at once devout and patriotic. Thelast of these is so evidently pestilent as to need no discussion. Thesecond has the merit of teaching men to identify duty to their godswith duty to their country; under this to die for the land ismartyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to subject a culprit topublic execration is to devote him to the anger of the gods. But it isbad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because it makes apeople sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all, which is nowstyled a Christian theism, having no special relation with the bodypolitic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particularobjections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being akingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity onlypreaches servitude and dependence. [253] What then is to be done? Thesovereign must establish a purely civil profession of faith. It willconsist of the following positive dogmas:--the existence of adivinity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the lifeto come; the happiness of the just, the chastisement of the wicked;the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These articles ofbelief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion exactly, but assentiments of sociability. If any one declines to accept them, heought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for being unsociable, incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing hislife to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas, carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished bydeath, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied beforethe laws. [254]

Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax thatreaction against the absorption of the state in the church which hadfirst taken a place in literature in the controversy between legistsand canonists, and had found its most famous illustration in the DeMonarchiâ of the great poet of catholicism. The division of twoco-equal realms, one temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced inthe Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be "pure Hobbism. " This, the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, sofar as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupiedEurope for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope andemperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitutionof the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principleas formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was therevolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose mostmelodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa. 

Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should notbelieve in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments forthe deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, aftersubscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to holdit, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerantgeneration like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejecteddeliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which theycould not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state. It seemedto contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanityand infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflictwhich they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrorsof the Holy Office. Men were as shocked as the modern philosopher is, when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing inhis latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to befollowed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believein the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker. [255] And we canhardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed lawswhich no city ever yet received, and "fed his fancy with making manyedicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him, wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of anacademic night-sitting. "[256] Rousseau's ideas fell among men who weremost potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter of 1793 twoparties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltaireanparty of the Commune, named improperly after Hébert, but whose bestmember was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led byRobespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches, andconsummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by thepublic worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set upfor deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeriesof the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism asthe crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed. Chaumette was not directly implicated in the proceedings which led totheir fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring with Hébert, Clootz, and the rest, "to destroy all notion of Divinity and base thegovernment of France on atheism. " "They attack the immortality of thesoul, " cried Saint Just, "the thought which consoled Socrates in hisdying moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship. "And this was the offence, technically and officially described, forwhich Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794), strictly on the principle which had been laid down in the SocialContract, and accepted by Robespierre. [257]

It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with theinfallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should nothave seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditionsof human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to thethree or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief. Having once granted the general position that a citizen may berequired to profess some religious faith, there is no speculativeprinciple, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any boundto the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the rightthus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city whodid not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward andretribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did notbelieve both that there is only one God, and also that there arethree Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to thestake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate isconcerned with heresy. And Hébert was only following out the samedoctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted onpreventing the publication of a book in which the author professed hisbelief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference withopinion leads you the whole way. 

The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiablefutility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseauclosed his exposition. "If there is no longer an exclusive nationalreligion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates othercreeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of thecitizen. But whoever dares to say, _Out of the church, no salvation_, ought to be banished from the state. " The reason for which Henry IV. Embraced the Roman religion--namely, that in that he might be saved, in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in thereformed faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yetaccording to Catholics he was necessarily damned, --ought to have madeevery honest man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was themore curious that Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing theline of tolerance at any given set of dogmas, however simple andslight and acceptable to himself they might be, because he invitedspecial admiration for D'Argenson's excellent maxim that "in therepublic everybody is perfectly free in what does not hurtothers. "[258] Surely this maxim has very little significance or value, unless we interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because noopinion whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act, including of course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admittedthat over and above the profession of civil faith, a citizen mighthold what opinions he pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign'scognisance or jurisdiction; "for as the sovereign has no competence inthe other world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not hisaffair, provided they are good citizens in this. " But good citizenshipconsists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punishmen on the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow fromthe rejection of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath ofadherence to such opinions on the same principle, is to concede thewhole theory of civil intolerance, however little Rousseau may haverealised the perfectly legitimate applications of his doctrine. It wasan unconscious compromise. He was thinking of Calvin in practice andHobbes in theory, and he was at the same time influenced by themoderate spirit of his time, and the comparatively reasonablecharacter of his personal belief. He praised Hobbes as the only authorwho had seen the right remedy for the conflict of the spiritual andtemporal jurisdictions, by proposing to unite the two heads of theeagle, and reducing all to political unity, without which never willeither state or government be duly constituted. But Hobbes wasconsistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to thereligious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for "even whenthe civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects thatresisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the lawsof nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, thatadmonisheth all Christians to obey their princes. . . . And for theirfaith, it is internal and invisible: they have the licence that Naamanhad, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do, they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of theirlawful sovereign. "[259] All this flowed from the very idea anddefinition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as wehave already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in these boldterms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could notassent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic, Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to seethe folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christiancommonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of acommonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics, which he took for his model, of their national and officialpolytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theismslightly tinged with Christianity. 

Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man whoshould not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously tomartyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle, which was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that thecivil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignorespirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from thetheological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the workingand tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more orless close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, orsubordinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental independenceending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is mostintent to begin. 

Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of thepropositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophyof government, that have for their key-note the conception ofexpediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to theobserved and recorded experience of mankind. According to this method, the ground and origin of society is not a compact; that never existedin any known case, and never was a condition of obligation either inprimitive or developed societies, either between subjects andsovereign, or between the equal members of a sovereign body. The trueground is an acceptance of conditions which came into existence by thesociability inherent in man, and were developed by man's spontaneoussearch after convenience. The statement that while the constitutionof man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work ofart, [260] is as misleading as the opposite statement that governmentsare not made but grow. [261] The truth lies between them, in suchpropositions as that institutions owe their existence and developmentto deliberate human effort, working in accordance with circumstancesnaturally fixed both in human character and in the external field ofits activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has itsroot not in contract but in force, --the force of the sovereign topunish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if heshall commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, asa means of protecting his own life against murder. [262] There is noconsent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed ofsovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should notcommit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it wasnot a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that thesovereign was strong enough to enforce them, which made the commandvalid. 

Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people bya majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience?Rousseau's answer is this:--When the law is proposed, the questionput is not whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whetherit is conformable to the general will: the general will appears fromthe votes: if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that onlyproves that I was mistaken, and that what I took for the general willwas not really so. [263] We can scarcely imagine more nonsensicalsophistry than this. The proper answer evidently is, that eitherexperience or calculation has taught the citizens in a populargovernment that in the long run it is most expedient for the majorityof votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to theminority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than theinconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form aseparate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were madeagainst their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity ofundergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission. The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the morefrequent case in the history of the race, the submission of themajority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more. In boththese cases, however, as in the general question of the source of ourobedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenienceis as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest ofthe field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over andconstantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by themany forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physicalapathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow orabrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau, expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubtwarranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account, though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of itspossible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing hispolitical institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantialground of propositions about human nature, which the average ofexperience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shownto be true within those limits. There are places in his writings wherehe reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, andhe does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently. [264] Butthroughout the Social Contract we seem to be contemplating theerection of a machine which is to work without reference to the onlyforces that can possibly impart movement to it. 

The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least helptowards the solution of any of the problems of actual government, because these are naturally both suggested and guided byconsiderations of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had neverreally settled the ends for which government exists, beyond theconstruction of the symmetrical machine of government itself. He is ageometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician, and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a livingorganism. The analogy of the body politic to the body natural was aspresent to him as it had been to all other writers on society, but hefailed to seize the only useful lessons which such an analogy mighthave taught him--diversity of structure, difference of function, development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition--all of whichmight have been serviceably translated into the dialect of politicalscience, and might have bestowed on his conception of politicalsociety more of the features of reality. We see no room for the freeplay of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, theregulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never beextinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincereattachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern questionwhich is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies, of the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individualfreedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined byanything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering asociety exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which islimited by the general will, [265] is to give us a phrase, where weseek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of privateinterests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it isthe accord of those interests which makes them possible, [266] is toutter a truth which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition ofprivate interests remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord hasimposed upon it, but which only controls and does not suppress such anopposition. What sort of control? What degree? What bounds?

So again let us consider the statement that the instant the governmentusurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all thecitizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced butnot morally obliged to obey. [267] He began by telling his readers thatman, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and therefore itwould appear that in all existing cases the social pact has beenbroken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free toresume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so. This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had itsshare in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoplesshould rise and throw off the yoke, which was one of the mostastonishing anxieties of the French during their revolution. That wasnot the worst quality of such a doctrine. It made governmentimpossible, by basing the right or duty of resistance on a questionthat could not be reached by positive evidence, but must always bedecided by an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrarily imagineddocument. The moderate proposition that resistance is lawful if agovernment is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough tooverthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they canprovide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capableof application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine ofresistance partly based their arguments upon the historic instances ofthe Old Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions ofProtestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in anadmiring spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that everexisted, and so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a correctivefor the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But thesewriters have throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers mightalways be expected to have, who were really meditating on thepossibility of their principles being brought to the test of practice. There can be no evidence possible, with a test so vague as the fact ofthe rupture of a compact whose terms are authentically known to nobodyconcerned. Speak of bad laws and good, wise administration or unwise, just government or unjust, extravagant or economical, civicallyelevating or demoralising; all these are questions which men may applythemselves to settle with knowledge, and with a more or less definitedegree of assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out whethersovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was therea usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when theassumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions ofvotes?

The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact andrestoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of thegovernment usurp separately the power which they ought only toexercise in a body. [268] Now this description applies very fairly tothe famous episode in our constitutional history, connected withGeorge the Third's first attack of madness in 1788. Parliament cannotlawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summonsfrom the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and deliberatedwithout communication from the crown. What was still more importantwas a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing ofletters patent under the great seal for opening parliament bycommission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was adistinct usurpation of regal authority. Two members of the government(in Rousseau's sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament, usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along withthe crown. [269] The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, aforgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the SocialContract, and if they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, theywould have declared the compact of union violated, and all Britishcitizens free to resume their natural rights. Not even the bittervirulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to takeup such a line, though within half a dozen years each of thedemocratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of everyother in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated andRobespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a validreason for annihilating a government, no matter under whatcircumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better, nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process. The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that ofpassive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and dutyof throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages thanit confers advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably tosubstitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in thenew era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynasticsuccession which have been the great curse of the old. Men die for aphrase as they used to die for a family. The other theory, which allEnglish politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commandingFrench politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was firstexpounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by Paley. [270] Ofcourse the greatest, widest, and loftiest exposition of the bearingsof expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in themagnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested byabsolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some ofthem by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after theseed sown by Rousseau had brought forth fruit. 

We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did notrecognise the historical effect of a speculation scientificallyvalueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either theshallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract. But there is another side to its influence. It was the match whichkindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Notin France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became thelanguage of all who aspired after freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseauas one who "converted Christians into human beings, " and the _Robbers_(1778) is as if it had been directly inspired by the doctrine thatusurped sovereignty restores men to their natural rights. Smaller menin the violent movement which seized all the youth of Germany at thattime, followed the same lead, if they happened to have any feelingabout the political condition of their enslaved countries. 

There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to natureamong the whole of the young generation. [271] The Social Contractsupplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just as the Emiliussupplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not understandor did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its directiontowards that "perfect Hobbism, " which the author declared to be theonly practical alternative to a democracy so austere as to beintolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the people, the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to whichtyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck bythe patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fireon the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired thewriter's ideal. 

Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along whichRousseau's influence moved in the two countries. In France it wasdrawn eventually into the sphere of direct politics. In Germany itinspired not a great political movement, but an immense literaryrevival. In France, as we have already said, the patriotic flameseemed extinct. The ruinous disorder of the whole social system madethe old love of country resemble love for a phantom, and so much ofpatriotic speech as survived was profoundly hollow. Even a man likeTurgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of improvement, and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the noblestand strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced thenarrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau'sexaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration andintensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made thenative land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a truecentre of existence, round which all the interests of the community, all its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entiresingleness of convergence, just as religious faith is the centre ofexistence to a church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thusevoked which presently saved France from partition. 

We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of theSocial Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinalservice, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deductionfrom the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth, that a nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order ora caste, but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers whomake the most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for thecontinuous nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it, and he drew inspiration partly from the intellectual school ofVoltaire, and partly from the social school of Rousseau, allinstitutions ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual, and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class. [272]This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from theimportant place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, asat once the foundation and the enduring bond of a community, thoseschemes of Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective actionfor a common social good, which have possessed such commandingattraction for the imagination of large classes of good men in Franceever since. Hitherto these forms have been sterile and deceptive, andthey must remain so, until the idea of special function has beenraised to an equal level of importance with that of united forcesworking together to a single end. 

In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily andunconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressiveideas, in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Præ-Newtoniansknew not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we, grown weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect thefinal combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a newsocial era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the aridsophisters who assume that the last word of civilisation has beenheard in existing arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage fromhistory to hope that generations will come, to whom our system ofdistributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procuredby the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morallyhideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older systemwhich impoverished and depopulated empires, in order that a despot ora caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives orthe hard-won treasure of others could suffice. 

FOOTNOTES:

[176] _Cont. Soc. _, I. Viii. 

[177] _Cont. Soc. _, II. Xi. He had written in much the same sense inhis article on Political Economy in the Encyclopædia, p. 34. 

[178] Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, andtook up a position like that of Rousseau--teaching the poor contemptfor the rich, not envy. "I do not want to touch your treasures, " hecried, on one occasion, "however impure their source. It is far morean object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than toproscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy thepalace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part, to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium atthe public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in themire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement ofthe people, and glittering with the public misery. " Quoted in Malon's_Exposé des Ecoles Socialistes françaises_, 15. Baboeuf carriedRousseau's sentiments further towards their natural conclusion by suchpropositions as these: "The goal of the revolution is to destroyinequality, and to re-establish the happiness of all. " "The revolutionis not finished, because the rich absorb all the property, and holdexclusive power; while the poor toil like born slaves, languish inwretchedness, and are nothing in the state. " _Exposé des EcolesSocialistes françaises_, p. 29. 

[179] _Cont. Soc. _, II. Xi. 

[180] _Cont. Soc. _, I. Iv. 

[181] _Ib. _, II. Vii. 

[182] Ch. Vi. (vol. V. 371; edit. 1801). 

[183] Ch. Vii. (p. 383. )

[184] Goguet, in his _Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences_(1758), really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out anotion of the historical method, but the fact that history itself atthat time had never been subjected to scientific examination made hiseffort valueless. He accumulates testimony which would be excellentevidence, if only it had been sifted, and had come out of the processsubstantially undiminished. Yet even Goguet, who thus carefullyfollowed the accounts of early societies given in the Bible and othermonuments, intersperses abstract general statements about man beingborn free and independent (i. 25), and entering society as the resultof deliberate reflection. 

[185] _Cont. Soc. _, II. Xi. Also III. Viii. 

[186] II. Xi. Also ch. Viii. 

[187] II. Viii. 

[188] II. Ix. 

[189] _Politics_, VII. Iv. 8, 10. 

[190] _Cont. Soc. _, II. X. 

[191] Plato's _Laws_, v. 737. 

[192] _Ib. _, iv. 705. 

[193] _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 75. 

[194] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. Xi. 

[195] _Cont. Soc. _, II. Vii. 

[196] Goguet was much nearer to a true conception of this kind; see, for instance, _Origine des Lois_, i. 46. 

[197] Decree of the Committee, April 20, 1794, reported byBillaud-Varennes. Compare ch. Iv. Of Rousseau's _Considérations sur leGouvernement de Pologne_. 

[198] Here are some of Saint Just's regulations:--No servants, norgold or silver vessels; no child under 16 to eat meat, nor any adultto eat meat on three days of the decade; boys at the age of 7 to behanded over to the school of the nation, where they were to be broughtup to speak little, to endure hardships, and to train for war; divorceto be free to all; friendship ordained a public institution, everycitizen on coming to majority being bound to proclaim his friends, andif he had none, then to be banished; if one committed a crime, hisfriends were to be banished. Quoted in Von Sybel's _Hist. FrenchRev. _, iv. 49. When Morelly dreamed his dream of a model community in1754 (see above, vol. I. P. 158) he little supposed, one would think, that within forty years a man would be so near trying the experimentin France as Saint Just was. Baboeuf is pronounced by La Harpe to havebeen inspired by the Code de la Nature, which La Harpe impudently setdown to Diderot, on whom every great destructive piece wassystematically fathered. 

[199] I forget where I have read the story of some member of theConvention being very angry because the library contained no copy ofthe laws which Minos gave to the Cretans. 

[200] III. Xiii. 

[201] III. Xv. He actually recommended the Poles to pay all publicfunctionaries in kind, and to have the public works executed on thesystem of corvée. _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. Xi. 

[202] _Cont. Soc. _, III. Ii. 

[203] II. I. 

[204] II. Ii. 

[205] III. I. 

[206] II. Vi. 

[207] II. Iv. 

[208] IV. Vi. 

[209] _Economie Politique_, p. 30. 

[210] _Mélanges_, p. 310. 

[211] See for instance Green's _History of the English People_, i. 266. 

[212] _Summa_, xc. -cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's _Moral andMetaphysical Philosophy_, i. 627, 628. Also Franck's _Réformateurs etPublicistes de l'Europe_, p. 48, etc. 

[213] _Defensor Pacis_, Pt. I. , ch. Xii. This, again, is an example ofMarsilio's position:--"Convenerunt enim homines ad civilemcommunicationem propter commodum et vitæ sufficientiam consequendam, et opposita declinandum. Quæ igitur omnium tangere possunt commodum etincommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri, ut commodum assequi etoppositum repellere possint. " The whole chapter is a most interestinganticipation, partly due to the influence of Aristotle, of the notionsof later centuries. 

[214] See Bayle's Dict. , s. V. _Althusius_. 

[215] _Lettres de la Montagne_, I. Vi. 388. 

[216] _Eccles. Polity_, Bk. I. ; bks. I. -iv. , 1594; bk. V. , 1597; bks. Vi. -viii. , 1647, --being forty-seven years after the author's death. 

[217] Goguet (_Origine des Lois_, i. 22) dwells on tacit conventionsas a kind of engagement to which men commit themselves with extremefacility. He was thus rather near the true idea of the spontaneousorigin and unconscious acceptance of early institutions. 

[218] Of Civil Government, ch. Xiii. See also ch. Xi. "Thislegislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, butsacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have onceplaced it; nor can any edict of anybody else, in what form soeverconceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force andobligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislativewhich the public has chosen and appointed; for without this the lawcould not have that which is absolutely necessary to its being alaw--the consent of the society; over whom nobody can have a power tomake laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received fromthem. " If Rousseau had found no neater expression for his doctrinethan this, the Social Contract would assuredly have been no explosive. 

[219] See especially ch. Viii. 

[220] Hence the antipathy of the clergy, catholic, episcopalian, andpresbyterian, to which, as Austin has pointed out (_Syst. OfJurisprudence_, i. 288, _n. _), Hobbes mainly owes his bad repute. 

[221] See Diderot's article on _Hobbisme_ in the Encyclopædia, _Oeuv. _, xv. 122. 

[222] _Esprit des Lois_, I. I. 

[223] _Cont. Soc. _, II. Vi. 50. 

[224] Goguet has the merit of seeing distinctly that command is theessence of law. 

[225] _Cont. Soc. _, II. Vi. 51-53. See Austin's _Jurisprudence_, i. 95, etc. ; also _Lettres écrites de la Montagne_, I. Vi. 380, 381. 

[226] See, for instance, letter to Mirabeau (_l'ami des hommes_), July26, 1767. _Corr. _, v. 179. The same letter contains his criticism onthe good despot of the Economists. 

[227] _L'Ordre Naturel et Essentiel des Sociétés Politiques_ (1767). By Mercier de la Rivière. One episode in the life of Mercier de laRivière is worth recounting, as closely connected with the subject weare discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied to Rousseau, Catherine of Russia, in consequence of her admiration for Rivière'sbook, summoned him to Russia to assist her in making laws. "Sir, " saidthe Czarina, "could you point out to me the best means for the goodgovernment of a state?" "Madame, there is only one way, and that isbeing just; in other words, in keeping order and exacting obedience tothe laws. " "But on what base is it best to make the laws of an empirerepose?" "There is only one base, Madame: the nature of things and ofmen. " "Just so; but when you wish to give laws to a people, what arethe rules which indicate most surely such laws as are most suitable?""To give or make laws, Madame, is a task that God has left to none. Ah, who is the man that should think himself capable of dictating lawsfor beings that he does not know, or knows so ill? And by what rightcan he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed in his hands?""To what, then, do you reduce the science of government?" "To studyingcarefully; recognising and setting forth the laws which God has gravenso manifestly in the very organisation of men, when he called theminto existence. To wish to go any further would be a great misfortuneand a most destructive undertaking. " "Sir, I am very pleased to haveheard what you have to say; I wish you good day. " Quoted fromThiébault's _Souvenirs de Berlin_, in M. Daire's edition of the_Physiocrates_, ii. 432. 

[228] _Cont. Soc. _, II. Vii. 

[229] _Corr. _, v. 181. 

[230] _Cont. Soc. _, I. V. , vi. , vii. 

[231] _Leviathan_, II. , ch. Xviii. Vol. Iii. 159 (Molesworth'sedition). 

[232] _Cont. Soc. _, III. Xvi. 

[233] _Civil Government_, ch. Viii. § 99. 

[234] I. Vi. Especially the footnote. 

[235] _Cont. Soc. _, II. I. 

[236] _Syst. Of Jurisprudence_, i. 256. 

[237] _Cont. Soc. _, III. Xv. 137. It was not long, however, beforeRousseau found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. Thechampions of the Council at Geneva compared the _droit négatif_, inthe exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to therepresentations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. Ii. P. 105)to the right of veto possessed by the crown in Great Britain. Rousseauseized upon this egregious blunder, which confused the power ofrefusing assent to a proposed law, with the power of refusing justiceunder law already passed. He at once found illustrations of thedifference, first in the case of the printers of No. 45 of the _NorthBriton_, who brought actions for false imprisonment (1763), and nextin the proceedings against Wilkes at the same time. If Wilkes, saidRousseau, had written, printed, published, or said, one-fourth againstthe Lesser Council at Geneva of what he said, wrote, printed, andpublished openly in London against the court and the government, hewould have been heavily punished, and most likely put to death. And soforth, until he has proved very pungently how different degrees offreedom are enjoyed in Geneva and in England. _Lettres écrites de laMontague_, ix. 491-500. When he wrote this he was unaware that theTriennial Act had long been replaced by the Septennial Act of the 1Geo. I. On finding out, as he did afterwards, that a parliament couldsit for seven years, he thought as meanly of our liberty as ever. _Considérations sur les gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. Vii. 253-260. Inhis _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 113, he says that "theEnglish do not love liberty for itself, but because it is mostfavourable to money-making. "

[238] III. , xi. , xii. , and xiii. 

[239] Mr. Freeman's _Growth of the English Constitution_, c. I. 

[240] _Cont. Soc. _, III. Xv. 140. A small manuscript containing hisideas on confederation was given by Rousseau to the Count d'Antraigues(afterwards an _émigré_), who destroyed it in 1789, lest its argumentsshould be used to sap the royal authority. See extract from hispamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition of the Social Contract, pp. Xxiii, xxiv. 

[241] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, v. 246. 

[242] Of course no such modification as that proposed by Comte(_Politique Positive_, iv. 421) would come within the scope of thedoctrine of the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen Intendancesinto which Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a chief, "alwaysappointed and removed by the central power. " There is no room for thesovereignty of the people here, even in things parochial. 

[243] There was one extraordinary instance during the revolution ofattempting to make popular government direct on Rousseau's principle, in the scheme (1790) of which Danton was a chief supporter, forreorganising the municipal administration of Paris. The assemblies ofsections were to sit permanently; their vote was to be taken oncurrent questions; and action was to follow the aggregate of theirdegrees. See Von Sybel's _Hist. Fr. Rev. _ i. 275; M. Louis Blanc's_History_, Bk. III. Ch. Ii. 

[244] This was also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic state; "siminor pars civium cæteris imperat. "

[245] _Politics_, III. Vi. -vii. 

[246] _Esprit des Lois_, II. I. Ii. 

[247] Rousseau gave the name of _tyrant_ to a usurper of royalauthority in a kingdom, and _despot_ to a usurper of the sovereignauthority (_i. E. _ [Greek: tyrannos] in the Greek sense). The formermight govern according to the laws, but the latter placed himselfabove the laws (_Cont. Soc. _, III. X. ) This corresponded to Locke'sdistinction: "As usurpation is the exercise of power which anotherhath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of a power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. " _Civil Gov. _, ch. Xviii. 

[248] III. Iv. 

[249] III. Vi. 

[250] III. V. 

[251] _Cont. Soc. _, IV. Viii. 

[252] _Cont. Soc. _, IV. Viii. 197-201. 

[253] This is not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, thatChristianity bids you render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, but seems to discourage any inquiry whether Cæsar is an usurper or alawful ruler. 

[254] _Cont. Soc. _, IV. Viii. 203. As we have already seen, he hadentreated Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civilprofession of faith. See vol. I. 326. 

In the New Heloïsa (V. V. 117, _n. _) Rousseau expresses his opinionthat "no true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. _If I werea magistrate, and if the law pronounced the penalty of death againstatheists, I would begin by burning as such whoever should come toinform against another. _"

[255] Plato's _Laws_, Bk. X. 909, etc. 

[256] _Areopagitica_, p. 417. (Edit. 1867. )

[257] See a speech of his, which is Rousseau's "civil faith" done intorhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's _Hist. De la Rév. Française_, Bk. X. C. Xiv. 

[258] _Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de laFrance_ (1764). Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy. 

[259] _Leviathan_, ch. Xliii. 601. Also ch. Xlii. 

[260] _Cont. Soc. _, III. Xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, "Magnusille Leviathan quæ civitas appellatur, opificium artis est. "

[261] Mackintosh's. 

[262] _Cont. Soc. _, II. V. 

[263] IV. Ii. 

[264] For instance, _Gouvernement de la Pologne_, ch. Xi. P. 305. And_Corr. _, v. 180. 

[265] _Cont. Soc. _, I. Viii. 

[266] _Cont. Soc. _, II. I. 

[267] _Ib. _, III. X. "Let every individual who may usurp thesovereignty be instantly put to death by free men. " Robespierre's_Déclaration des droits de l'homme_, § 27. "When the governmentviolates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the peoplethe most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties. " § 35. 

[268] _Cont. Soc. _, III. X. 

[269] See May's _Constitutional Hist. Of England_, ch. Iii; and LordStanhope's _Life of Pitt_, vol. Ii. Ch. Xii. 

[270] In the 6th book of the _Moral Philosophy_ (1785), ch. Iii. , andelsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau'spolitical theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions ofGeneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his ownbook. 

[271] One side of this was the passion for geographical explorationwhich took possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenthcentury. See the _Life of Humboldt_, i. 28, 29. (_Eng. Trans. _ byLassell. )

[272] Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter's maxim, which has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that"not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of thesocial art. "

CHAPTER IV. 

EMILIUS. 

One whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodnessof all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, andso long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man, was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process ofsophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and thebest of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his highoriginal. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own thedoctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never madepeople any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if theyought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, isstill indispensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing thatman had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguineemotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose inidyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament, that enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut outthe dogma of his fatal depravation. "How difficult a thing it is, "Madame d'Epinay once said to him, "to bring up a child. " "Assuredlyit is, " answered Rousseau; "because the father and mother are not madeby nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up. "[273] Thiscynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. Itwas a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is allgood and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reachingtrue happiness knows no stint. 

In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what canbe made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyedthe tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by thespirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young liesfulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how isthe future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of humandisposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic. Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike inconduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from twomutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, andsociety is the work of man. Yet man, who has engendered this corruptedbirth, is good and whole. The strain in the argument may be pardonedfor the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Rousseau intoharmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character intofiner mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to suchefforts both fervour and elevation. While others were content withthe mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them thespirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith thatclothed education with the augustness and unction of religion. Thetraining of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something ofthe awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in thissanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and werepromised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank ofdrudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature. 

Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps onaccount of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors ofthe time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abbé deSaint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greaterdepartments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerationsupon the bringing up of the young. [274] Madame de Grafigny did thesame in a less grave shape. [275] She received letters from theprecociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensibleprecepts which ten years later were commended with more glowingeloquence in the pages of Emilius. [276] Grimm had an elaborate schemefor a treatise on education. [277] Helvétius followed his explorationof the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the trainingproper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by theseand other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had beenknown to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly cameto be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement ofideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movementtowards the restoration of the family, which was so striking aspectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education nowcame to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parentsand their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The directionof this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards anincreased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuoussuffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of thegeneral revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature wasnot likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women thantheir own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the societyof those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerfulhearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigiddiscipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition ofstrangers. 

Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhapscontributed something towards a movement which, if it could not breakthe religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce theparent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence overthe ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion wasaimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the establishedsystem. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance ofthe dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was stillconceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mysticalold Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that blackfolly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at oneanother with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent, and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity madeplain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one another as guiltyvictims cowering under a divine curse. They stood erect inconsciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man, with hislarge discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty andmajestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets oftruth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of theuniverse, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love forhis comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his ownwrong-doing, --the palsied and crushing conception of this excellentand helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive andmeaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, onlyto be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into thoseregions of night, whence the depth of human misery and theobscuration of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, tohang evilly over the western world for a season. So vital a change inthe point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringingof the young. Education began to figure less as the suppression of thenatural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a processof rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots aboundingin promise of richness. What had been the most drearily mechanical ofduties, was transformed into a task that surpassed all others ininterest and hope. If man be born not bad but good, under no curse, but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then theentire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril, is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great foldedpossibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing. 

I. 

Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneerof French thought. In education there is less room for scientificoriginality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her tradewith an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke wasnearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women. The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for thepreservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near theearth. His manner throughout is marked by the stout wisdom of thepractical teacher, who is content to assume good sense in his hearers, and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest. Hegives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed, upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightlyfitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it afair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the peoplewith whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the mostadmirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, andparents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently totheir sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends. Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator ofGargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whomRousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends thedropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds. 

There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, whichthe connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough. They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal, and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into associationwith the spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To theseRousseau came. For both the tenour and the wording of the moststriking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what wasso realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power andrichness and beauty of an ideal that can move the most generous partsof human character. The child is treated as the miniature of humanity;it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms ourcuriosity as to the composition of man's nature, and becomes the veryeye and centre of moral and social aspirations. 

Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating hisconception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while totake the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature willhelp you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being a manual forparents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character forall others. The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour. The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeblemaxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or theapproval of others, are routed at the first stroke. The old regimen ofaccumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body andsoul, by the new system of liberty and nature. In saying this we havealready said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs throughRousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every trace of themuch-vaunted military and public training has yielded before theattractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Publicinstruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is nolonger such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer becitizens. Only domestic education can now help us to rear the manaccording to nature, --the man who knows best among us how to bearthe mingled good and ill of our life. 

The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after areturn to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm byRousseau's famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own littleones. Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption ofthis practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had noresonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children werestill sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more passionate moralentreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these tender mothers, " heexclaimed, "who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrenderthemselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort ofusage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddlingband? At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a naillike a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thuscrucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every child foundin this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression ofthe chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to thehead, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just because ithad not strength enough to cry out. "[278] But in Rousseau, as inBeethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed bysome piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of theseindignant pictures was heightened and relieved by moving appeal toall the tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all thatthis solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father, and the young. The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the bestantidote to the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, whichyou now think so importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it bringsfather and mother nearer to one another; and the lively animation of afamily added to domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of thewife, and the sweetest of all his amusements to the husband. If womenwill only once more become mothers again, men will very soon becomefathers and husbands. [279]

The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau'seloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for theduty of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation ofthe gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement. 

 Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos Jacere pulvillos amant?

So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires, and their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, whilethey were full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, andthere received the nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would havedrawn in more salutary sort from a healthy foster-mother in thecountry. This, however, was only an incidental drawback to a movementwhich was in its main lines full of excellent significance. Theimportance of giving freedom to the young limbs, of accustoming thebody to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surrounding youth withlight and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny detail such as thepropriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft substanceagainst which the growing teeth might press a way without irritation, all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of interest thatgives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the poetic. Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth likethat with which the author had denounced comedy. [280] The city is heldup to indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it hadbeen in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies ofthe adult life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in thecountry, and it would be all the better if it remained in the countryto the last day of its existence. You must accustom it little bylittle to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes;also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises, beginning with snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries frompain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; yourcaresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the childwill remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get itsown way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she isnot to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations thatcome to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, andonly referring to objects which may be shown to the child. "Ourunlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do notunderstand, begins earlier than we suppose. " Let there be no haste ininducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation inthis respect is not that children use and hear words without sense, but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own, without our perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thusearly, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn ofthe mind for the rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thingto keep a child's vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it shouldhave more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possiblyrealise in thought. [281]

In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval inhuman life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The greatsecret is to make the early education purely negative; a process ofkeeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and theintelligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take for first, second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to theperformance of her own tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be noidea of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says Rousseau, nomoral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of constantly reasoning withchildren was a mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which isonly a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development, and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which comeearliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn thefinished work into an instrument. "In speaking to children in theseearly years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom themto cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, tothink themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious andmutinous. " If you forget that nature meant children to be childrenbefore growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neitherripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthfuldoctors and old infants. 

To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseauwas too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest ofhuman endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless theprocess be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning ismade, the earlier will be the ripening. To know the grounds of rightconduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition topractise it. But nobody will deny the expediency of an intelligentacquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and itsopposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become asubstitute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit. Forone thing, cases are constantly arising in a man's life that demandthe exercise of reason, to settle the special application ofprinciples which may have been acquired without knowledge of theirrational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and testingpoints of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or lessjustly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as wehave said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it callssuch attention to the early age at which mental influences begin tooperate. Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of usingthe mind be any exception?

Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educationalsystems. Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeplyeffective, if only the will and the throng of various motives whichguide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon theintelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, savingthe parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his owncharacter, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within itsinfluence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuableof Rousseau's notions about education, though he by no meansconsistently adhered to them, was his urgent contempt for thisfatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for thedeeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visiblecircumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in thetheory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he hasthe honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter, may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and itsadoption in various forms. The change in the up-bringing of the youngexactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane. Wemay look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms, moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics, with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats, chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention ofPinel. 

It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this mostimportant of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first qualityin connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young, and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associating itwith the approval of those to whom the child looks. Sympathy, in aword, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure ofgood habit. The young should be led to practise the elementary partsof right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securerbasis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the mostcomplex conditions of action, while the grounds on which action isjustified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, whenthe understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and termsessential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each withoutsacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow upwith firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retainrespect for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in theless immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earliertimes, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, thatmakes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helplessfor want of ready conclusions. 

The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we mightexpect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, isdeclared to be that of property. And he can only acquire this idea byhaving something of his own. But how are we to teach him thesignificance of a thing being one's own? It is a prime rule to attemptto teach nothing by a verbal lesson; all instruction ought to be leftto experience. [282] Therefore you must contrive some piece ofexperience which shall bring this notion of property vividly into achild's mind; the following for instance. Emilius is taken to a pieceof garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground for him, and theboy takes possession by sowing some beans. "We come every day to waterthem, and see them rise out of the ground with transports of joy. Iadd to this joy by saying, This belongs to you. Then explaining theterm, I let him feel that he has put into the ground this time, labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in this bit ofground something of himself which he may maintain against every comer, as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man whowould fain retain it in spite of him. " One day Emilius comes to hisbeloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish anddespair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground hasbeen turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. Thegardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown theseed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long beforeEmilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it washis land; that nobody touches the garden of his neighbour, in orderthat his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a pieceof garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half theproduce. [283] Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion ofproperty naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant asderived from labour. We should have thought it less troublesome, as itis certainly more important, to teach a boy the facts of propertypositively and imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to originsseems an exaggerated form of that very vice of over-instructing thegrowing reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so shorta time before. 

Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons byartificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly alwaysextremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. YetRousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delightin their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin andsignificance of property, there is the complex fancy in which ajuggler is made to combine instruction as to the properties of themagnet with certain severe moral truths. [284] The tutor interestsEmilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed. The poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger andweariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series ofinferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convincehim that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found tobe. [285] Here, again, is the way in which the instructor proposes tostir activity of limb in the young Emilius. "In walking with him of anafternoon, I used sometimes to put in my pocket two cakes of a sort heparticularly liked; we each of us ate one. One day he perceived that Ihad three cakes; he could easily have eaten six; he promptlydespatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I said to him, Icould well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I would rathersee it made the prize of a running match between the two little boysthere. " The little boys run their race, and the winner devours thecake. This and subsequent repetitions of the performance at firstonly amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and perceivingthat he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast he couldrun. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his tutor forthe third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed tocompete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the onlyadvantage gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of furtherstratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and practise visualcompass, and so forth. [286] If we consider, as we have said, first thereadiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction isconcerned, and next their resentment on discovering artifice of thatkind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as it isassuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leavingcircumstances to lead. 

In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousnessin the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that itwas so, arose from a no less inadequate conception of the rightinfluence upon the growing character, of the great principle ofauthority. His dread lest the child should ever be conscious of thepressure of a will external to its own, constituted a fundamentalweakness of his system. The child, we are told with endlessrepetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is following itsown judgment or impulses, and has only them and their consequences toconsider. But Rousseau could not help seeing, as he meditated on theactual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus to thetraining of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps andchasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not beallowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secretpreparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and inamusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. "Let not the teacherafter the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedlybetter not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it upwith difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artisticbellows and air-pumps to the little flowers. "[287]

The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist inpromptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposedfrom without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right underall its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant toitself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will bepleasant to its parents on the other. "You must never, " Rousseaugravely warns us, "inflict punishment upon children as punishment; itshould always fall upon them as a natural consequence of theirill-behaviour. "[288] But why should one of the most closely followingof all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden fromsight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of thechild's nearest friend? Why are the effects of conduct upon theactor's own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured withthe title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the young thewidest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decidefor themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwardsto state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on thenext occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others intoproper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hastythan it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. Oneof the most important of educating influences is lost, if the youngare not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, whenthey think in their own simple way of what will happen to them fromyielding to a given impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting onpractical experience of consequences as the only secure foundation forself-acting habit; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this experienceby the exclusion from it of the effects of perceiving, resisting, accepting, ignoring, all will and authority from without. The great, and in many respects so admirable, school of Rousseauitephilanthropists, have always been feeble on this side, alike in thetreatment of the young by their instructors, and the treatment ofsocial offenders by a government. 

Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which areassociated with affectionate respect for a more fully informedauthority. In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is noinconsiderable gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easyterms in our earliest days. If in another sense the will of eachindividual is all-powerful over his own destinies, it is best thatthis idea of firm purpose and a settled energy that will not bedenied, should grow up in the young soul in connection with a riperwisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for then, when the timefor independent action comes, the force of the association willcontinue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise, none sage byproxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it not apuerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal, while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle onthe wall? Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction fromgeneration to generation, that the area of right conduct in the worldis extended. Such instruction must with youth be conveyed by militaryword of command as often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth. Nor is the atmosphere of command other than bracing, even to those whoare commanded. If education is to be mainly conducted by force ofexample, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever to have beforeits eyes as living type and practical exemplar the pale figure ofparents without passions, and without a will as to the conduct ofthose who are dependent on them. Even a slight excess of anger, impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less demoralising tothe impressionable character than the constant sight of a manartificially impassive. Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men totry to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he hascreated for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked ofall men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and withoutphysiognomy. 

Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned theyoung spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet didnone the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse, which with its regulated temperature and artificially contrived accessof light and air, was in many respects as little the method of nature, that is to say it gave as little play for the spontaneous working andgrowth of the forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that regimenof the cloister which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was theresult of a ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and againthat self-love is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character, from which you have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire ofpossessing pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which thelever of experience rests. Not only so, but from this sameunslumbering quality of self-love you have to develop regard forothers. The child's first affection for his nurse is a result of thefact that she serves his comfort, and so down to his passion in lateryears for his mistress. Now this is not the place for a discussion asto the ultimate atom of the complex moral sentiments of men and women, nor for an examination of the question whether the faculty ofsympathy has or has not an origin independent of self-love. Howeverthat may be, no one will deny that sympathy appears in good naturesextremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the veryfirst. Here is the only adequate key to that education of theaffections, from their rudimentary expansion in the nursery, untilthey include the complete range of all the objects proper to them. 

One secret of Rousseau's omission of this, the most important of alleducating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation ofcharacter, was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that hewas not animated by that singular tenderness and almost mysticaffection for the young, which breathes through the writings of someof his German followers, of Richter above all others, and whichreveals to those who are sensible of it, the hold that may so easilybe gained for all good purposes upon the eager sympathy of theyouthful spirit. The instructor of Emilius speaks the words of a wiseonlooker, sagely meditating on the ideal man, rather than of a parentwho is living the life of his child through with him. Rousseau'sinterest in children, though perfectly sincere, was still æsthetic, moral, reasonable, rather than that pure flood of full-hearted feelingfor them, which is perhaps seldom stirred except in those who haveactually brought up children of their own. He composed a vindicationof his love for the young in an exquisite piece;[289] but it has noneof the yearnings of the bowels of tenderness. 

II. 

Education being the art of preparing the young to grow intoinstruments of happiness for themselves and others, a writer whoundertakes to speak about it must naturally have some conception ofthe kind of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen enough ofRousseau's own life to know what sort of ideal he would be likely toset up. It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to makehappiness safe in case that circumstances should frown. The man whohas lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who hasmost felt life. [290] It is mere false wisdom to throw ourselvesincessantly out of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, everto pursue without ceasing a future which flees in proportion as weadvance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we are not, to someplace where we shall never be. [291] He is happiest who suffers fewestpains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest pleasures. Then wehave a half stoical strain. The felicity of man here below is only anegative state, to be measured by the more or less of the ills heundergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires and facultiesthat our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not indiminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, butin diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringingpower and will into perfect balance. [292] Excepting health, strength, respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion;excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are inimagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledgeand false wisdom. "Live according to nature, be patient, and driveaway physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel itonce, while they on the other hand would bring it daily before yourtroubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging yourdays, only hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover;but above all things live, live up to your last hour. " It isforesight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the truesource of our miseries. [293] O man, confine thy existence withinthyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy liberty, thy power, reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all therest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his own will is hewho does not need in order to have it the arms of another person atthe end of his own. [294]

The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor hascarefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which isonly fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life. Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room todistinguish it from that of a peasant. [295] If he is taken to aluxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, toreflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands have beenemployed in preparing it. [296] His preference for gay colours in hisclothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming tohis age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich, behold a sophisticated creature. [297] The curse of the world isinequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, whichcause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentiallygood is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself withothers; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and tocling much to opinion. [298] Hence, although Emilius happened to haveboth wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman, with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturallyassociated with that abused name. 

This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary ofself-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius andevery one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable dutyin the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizenis a knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with hishands. It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake ofknowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices whichdespise it. Labour for glory, if you have not to labour fromnecessity. Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to beabove your own. In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning overit. All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred isthat of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carriedon in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, andthough the form of the work is determined by utility, still eleganceand taste are not excluded. [299] There are few prettier pictures thanthat where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her younglover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair looselyfastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other, too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of hismistress. [300]

When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigentexile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to theadvantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had notbeen too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudentexample of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laidso much stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause evena king to be grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of hisarms, is sometimes quoted as a proof of his foresight of troubloustimes. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instancesof such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keepingschool at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Romanscrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender, wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving onlyrebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 aconsiderable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had goneinto exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party. [301]Besides all this, the propriety of being able to earn one's bread bysome kind of toil that would be useful in even the simplest societies, flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of the aims of lifeand the worth of character. He did, however, say, "We approach a stateof crisis and an age of revolutions, " which proved true, but he addedtoo much when he pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies ofEurope could last long. [302] And it is certain that the only one ofthe great monarchies which did actually fall would have had a farbetter chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. Had been as expert in thetrade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts. 

From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions, of which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerfulpropagator. As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willingto leave social questions alone, provided only the government wouldsuffer the free expression of opinion in literature and science. Rousseau went deeper. His moral conception of individual life andcharacter contained in itself a social conception, and he did notshrink from boldly developing it. The rightly constituted man sufficesfor himself and is free from prejudices. He has arms, and knows how touse them; he has few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured inthe most absolute freedom, he can think of no worse ill thanservitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes not, limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever maybe taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detachhis heart from loved objects without a pang. [303] He pities miserablekings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey them; he pitiesfalse sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their empty renown;he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation. [304] Allthe sympathies of such a man therefore naturally flow away from these, the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce. "It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not thepeople is hardly worth taking into account. Man is the same in allranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve mostrespect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: hemarks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in theman covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, anda varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of thishumble condition; you will perceive that under another sort oflanguage, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense. Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made up of thecollection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher werecut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the worldwould go none the worse. "[305] As it is, the universal spirit of thelaw in every country is invariably to favour the strong against theweak, and him who has, against him who has not. The many aresacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice and subordinationserve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity. Theostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are intruth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others. [306]

This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the NewHeloïsa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with agravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture ofa fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who hasapproached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth ofexpression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blindcrowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisationwith its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of thePeople. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of hispathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere andas touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitternessof the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pityand devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up fromresentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir uslike a tale of noble action. [307] It was Rousseau, however, who firstsounded the note of which the religion that had once been the championand consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even thetradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the idealman was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something ofthe isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. Hemarries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life ofdetachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed. Social or political education, that is the training which characterreceives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account, and so is the correlative process of preparation for the variousconditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is toolate to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsierthan the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existenceand nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of thiswas that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations, willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active socialrelation, the citizen of a state. 

III. 

There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups offaculties associated with each of them, which it is the business ofthe instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man. The first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for theconclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehendingalso a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that suchconclusions shall be rightly drawn. Connected with this is thediscipline of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from thesimple habit of correct observation, down to the highly complex habitof weighing and testing the value of evidence. This very importantbranch of early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own which wehave already often referred to, cared little about, and he throws verylittle light upon it, beyond one or two extremely sensible precepts ofthe negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon and forcingan apparent progress too rapidly. The second fundamental state in arightly formed character is a deep feeling for things of the spiritwhich are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of awe, mystery, sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning and itsend. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of thiswe shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius wasnever to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason wasfairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult tobring to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passionfor Justice. 

The little use which Rousseau made of this momentous andmuch-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, isa very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that hissense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enoughto comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of thebenignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings wherehe speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which wasperhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moralrobustness. He says excellently that "love of the human race isnothing else in us but love of justice, " and that "of all the virtues, justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men. "While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest ofsentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness, and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when itaccords with justice. [308] But that is all. What constitutes justice, what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence theextraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be investedamong the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told, nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of suchquestions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would, it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of thenatural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it wasmeant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relationsin an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have tobe impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as othermysteries. As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up tohumanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he wasleft without a further guide to define the marks of truly socialconduct. 

This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau'stenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of lifewhich he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, "We must study societyby men, and men by society; those who would treat politics andmorality apart will never understand anything about either one or theother. "[309] This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in themorality which is designed for Emilius the traces of politicalelements. Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of societyas a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justicewith any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very early timeto develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion ofequity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justicecan only find room in a character that has been made spacious byhabitual contemplation of the height and breadth and closecompactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, andof the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has inthe happiness or woe of other souls. And this contemplation shouldbegin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits. Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machinewhich bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soonthat its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, ofwhich our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripeyears come. To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, orwith the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to growto manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moralwilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, withegotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be abludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjustedand fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either caseis no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another istransformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in commonexcellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our businessto fix and root the habit of thinking of that _moral_ union, intowhich, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the _pathological_necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, havebeen gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly theprimitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of educationbrings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins wereindispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of amaturer system. 

It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personalinterest, perhaps even more specially than Helvétius himself. Theaccusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs ofthat social conscience, which animates a man with all the associationsof duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for thefuture, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. "Iobserve, " says Rousseau, "that in the modern ages men have no holdupon one another save through force and interest, while the ancientson the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections ofthe soul. "[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing himto mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much widerin its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which issupposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the morecomplex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. Theneighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all themembers of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of dutyare either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actualand palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on theearth, --a conception that for many ages to come will remain with themajority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic andconcentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no furtherthan an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism. 

What the young need to have taught to them in this too littlecultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floatingindependent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, andsucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they canseize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than tokeep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer ofbland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whoseboundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church thehandwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idlemystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death. Theyneed to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the greatstruggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endlessvariety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love ofself or class and solicitous passion for justice, between theobstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mentalactivity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the socialconscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in alllands, --here is the church militant in which we should early seek toenrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taughtthat they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These arethe struggles with which the modern instructor should associate thosevirtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy, readiness to assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves, willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which menof old knew how to show for their gods or their sovereign. But theideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul inpatience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality, without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses ofstrong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after somuch as one great forlorn cause. 

"If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famousancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this otherSocrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins tomake himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgetshimself altogether. "[311] But if a man only nurses the conception ofhis own personality, for the sake of keeping his own peace andself-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the bestthing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his exampleshould infect others with the same base contagion. Excessivepersonality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personalitythat only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among uncleanthings. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm isfatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the verybook which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was atbottom the apotheosis of social despair. 

IV. 

The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of asocial conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of astrong and energetic public spirit at work around the growingcharacter, must be found in the study of history rightly directed witha view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes oftime and appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, thatthe mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is thebond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins toacquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wisesocial activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is thecapacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is thesignificance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off theyesterday of our society from its to-morrow. 

Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to youngchildren, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moralrelations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the termsand ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual graspof the very young. [312] He might have based his objections equallywell upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning ofthe multitude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual, or realising the relations between events in bare point of time, although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for somemechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was toappear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almostready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from whichhe should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its highermoral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer waythan through actual intercourse with society. Society might make himeither cynical or frivolous. History would bring him the sameinformation, without subjecting him to the same perils. In society youonly hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions, and actions are only unveiled in history. [313] This view is hardlyworth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, butthe movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history areentirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping ofdaily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims, caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those withwhom the occasions of life bring us into contact. 

It is true that at the close of the other part of his education, Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completedcircle of his studies. [314] But excellent as travel is for some of thebest of those who have the opportunity, still for many it isvalueless for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the greatmajority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much asRousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm ineducation unbridged. 

It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions abouthistory as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few ofthem are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. "The worsthistorians for a young man, " he says, "are those who judge. The facts, the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment isfor ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, andas soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing. " Modern history is notfit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all ourmen being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intenton brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much aspainting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part representnothing at all. [315] Of course such a judgment as this implies anignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, consideringthat he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historicalstudy, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only to perfection ofform and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in themiddle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rankwithout competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon literatureand the arts might have been expected to look beyond composition, andthe contemporary of Voltaire's _Essai sur les Moeurs_ (1754-1757)might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of thehuman race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Amongthe ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model, because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of thecircumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them forourselves--though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted, I am unable to divine. Then come Cæsar's Commentaries and Xenophon'sRetreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits andwithout maxims, but abounding in details the most capable ofinteresting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, ifonly these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livyis unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician. Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art ofreading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims. 

The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and Cæsar, Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leavingout the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwrittenchronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflectionthat historians while recounting facts omit the gradual andprogressive causes which led to them. "They often find in a battlelost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battlewas already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into fulllight events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldompenetrate. "[316] A third complaint against the study which he began byrecommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is thatit does not present men but actions, or at least men only in theirparade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproacheswriters alike of history and biography, for omitting those triflingstrokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy ofcharacter. "Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature;harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and makeyourselves despicable by force of dignity. "[317] And so after all, bya common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, andfalls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low andfamiliar details being banished from modern style, however true andcharacteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors intheir private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of theworld. 

V. 

As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us allat the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from thebeginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfecttreatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid sayingsomething on the upbringing of women. Such a writer may start fromone of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined tobe a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man, as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowedwith gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, andcapable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or thebest uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of thesethree ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of themeffectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appreciationof the conditions of human progress by observing the function which hemakes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim ofwomanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal whichis silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating therelations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capableof thinking of them as human beings, independently of these twofunctions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connectionwith them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount. 

Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developedthe theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted onman being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the manof art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he cameto speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way, by giving equally free room in the two halves of the human race, forthe development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins bysaying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor aphysician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other specialcalling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophietoo be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the specialqualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in theirdue order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwardsand secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and aninstructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left inthe hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted to her as weregiven to her predestined mate? Again, the pictures of the New Heloïsawould have led us to conceive the ideal of womanly station not so muchin the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem and soberaffection to her husband, but having for her chief functions to be thegentle guardian of her little ones, and the mild, firm, and prudentadministrator of a cheerful and well-ordered household. In the lastbook of the Emilius, which treats of the education of girls, educationis reduced within the compass of an even narrower ideal than this. Weare confronted with the oriental conception of women. Every principlethat has been followed in the education of Emilius is reversed in theeducation of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among men, isamong women its high throne. The whole education of women ought to berelative to men; to please them, to be useful to them, to makethemselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to rendertheir lives agreeable and sweet to them, --these are the duties whichought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought tohave the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband. Not being in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought toreceive the decision of fathers and husbands as if it were that of thechurch. And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it is notso much a matter of explaining to them the reasons for belief, as forexpounding clearly to them what to believe. Although boys are not tohear of the idea of God until they are fifteen, because they are notin a condition to apprehend it, yet girls who are still less in acondition to apprehend it, are _therefore_ to have it imparted to themat an earlier age. Woman is created to give way to man, and to sufferhis injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness, mildness, andcomplaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her threats are tears. Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant; they must alsovery early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint. Thismisfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their sex, and ifever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer misfortunesstill more cruel in consequence. [318]

After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind, it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligenceand men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that menwill philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will bemore skilful in reading it. [319] And it is a mere mockery to end thematter by a fervid assurance, that in spite of prejudices that havetheir origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what isworthy and noble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, andthat there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not beobtained from them as well as from ourselves. [320] Finally there is acomplete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence asthis: "I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one thepeople who think, the other the people who do not think, and thisdifference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first ofthese classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatestcharm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife heis reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit thatprovides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a fatherof a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself upwithin himself, and to have no one about him who understands him. Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring upher children?"[321] Nothing could be more excellently urged. But howis a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantlybrought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, trained always toconsider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and herinstruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?

This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his mostserious errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement inhuman affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot, Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, tomeditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded towomen, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack ofthis, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of thesubject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting thechampions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the viciousor feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. Thesame kind of answer obviously meets the current idea, which he adoptedwith a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of therelations between men and women. That type practically reducesmarriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorousparody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other causeto keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members ofa society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus itproduces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it isdeplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated facultyto be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining halfof their own generation, makes them the mothers and the earliest andmost influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comesafter. [322] Of course, if any one believes that the existingarrangements of a western community are the most successful that wecan ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain ofRousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that aconsiderable portion of the change will be effected in the hithertoneglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of thefamily, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightlysought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, wasessentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornmentof a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between thefrowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of aParisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake indefending the free gratification of sensual passion, as one of theconditions of happiness and making the most of our lives. [323] Buteven this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order ofthe family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women instrict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family asthe true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitfulseed-ground of wise activities and new hopes for each freshgeneration. 

This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunatelyfor the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated thegallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, hispower was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies inthe general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected tothe same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The samefeeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equalityof opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom andequality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part ofthe energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguisedbitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. Hehad no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, neverwholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whomFrench history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and whowere not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in whichdevotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divinecandour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty andintellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were notfor Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for noneof us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages inwhich Fénelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel thatthe world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence haspassed out from our hearts?

The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women, but an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under whichRousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in themidst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flowerpoured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it isdelicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it isnaught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless itbe meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragicirony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversarycould have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the orientalprinciple, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to theblameless Emilius, her lord. [324]

VI. 

Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education isnot to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the NewHeloïsa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself withvivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in thehistory of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in theparts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. Itfilled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task. It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscureinveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalisticarts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closednurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth formechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity, self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence wasthe most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection tocherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It wasthe charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect ofEmilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was theChristian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than educationthat needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies tothat profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter. Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books andpamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of theJesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left;and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from whichthe book itself had originally been an outcome. [325] But why try tostate the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike theaccount truly would be to write the history of the first FrenchRevolution. [326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big withEmilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted thechildren born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superiorspirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation ofrevolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science. It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampère, La Place, Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire. "[327]

In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with theextraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which wehave already spoken. [328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseauof the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline ofthe "divine Emilius, " and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as hisinspirer and his master. [329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless, and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phreneticenthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them intoGerman, and repeated them in his works over and over again with anincessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow inbeing a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown intocompany with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the causeof reforming education in the Rousseauite sense. [330] Pestalozzi(1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successfulof all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and hisprinciples mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extensionand more intelligent exactitude to their application. Jean Paul theUnique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806), one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares thatamong previous works to which he owes a debt, "first and last he namesRousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in noprevious work on education was the ideal so richly combined with theactual, " and so forth. [331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, aHerder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, suchas Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. Theworship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degreeof intelligence. [332]

In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, andmust have been widely read, for a second version of the translationwas called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey givesone a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education isnot very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time tocome, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculationson society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attractedmore attention. Reference has already been made to Paley. [333] AdamFerguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) hasmany allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau. [334] Kames'sSketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously inreferences to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more oftento cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crudenotions about women are cited with special acceptance. [335] Cowper wasprobably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energeticlines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set himfree, " scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man. [336] Norshould we omit what was counted so important a book in its day asGodwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhapsmore French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence inour literature of politics, and in its composition the author wasavowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of thematerialistic school. 

In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of thatdemocratic tendency in education, which political and othercircumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, andGermany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a processconcerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has oftenbeen remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, Fénelon, busy themselves aboutthe instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of theworld are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education ofcircumstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century thismonopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the samegeneral agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly. Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing manas the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, theinfinite capacity of the young for that simple and naturalcultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that sucha capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hopeof producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who hadevery external motive placed around them for being neither natural norself-sufficing. 

Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that itcontained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, wemay be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar'sprofession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringingof the natural man in things temporal. Let us pass to that eloquentdocument which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as theexpression of the religious opinion that best befits the man ofnature--a document most hyperbolically counted by some Frenchenthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion ofsentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century. 

FOOTNOTES:

[273] _Mém. De Mdme. D'Epinay_, ii. 276, 278. 

[274] _Lettres à mon Fils_ (1758), and _Les Conversations d'Emilie_(1783). 

[275] _Lettres Péruviennes. _

[276] _Oeuv. _, ii. 785-794. 

[277] _Corr. Lit. _, iii. 65. 

[278] _Emile_, I. 27. 

[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Romansociety of the second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinusto mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting thesolicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young withthe brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca mendiscussed in the schools the educational theories of Rousseau'sEmilius. (_La Relig. Romaine_, ii. 202. )

[280] See also his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing forgirls, V. 27. 

[281] _Emile_, I. 93, etc. 

[282] _Emile_, II. 141. 

[283] _Emile_, II. 156-160. 

[284] _Emile_, III. 338-345. 

[285] III. 358, etc. 

[286] _Emile_, II. 263-267. 

[287] _Levana_, ch. Iii. § 54. 

[288] _Emile_, II. 163. 

[289] The Ninth Promenade (_Rêveries_, 309). 

[290] _Emile_, I. 23. 

[291] II. 109. 

[292] II. 111. 

[293] _Emile_, II. 113-117. 

[294] II. 121. 

[295] II. 143. 

[296] _Emile_, III. 382. 

[297] II. 227. 

[298] IV. 10. 

[299] _Emile_, III. 394. 

[300] V. 199. 

[301] The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in_Candide_. 

[302] _Emile_, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage, asfar as it goes, is that in the _Confessions_ (xi. 136):--"Thedisasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault ofthe government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continualdissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two orthree ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake ofhurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the generaldiscontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; theobstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her betterjudgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the mostcapable from office, to make room for her favourites . . . All thisprospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelterelsewhere. "

[303] _Emile_, V. 220. 

[304] IV. 85. 

[305] _Emile_, IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply toLavoisier's request that his life might be spared from the guillotinefor a fortnight, in order that he might complete some experiments, that the Republic has no need of chemists. 

[306] IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes inwords that seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:--"I amconvinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live withoutgovernment, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degreeof happiness than those who live under European governments. Among theformer public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals aspowerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretenceof governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolvesand sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe. "Tucker's _Life of Jefferson_, i. 255. 

[307] Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the _Essayon Indifference_ he often appeals to him as the vindicator of thereligious sentiment (_e. G. _ i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837). Thesame influence is seen still more markedly in the _Words of aBeliever_ (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a kindof dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in thefirst days (_e. G. _ § xix. "Tous naissent égaux, " etc. , § xxi. , etc. )The _Book of the People_ is thoroughly Rousseauite. 

[308] _Emile_, IV. 105. 

[309] _Emile_, IV. 63. 

[310] _Emile_, IV. 273. 

[311] _Emile_, IV. 83. 

[312] _Emile_, II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudentobservations on the folly of teaching geography to little children. 

[313] _Emile_, IV. 68. 

[314] V. 231, etc. 

[315] _Emile_, IV. 71. 

[316] _Emile_, IV. 73. 

[317] IV. 77. 

[318] _Emile_, V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132. 

[319] _Emile_, V. 78. 

[320] V. 122. 

[321] V. 129, 130. 

[322] Well did Jean Paul say, "If we regard all life as an educationalinstitution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by allthe nations he has seen than by his nurse. "--_Levana. _

[323] _Tableau des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain. _ _Oeuv. _, vi. Pp. 264, 523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849. ]

[324] _Emile et Sophie_, i. 

[325] For an account of some of these, see Grimm's _Corr. Lit. _, iii. 211, 252, 347, etc. Also _Corr. Inéd. _, p. 143. 

[326] For the early date at which Rousseau's power began to meetrecognition, see D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762. 

[327] _Louis xv. Et xvi. _, p. 226. 

[328] See above, vol. Ii. P. 193. 

[329] Hettner, III. Iii. , 2, p. 27, _s. V. _ Herder. 

[330] The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's name ismost commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. "It issupposed that physiognomy is only a development of features alreadymarked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides thisdevelopment, the features of a man's countenance form themselvesinsensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitualwearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affectionsmark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and whenthey grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it. "IV. 49, 50. 

[331] Author's Preface, x. 

[332] See an excellent page in M. Joret's _Herder_, 322. 

[333] See above, vol. Ii. P. 191. 

[334] _E. G. _ pp. 8, 198, 204, 205. 

[335] _E. G. _ Bk. I. § 5, p. 279. § 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portionconcerning the female sex). 

[336] Vv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. Ii. P. 41, _n. _)that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deistas "an Orpheus and omnipotent in song, " coincides with Rousseau'scomparison of the Savoyard Vicar to "the divine Orpheus singing thefirst hymn" (_Emile_, IV. 205). 

CHAPTER V. 

THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 

The band of dogmatic atheists who met round D'Holbach'sdinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not anungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of ageneration with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace, not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christiandogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception. A hope ofthis kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold whichChristianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, andof the durableness of those conditions in human character, to whichsome belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of goodattributes brings solace and nourishment. A movement like that ofChristianity does not pass through a group of societies, and thenleave no trace behind. It springs from many other sources besides thatof adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream of its influencemust continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has beenconfined to the least informed portions of a community. TheEncyclopædists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shakenecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment onthe one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, wereboth of them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by ahost of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automaticmachine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole;that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; andthat to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objectivetruth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth and thereason which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagination is asactive in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace maybecome much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianityhad given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, whichwas not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark apermanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature. There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreadingmodification than any which the French atheists could effect, beforeall debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, itselevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanentlypreserved in more beneficent form and in an association lessquestionable to the understanding. 

Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. Theremust be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional, scientific, and material. And, above all, there must be the slowsteadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all theelements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief thathas disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new. 

Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that whichRousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar'sprofession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction wasin many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to theapplication of positive methods and conceptions to the most importantgroup of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit underthe circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alivein association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set ofarticles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitionswhich were at that moment the only practical alternative. The deism ofRousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of thecorresponding religious reaction in England, because the former neveracquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latterdid, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkableof its developments. In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjectivecharacter of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis ofany great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom thesublimation of individualism. But in itself it was a far lessretrogressive, as well as a far less powerful, movement. It kept fewerof those dogmas which gradual change of intellectual climate hadreduced to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some ofits own, which a still further extension of the same change isassuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless, along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will neverwillingly let die. 

The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of courseto be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation inearly times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to theactive intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe, reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, whichthe Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabricwhich four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, withits magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief andpractice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religiousimagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mentaldirection from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remaindistinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose ofhistories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact thatthese deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature, will not be denied either by those who think that Christianityassociates them with objects destined permanently to awake them intheir loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moodsof which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves withsomething still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphiseddeities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, whileintercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault anddiverting the current of renovating energy, still did something tokeep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowlyexpiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing. 

Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as muchprecision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of adoctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in thepractical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varietiesof significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, withoutqualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in withthe eighteenth century. It would be impossible to name any centurysince the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not befound within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in asupernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in aspecial revelation. [337] A præter-christian deism, or the principle ofnatural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception ofa natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the ideaof a definite lawgiver? The very scholastic disputations themselves, by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoningfaculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were notalways of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries couldhave sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle ofevery nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true thatthe cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever thereis argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin toreason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasonersmight have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of theirwork, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens intoeclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when freethought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With theProtestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolongedand tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformedbodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies atstrife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought inmany directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions ofChristianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feelingwhich thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul ofman and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towardsthe dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom themoral timidity of a dark and stricken age had once sought shade fromthe too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting. The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason withinthe limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred yearsto grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond thoselimits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independentjudgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation, gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the recordsthemselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in oneshape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of thesixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism ofEngland in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agentin introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futileshape into his own country, had its main effect as a process ofdissolution. 

All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau foundin progress at Geneva in 1754, [338] was distinctly the outcome in amore or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, andnot of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with referenceto revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it withreference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there wereone or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of themiddle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studiesuncorrected by science always exert over certain temperaments, hadbeen full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed awaywith a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of theimmortal _De Imitatione_, in whom the special qualities of Christiandoctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devoutaspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was notthe deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheismon the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formalacceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, orelse it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who hadtravelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lackedstrength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the lattercase, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough convictionof the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imaginedto go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but notgoverning, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment, and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines ofproperty, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moralfoundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for apurely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basisof a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as thealternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring ofspiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy. 

The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in hisprofession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this. Though the Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced roundwith rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from theevidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of theuniverse, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but ofemotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith thattouches the hearts of many men must always be. The Savoyard Vicar didnot believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it withmajestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which hebelieved that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the thirdside. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation withforce, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poordescription in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into lifethan words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling offinto the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single momentsuffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of atheological definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enoughto give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yetluminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifyingconsciousness of freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a numberof affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness bymultitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperamentfor knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the humansoul, --for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom ofheaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a creed, andso has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow ofcontemplative transport. It is impossible to set about disproving it, for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness oflogomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is tracedupon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are onlycontent to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You cannotdemonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks theSavoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is thebest of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a beingwho moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give thename of God. 

"To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which Ihave united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessaryconsequence flowing from them. But I do not know any the better forthis the being to whom I have given the name; he escapes equally frommy senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more Iconfound myself. I have full assurance that he exists, and that heexists by himself. I recognise my own being as subordinate to his andall the things that are known to me as being absolutely in the samecase. I perceive God everywhere in his works; I feel him in myself; Isee him universally around me. But when I fain would seek where he is, what he is, of what substance, he glides away from me, and my troubledsoul discerns nothing. "[339]

"In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infiniteessence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me. The less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and sayto him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditateceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to myveritable source and fount. The worthiest use of my reason is to makeitself as naught before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it isthe solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awfulmajesty of thy greatness. "[340]

Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying likefiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silentChrist of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of theorthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leadenrefutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour tolisten to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from aregion towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, butfrom which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazenbarriers. It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it wasthe restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one must turn to sucha book as Helvétius's, which was supposed to reveal the whole innermachinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece ofmechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism, receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it isplaced, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It was thisfree and energetic inner life of the individual which the SavoyardVicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre ofthat imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in auniverse that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer inwhom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to theadvance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul byturning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that theSavoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourseupon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding. [341] Thereis here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseauchose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fadingprojection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days, ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstandingdefect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain toquicken. And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced. 

Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather?Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting, imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at breakof a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowedbetween fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alpscrowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long levelshadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with athousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas. [342] Thiswas the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power andhope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man ofpeace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound. Rousseau's sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; itdid not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence thediviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in whichsuch a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, themysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful andimpenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach morethan a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours oftranquillity and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, tobring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or toinvest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I havegrace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye. "

The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his ownconception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverencetoo profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desiresas to the special relations of that order to himself. "I penetrate allmy faculties, " he said, "with the divine essence of the author of theworld; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts, but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me heshould change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles?Could I, who must love above all else the order established by hiswisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such ordertroubled for my sake? Nor do I ask of him the power of doingrighteousness; why ask for what he has given me? Has he not bestowedon me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedomto choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I willit. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what heseeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wishsomething other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil. "[343]We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and themanliness which it would engender in the character that were strongenough to practise it. But a divinity who has conceded no right ofpetition is still further away from our lives than the divinities ofmore popular creeds. 

Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism andcomplacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of thereligious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity firstclothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforthmiss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why isthis? Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into ahidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that themost touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts ofhuman life. Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinarymen, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it didnot enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this showsthat his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion ofinsincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so manycases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitouslyadopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner cravingand resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and thewicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaictheologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to himwhether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though heconcludes more graciously with the hope that in another state thewicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less thanhis own. [344] But the divine pitifulness which we owe toChristianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished bythose who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon usthat we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that iswithout sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by someformula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left andconstituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the badman who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force ofcircumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the franksense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequateexplanation of the foundations of moral responsibility. 

Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate hadat any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will ofthe gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the SupremeBeing upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him fromthe guilt that brings misery, --that is at the moment when conductbegins to follow the preponderant motives or the will, --did thuseffectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of oursympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment. Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventyyears, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who hasleft us there, with no other solace than that he is good and just andall-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if hewould. This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to imposeupon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men, thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had thenunder the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them. Thefaith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, thoughjust as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying aspiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by the humanintelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father'sexcellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence andgratitude and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love forthe God whom they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and lovefor their brethren whom they had seen. 

The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one ofreverential scepticism. "The holiness of the gospel, " he said, "is anargument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorryto find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with alltheir pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here thetone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, whatpurity, in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching, whatloftiness in his maxims! Assuredly there was something more than humanin such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death. If thelife and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and deathof Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that the history of thegospels is invented at pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion ofinvention; and the facts about Socrates are less attested than thefacts about Christ. [345] Yet with all that, this same gospel aboundsin things incredible, which are repugnant to reason, and which it isimpossible for any sensible man to conceive or admit. What are we todo in the midst of all these contradictions? To be ever modest andcircumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can neither rejectnor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the great beingwho alone knows the truth. "[346]

"I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions, which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God bypublic worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve Godfittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart. God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered tohim. In other days I used to say mass with the levity which in timeinfects even the gravest things, when we do them too often. Sinceacquiring my new principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I amoverwhelmed by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, bythe insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little whatpertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, Icollect myself for performing the act with all the feelings requiredby the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive toannihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who artthou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'"[347]

A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerfulsolvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential totrue worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, bemystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based uponbooks, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into thesecond place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, butthat can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable tovirtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer hasever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian, Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar withsuch energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire. [348] It was turningan unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties oftheological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist uponacceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above thedictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant, but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry andcomparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of suchmomentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of thecompeting revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety. "Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardlyshall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his timeand used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number ofyears, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure whatto believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, inwhat faith he ought to have lived. " The superiority of the scepticalparts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of theLetters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over thebiting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method ofassault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated allserious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern, while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in supportof his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sensehappened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urgedobjections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. Hisobjections were on a moral level with the best side of the religionthat they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with itslowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross andrepulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church. 

Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans ofevery exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough todisperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the veryinstrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he wassatisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that heknew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here andhereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found thesetruths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent theChristian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the NewTestament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from theSupreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of theheart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not inthe other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that anyman desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing eitherreasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearingon its efficacy or conclusiveness. 

Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, becauseit makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, andbinds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes canneither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to beable to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote, to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. Thetemperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoilrising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to beimposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understandingas a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then thoseinstincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many ofits highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come toassociate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the longbrotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with anassurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake, because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousnessof human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition inknowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have thereligious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from theregion of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with thehardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with thehard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice bywhich generation after generation has added some small piece to thetemple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incompletesum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong orbeautiful character, --those who have an eye for all this may indeedhave no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion, but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude, and sovereign pitifulness. 

And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathlychills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit innew hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of theexperience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds, brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relationswith his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life, and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficenttradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sagespirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation forall the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A manwith this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is nomysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a largerparticipant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilationwith which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngestand crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, becausethe key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty, practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of avisible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal andparalysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faithin humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the manypossibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for menin the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens bymanful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces thatgovern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident howmuch our destiny is shaped by the generation of the dead who haveprepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and thedirection of our activity for the generations that are to fill thefuture, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself tothe great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and whoare to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating inthe sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on apositive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the wideningof experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it. Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the mostscientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each momentexpecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religiousa solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarousmysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom withthe eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation, " hewrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of hispersecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with manreinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets mantormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is herethat he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reasonhas known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanityadorns with all purest delights. "[349]

This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress atthe first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they havemarked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days, when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without theeye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism. But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generousnatures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of thedawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towardsgood and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity islost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked outby the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dryindifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the SavoyardVicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there tocontemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyondcontemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate thesefine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, andstill sublime possibilities of the human destiny, --that imperialconception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion inall its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Doyou ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened fromyouth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the staincast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with whichhe has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that havebecome the ruling harmony of his days. 

FOOTNOTES:

[337] See Hallam's _Literature of Europe_, Pt. I. Ch. Ii. § 64. Again(for the 16th century), Pt. II. Ch. Ii. § 53. See also for mention ofa sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary, _s. V. _Viret. 

[338] See above, vol. I. Pp. 223-227. 

[339] _Emile_, IV. 163. 

[340] IV. 183-185. 

[341] M. Henri Martin's _Hist. De France_, xvi. 101, where there is aninteresting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly asuccessful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence intoscientific form. 

[342] _Emile_, IV. 135. 

[343] _Emile_, IV. 204. 

[344] _Emile_, IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758. _Corr. _, ii. 9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls ofthe wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that being andfeeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter heasks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar, "of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him. "

[345] A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with theChrist of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15, 1769 (_Corr. _, vi. 59, 60), to M----, accompanied by a violentdenigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice ofthe time. 

[346] _Emile_, IV. 241, 242. 

[347] _Emile_, IV. 243. 

[348] IV. 210-236. 

[349] Condorcet's _Progrès de l'Esprit Humain_ (1794). _Oeuv. _, vi. 276. 

CHAPTER VI. 

ENGLAND. [350]

There is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques, which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincialartist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights upfor us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere, which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of thestatue on the little island at Geneva, would leave veryincomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some ofthe dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hardstruggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deepfurrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, halfpenetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances havesprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has beenwith his own passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, theeye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeatwhich is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil andweakness, and leaves only eternal desolation and the misery that isformless. Our English artist has produced a vision from that proseInferno which is made so populous in the modern epoch by impotence ofwill. Those who have seen the picture may easily understand howlargely the character of the original must have been pregnant withharassing confusion and distress. 

Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had toldthe story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, anddeclared his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him inEngland. There had been an exchange of cordial letters, [351] and thenthe matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining longerin Neuchâtel had once more set his friends on procuring a safeestablishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau'sappearance in Paris had created the keenest excitement. "People maytalk of ancient Greece as they please, " wrote Hume from Paris, "but nonation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so muchengaged their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else arequite eclipsed by him. " Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared veryhomely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess ofMorocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towardshim. His very dog had a name and reputation in the world. [352]Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presencecreated, but whether this was so or not, he was very impatient to beaway from it as soon as possible. 

In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage thatlasted twelve hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, wasextremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upondeck, taking no harm, though the seamen were almost frozen todeath. [353] They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and thepeople of London showed nearly as lively an interest in the strangepersonage whom Hume had brought among them, as the people of Paris haddone. A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects to theSwiss philosopher. The crowd at the playhouse showed more curiositywhen the stranger came in than when the king and queen entered. Theirmajesties were as interested as their subjects, and could scarcelykeep their eyes off the author of Emilius. George III. , then in theheyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a foreigner of geniusseeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway'ssuggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should have a pensionsettled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made member ofParliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that "heentertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide hisunderstanding, but vanity. "[354] Hume, on the contrary, thought thebest things of his client; "He has an excellent warm heart, and inconversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks likeinspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have some share in hisaffections. . . . He is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spiritedand warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is also toappearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems bettercalculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure init. " "He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. Thephilosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him toCalais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all mylife in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source ofour concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is notthe case with any of them. They are also displeased with him, becausethey think he over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkablethat the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is byfar the most devout. "[355]

What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, mayperhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailingupon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed aspecial occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hourcame, Rousseau declared that he could not leave his dog behind him. "The first person, " he said, "who opens the door, Sultan will run intothe streets in search of me and will be lost. " Hume told him to lockSultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This wasdone, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; hismaster turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him inthat condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him thatMr. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room forhim, that the king and queen were expecting to see him, and thatwithout a better reason than Sultan's impatience it would beridiculous to disappoint them. Thus, a little by reason, but more byforce, he was carried off. [356] Such a story, whatever else we maythink of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouchingsimplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keephis dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was tooprivate in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectationwith which he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive. 

There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager toleave London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased withthe friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced Londonto be as much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals. He spent a few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thoughtabout fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, thensomewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know, greatly attracted him. Finally arrangements were made by Hume with Mr. Davenport for installing him in a house belonging to the latter, atWootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of Derbyshire. [357] HitherRousseau proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenportwas a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom inhabited thissolitary house, was very willing that Rousseau should take up hisabode there without payment. This, however, was what Rousseau'sindependence could not brook, and he insisted that his entertainershould receive thirty pounds a year for the board of himself andTheresa. [358] So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate, knowing no word of the language of the people about him, with nocompanionship but Theresa's, and with nothing to do but walk when theweather was fair, play the harpsicord when it rained, and brood overthe incidents which had occurred to him since he had left Switzerlandsix months before. The first fruits of this unfortunate leisure were abitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most famous and far-resounding ofall the quarrels of illustrious men, but one about which very littleneeds now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all significancethat may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The incubation ofhis grievances began immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but twomonths elapsed before they burst forth in full flame. [359]

The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of anaccursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners;and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and renderhis life miserable. The particular acts on which this belief wasestablished were the following:--

(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a letter nominallyaddressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironicalstrain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work ofVoltaire. [360] Then he suspected D'Alembert. It was really thecomposition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris. Now Hume was thefriend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction tohim for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of somepapers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest amusement atRousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, whilefeigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the Englishpublic, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was aforgery, nor did he break with its wicked author. [361] (2) WhenRousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and dishonourableman, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew thelatter to be Rousseau's enemy. [362] (3) Hume lived in London with theson of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all thefoes of Jean Jacques. [363] (4) When Rousseau first came to London, hisreception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecutionfrom so many governments. England was proud of being his place ofrefuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration. Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone changed, thenewspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseauwas thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had muchinfluence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of theprotection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris. [364] (5)Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau frommaking friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau'sletters, and the like. [365] (6) A violent satirical letter againstRousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions whichcould only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night aftertheir departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room withHume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night inthe course of his dreams, _Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau_, withextreme vehemence--which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic toneof the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which laterevent proved to have been full of malign significance. [366] (8)Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinisterand diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude, though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he wasseized with remorse, fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and, suffocated with sobs and bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents, _No, no, David Hume is no traitor_, with many protests of affection. The phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with politeness, strokedhim gently on the back, and repeated several times in a tranquilvoice, _Quoi, mon cher monsieur! Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, moncher monsieur!_[367] (9) Although for many weeks Rousseau had kept afirm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer letters that plainly calledfor answer, and marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways, yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what must necessarilyhave struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if nothinghad happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness ofperfidy?

Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set ofgrievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at tablewith him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engravingexecuted of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while inanother engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques wasmade as ugly as a bear. [368]

It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing thesecharges. They are not open to serious examination, though it isastonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Humewas a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate manwhom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of theindictment about which there could be the least doubt, was thepossibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very smallpleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had ahand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although theletter constituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensibleman have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who, like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could beshown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition orthe circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon one towards whom hewas pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that heshowed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amountedto something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume setsthis doubt at rest. "I cannot be precise as to the time of my writingthe King of Prussia's letter, but . . . I not only suppressed the letterwhile you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reasonwhy, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you oftenproposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to aman, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him. "[369]

With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us, as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men donot act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in enteringinto any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers inFrance might have motives. We know the character of our David Humeperfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainlylay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable foreverybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which henever had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume'sagency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity, and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to hisconsequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talkedabout and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all forRousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at greatpains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him thegrant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refusedthe pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, stillignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's mind, supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being keptprivate, and at once took measures with the minister to procure theremoval of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts likethese, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is abundantlyshown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just asRousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early lettersboth to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on theone side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidenceto neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges withgravity is irrational. 

If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there canbe no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imaginationwould, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to asense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at whathe very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. Hereproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had usednine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindlywords he had once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting intheir place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave thephilosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmationwhich his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warnedhim that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of theadvice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and oneof the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account ofthe quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step waschiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was thespokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened variousexpressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It maybe true that a council of war never fights; a council of men ofletters always does. The governing committee of a literary, philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers anyman can have. 

Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared themost hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection. Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he hadsuffered with firm silence petulant charges against which theconsciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer. That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much inthe world, and which saves men from waste of themselves and others inpitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helpedhumane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwardsRousseau said, "England, of which they paint such fine pictures inFrance, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks, was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all thatpassed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable tothose of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to havedone no more than published our private quarrels?"[370] An amplercontrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, butthere is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however, reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that heis sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regretit. [371] And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau hadreturned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgentin entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government toprotect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both howsincere this humane interposition was, and how practicallyserviceable. [372]

Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared inParis and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed bysuccinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account ofhis own share in the matter. Boswell officiously wrote to thenewspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King Georgefollowed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemnformalities sent the documents to the British Museum. There wassilence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunateperson who had done all the mischief printed not a word. 

The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarksinvariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, isthat he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted reallytells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from awarranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia. Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes andliving frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and wentto live in the country. The same facile explanation covered hisquarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called himmad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste andtemperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, thepair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced byconversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate totake either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even fordemocratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind. [373] ThatRousseau's conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mentalsoundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy, teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases likemonomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions whichprepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the onlymeans of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which itextended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple andobvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essentialfacts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in thesymptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectualconstitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn. 

Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. Thispredisposition was further deepened by the application in early youthof mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenilesensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formalinstruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in histemperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at arate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses andfaculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the manyforms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary havegradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When thevicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he cameto Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by theuncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of amarked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, andpractical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravationof the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion, by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe'sPrincess warn the hapless Tasso:--

 Dieser Pfad Verleitet uns, durch einsames Gebüsch, Durch stille Thäler fortzuwandern; mehr Und mehr verwöhnt sich das Gemüth und strebt Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt, In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen, So wenig der Versuch gelingen will. 

Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, andthis introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element ofbitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling abouthimself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicionabout others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim oftormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it. The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed thesum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he wassettled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents ofthe few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which hadlong been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly butby a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of hisintelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which wasnot yet fixed, but which ultimately became so. 

"He has only _felt_ during the whole course of his life, " wrote Humesympathetically; "and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitchbeyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a moreacute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who wasstripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out inthat situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements. "[374]A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree ofintensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state, general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey ofunsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistentenough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of allor some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced intofinding supports in misconception of circumstances, for amisconception of human relation which had its root in disorderedemotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man'snature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though thebreach may not, and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend alongthe whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion aboutHume's sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definitemanifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of theintelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of aninherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily forthe man's history had never been counteracted either by a strenuouseducation, or by the wholesome urgencies of life. 

We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, therewas entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel orinexplicable rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in anorder that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with theirfoundations down in physical temperament; the facts which madeRousseau's name renowned and his influence a great force, along withthose which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself. The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectationof happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the markboth of his character and his work. The exaltation of emotion overintelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the sameexaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, atlength passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The tendency of thedominant side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a factof daily observation. The ruin which the excess of strong religiousimagination works in natures without the quality of energeticobjective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary, Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God wereequally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, withRousseau's delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plottersamong men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the importantthing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certainspecially marked tendencies of the sufferer's sanity. 

The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemiesled him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which isprobably the only one of his writings that continues to be generallyread. He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, duringthe autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to thepublic was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers. To write memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time, but like all else, it became in Rousseau's hand something morefar-reaching and sincere than a passing fashion. Other people wrotepolite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romanticdecorations. Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmostdepths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him eitherridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing thatcould attract much sympathy or much admiration. Though, as has beenpointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies ofdate, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the factsof his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or twoof the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimentalreminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yetwhen all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulnessof what remains is made more evident with every addition to ourmaterials for testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau'slife are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proveddelinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character asessentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as isconsistent with the general empire of sensation over untrainedintelligence. [375] As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hardto see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism. And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to thesurface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less viciousand debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with atroglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itselfperversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two ofthe disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, andare made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some viceswhose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright atrocities, and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelierimpatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when heconfesses to a horrible assassination. This morbid form ofself-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form whichclothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation. And there isnot much of it. Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, andthe egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustineor of Cardan. 

These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raisethe popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests ofa greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearlyalways been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau, from the time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in theirleast agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are theexpression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion ofthe essential goodness of nature and the importance of understandingnature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses andEmilius. "I would fain show to my fellows, " he began, "a man in allthe truth of nature, " and he cannot be charged with any failure tokeep his word. He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observewhether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add tothe popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all, considering that literature is for the most part a hollow andpretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches andperuke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignifiedassumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one whowould not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intensesubjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend tocome to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics tothe glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In anycase, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathologicalfacts no less than the others. These are the first thing, and thesecond, and the third also. 

The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. Nomonk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemousself-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, whenthe course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings withobjective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination. The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour ofcomposition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader wouldnever know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindicationof his life and character against the infamies with which Hume andothers were supposed to be industriously blackening them. While he waswriting this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from themodes of English provincial life, he was on good terms with one or twoof the great people in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious andsocial correspondence with them. He was greatly pleased by acompliment that was paid to him by the government, apparently throughthe interest of General Conway. The duty that had been paid uponcertain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from Switzerland was recouped bythe treasury, [376] and the arrangements for the annual pension of onehundred pounds were concluded and accepted by him, after he had dulysatisfied himself that Hume was not the indirect author of thebenefaction. [377] The weather was the worst possible, but whenever itallowed him to go out of doors, he found delight in climbing theheights around him in search of curious mosses; for he had now come tothink the discovery of a single new plant a hundred times more usefulthan to have the whole human race listening to your sermons for half acentury. [378] "This indolent and contemplative life that you do notapprove, " he wrote to the elder Mirabeau, "and for which I pretend tomake no excuses, becomes every day more delicious to me: to wanderalone among the trees and rocks that surround my dwelling; to muse orrather to extravagate at my ease, and as you say to stand gaping inthe air; when my brain gets too hot, to calm it by dissecting somemoss or fern; in short, to surrender myself without restraint to myphantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all under my owncontrol, --all that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I canimagine nothing superior in this world for a man of my age and in mycondition. "[379]

This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. Theexcitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoblequarrels with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned withgreater force than before. He believed that the whole English nationwas in a plot against him, that all his letters were opened beforereaching London and before leaving it, that all his movements wereclosely watched, and that he was surrounded by unseen guards toprevent any attempt at escape. [380] At length these delusions got suchcomplete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror he fled awayfrom Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him. Nothingwas heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a letterfrom him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conductthroughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him thehighest honour. He confesses himself "quite moved to read poorRousseau's mournful epistle. " "You shall see his letter, " he writes toHume, "the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity givea copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little privateconcerns, that it would not be right in me to do it. "[381] This isthe generosity which makes Hume's impatience and that of hismischievous advisers in Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quiteas ill to Mr. Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received atleast equal services from him. [382] The good man at once sent aservant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau hadagain disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hoursof each day in his company, and had found him cheerful andgood-humoured. He had had a blue coat made for himself, and hadwritten a long letter to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint aguard, at Rousseau's own expense, to escort him in safety out of thekingdom where enemies were plotting against his life. [383] He was nextheard of at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to GeneralConway, setting forth his delusion in full form. [384] He is the victimof a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave the island, lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to which he hasbeen subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres that willarrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he warnsthem that his tragical disappearance cannot take place withoutcreating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, hegives his word of honour that he will not publish a line of thememoirs he has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he hassuffered in England. "I see my last hour approaching, " he concluded;"I am determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perishor be free; there is no longer any other alternative. " On the sameevening on which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorncreature took boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once tohave recovered his composure and a right mind. 

FOOTNOTES:

[350] Jan. 1766--May 1767. 

[351] Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. _Corr. _, iii. 

[352] Burton, ii. 299. 

[353] The materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau's_Correspondence_ (vols. Iv. And v. ), and from Hume's letters tovarious persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton's _Life ofHume_. Everybody who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr. Burton for the ample documents which he has provided. Yet one cannotbut regret the satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, andwhich is not always felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295)that Rousseau invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume'scorrecting the proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story maybe true or not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantiallyfrom Lord Marischal; see letter from Lord M. To J. J. R. , inStreckeisen, ii. 67. Again, such an expression as Rousseau's"_occasional_ attention to small matters" (p. 321) only shows that thewriter has not read Rousseau's letters, which are indeed not worthreading, except by those who wish to have a right to speak aboutRousseau's character. The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel betweenHume and Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I haveturned over, really shed no light on the matter, though they addedmuch heat. For the journey, see _Corr. _, iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304. 

[354] _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. _ The same passagecontains some strong criticism on Rousseau's style. 

[355] Burton, 304, 309, 310. 

[356] _Ib. _ ii. 309, _n. _

[357] Mr. Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters atWootton, in his _Visits to Remarkable Places_. One or two agedpeasants had some confused memory of "old Ross-hall. " For Rousseau'sown description, see his letters to Mdme. De Luze, May 10, 1766. _Corr. _, iv. 326. 

[358] Burton, 313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid this;at any rate when he fled, he left between thirty and forty pounds inMr. Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367. Rousseau'saccurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely unimpeachable. 

[359] _Corr. _ iv. 312. April 9, 1766. 

[360] Here is a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm:--"Mydear Jean Jacques--You have renounced Geneva, your native place. Youhave caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled inyour writings; France has issued a warrant against you; so do you cometo me. I admire your talents; I am amused by your dreamings, thoughlet me tell you they absorb you too much and for too long. You must atlength be sober and happy; you have caused enough talk about yourselfby oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really great man. Prove to your enemies that you can now and then have common sense. That will annoy them and do you no harm. My states offer you apeaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if youwill let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckonupon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormentingyour spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. Iam a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and whatwill certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I willcease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in beingpersecuted. Your good friend, FREDERICK. "

[361] _Corr. _, iv. 313, 343, 388, 398. 

[362] _Ib. _ 395. 

[363] _Ib. _ 389, etc. 

[364] _Ib. _ 384. 

[365] _Ib. _ 343, 344, 387, etc. 

[366] _Corr. _, iv. 346. 

[367] _Ib. _ 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the ruptureovert, shows the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on thisoccasion as he may have seemed. "I hope, " he writes, "you have not sobad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion; Iassure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with aplentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever moreaffecting. " Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenthcentury could without fear have accepted the test of the ancientsaying, that men without tears are worth little. 

[368] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv. _, xii. 79. 

[369] Walpole's _Letters_, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For otherletters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. Acorroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letteruntil he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madamede Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and _n. _ 2. 

[370] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv. _, xii. 79. 

[371] To Adam Smith. Burton, 380. 

[372] Burton, 381. 

[373] A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity tocertain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may havecontributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies, though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance wereremarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mentalstate in the least corresponding to that particular variety ofinsanity, which possesses definitely marked features. 

[374] Burton, ii. 314. 

[375] For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughlytrustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions werewritten, see the 4th of the _Rêveries_. 

[376] Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. _Corr. _, v. 98:also 118. 

[377] _Ib. _ v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc. 

[378] _Corr. _, v. 37. 

[379] _Corr. _, v. 88. 

[380] See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767. _Corr. _, v. 140-147. 

[381] Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371. 

[382] J. J. R. To Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. _Corr. _, v. 66, 152. 

[383] Burton, 369, 375. 

[384] _Corr. _, v. 153. 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE END. 

Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more than onelong and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest ofmankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis ofMirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sireof a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseauwere the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau'soriginality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There isless of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman inhim than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like manyother headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notionsof philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force oftemperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moralformalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be, with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence withoutnative strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely takenup the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases ofperfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for aFénelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils. 

Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the markedtenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, itsformulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent inprivate life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race. Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted inRousseau's books: "I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; itstrikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance oftruth, for you are always true, according to your notions for themoment. " He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time atgreat length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academicthan Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel withHume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of thesacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in themidst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities. He concludeswith a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes, with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseauto take up his residence in whichever of them may please himbest. [385]

Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, andMirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant ofthe parliament of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. Butthe Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, "bore letters asa plum-tree bears plums, " and wrote to his guest with strangehumoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knewhis Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himselfagainst excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to takesociety more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth shouldlead him to do. "No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-picture, nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaselessflight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own faultfor looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary thescene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness andconsiderateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom ofit all. "[386] Enormous manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibilitywere not in the least degree either soothing or interesting toRousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touchhis fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener. Two humorists areseldom successful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau insistedthat Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books. Rousseauanswered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it. "I donot engage always to follow what you say, because it has always beenpainful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of otherpeople, and at present I cannot do so at all. "[387] Though theycontinued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or fourweeks at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince ofConti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrousfashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away atthe time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refugeat one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors. Here he installedRousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreetcuriosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself. 

Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing thesecond part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mentalconfusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew thegardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume, and that he was watched day and night with a view to hisdestruction. [388] He entirely gave up either reading or writing, savea very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up thepen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interesthe had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense. He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he couldemploy himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, inarranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rareseed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more thesame conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled from Wootton. Hemeant apparently to go to Chambéri, drawn by the deep magnetic forceof old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his waythither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that hehad lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He wasundoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by properauthorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less forthat. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and howeagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proofdemonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which theymight have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showedto be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages ofdroning wretchedness. [389] Then we find him at Bourgoin, where hespent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more atMonquin on adjoining uplands. [390] The estrangement from Theresa, ofwhich enough has been said already, [391] was added to his othertorments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have donesince, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond theAtlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among usto be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns hisface eastwards, and dreams of ending his days peacefully among theislands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely, not onlydesigned, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton. All was nomore than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, theweary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself toisolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully tocount the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessedto meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man'smental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of theirfullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moralsolitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace. Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, eitherfinds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic whowill, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has laindown with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossiblefor him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in acondition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasureitself. 

In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eightyears longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree oforder into his outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion anddistrust, half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon hismind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this period (1775-76) tovindicate his memory from the defamation that was to be launched in adark torrent upon the world at the moment of his death, could notpossibly have been written by a man in his right mind. Yet the best ofthe Musings, which were written still nearer the end, are masterpiecesin the style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth, theseventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow gravity of tonewhich is so rare in literature, because the deep absorption of spiritwhich is its source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to uswith a truth beyond that attained in any of his other pieces--amournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow of sundownamong sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in theFrench tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or theaugust among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangelymelodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit whichyet had imaginative visions of beatitude. 

 * * * * *

It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste andobscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silentlyfermenting for good and for evil in many spirits--a Schiller, aHerder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and manyhundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously tofollow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancientfriends, and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old tradeof copying music. In summer he rose at five, copied music untilhalf-past seven; munched his breakfast, arranging on paper during theprocess such plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon; then hereturned to his work, dined at half-past twelve, and went forth totake coffee at some public place. He would not return from his walkuntil nightfall, and he retired at half-past ten. The pavements ofParis were hateful to him because they tore his feet, and, said he, with deeply significant antithesis, "I am not afraid of death, but Idread pain. " He always found his way as fast as possible to one of thesuburbs, and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Valérienin the sunset. "Atheists, " he said calumniously, "do not love thecountry; they like the environs of Paris, where you have all thepleasures of the city, good cheer, books, pretty women; but if youtake these things away, then they die of weariness. " The note of everybird held him attentive, and filled his mind with delicious images. Agraceful story is told of two swallows who made a nest in Rousseau'ssleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. "I was no more than adoorkeeper for them, " he said, "for I kept opening the window for themevery moment. They used to fly with a great stir round my head, untilI had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention between theseswallows and me. "

In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal _Pauland Virginia_ (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wroteto a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe, counting among other delights that of seeing two summers in oneyear. [392] Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desireto make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should thinkof that as one of his chief pleasures. To this we owe the followingpictures of an interior from St. Pierre's hand:--

 In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a house in the Rue Plâtrière, nearly opposite to the Hôtel de la Poste. We mounted to the fourth story. We knocked, and Madame Rousseau opened the door. "Come in, gentlemen, " she said, "you will find my husband. " We passed through a very small antechamber, where the household utensils were neatly arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music. He rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed his work, at the same time taking a part in conversation. He was thin and of middle height. One shoulder struck me as rather higher than the other . . . Otherwise he was very well proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on his cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and lofty brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling from the nostrils to the extremity of the lips, and marking a physiognomy, in his case expressed great sensibility and something even painful. One observed in his face three or four of the characteristics of melancholy--the deep receding eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic gaiety in a thousand little creases at the corners of the eyes, of which the orbits entirely disappeared when he laughed. . . . Near him was a spinette on which from time to time he tried an air. Two little beds of blue and white striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor. His wife was sitting mending linen; a canary sang in a cage hung from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on to the sills of the windows, which on the side of the street were open; while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and pots filled with such plants as it pleases nature to sow. There was in the whole effect of his little establishment an air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity, which was delightful. 

A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. "He wore a round wig, well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a fullsuit of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat. "He expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and icewere the only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened tohave brought some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day herashly sent Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a politeletter of thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one ofharsh protest against the ignominy of receiving presents which couldnot be returned, and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose betweentaking his coffee back or never seeing his new friend again. A fairbargain was ultimately arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange forhis coffee some curious root or other, and a book on ichthyology. Immediately afterwards he went to dine with his sage. He arrived ateleven in the forenoon, and they conversed until half-past twelve. 

 Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and as he put it on the table, asked whether we should have enough, or if I was fond of drinking. "How many are there of us, " said I. "Three, " he said; "you, my wife, and myself. " "Well, " I went on, "when I drink wine and am alone, I drink a good half-bottle, and I drink a trifle more when I am with friends. " "In that case, " he answered, "we shall not have enough; I must go down into the cellar. " He brought up a second bottle. His wife served two dishes, one of small tarts, and another which was covered. He said, showing me the first, "That is your dish and the other is mine. " "I don't eat much pastry, " I said, "but I hope to be allowed to taste what you have got. " "Oh, they are both common, " he replied; "but most people don't care for this. 'Tis a Swiss dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and chestnuts. " It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had slices of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after which his wife served the coffee. 

 * * * * *

 One morning when I was at his house, I saw various domestics either coming for rolls of music, or bringing them to him to copy. He received them standing and uncovered. He said to some, "The price is so much, " and received the money; to others, "How soon must I return my copy?" "My mistress would like to have it back in a fortnight. " "Oh, that's out of the question: I have work, I can't do it in less than three weeks. " I inquired why he did not take his talents to better market. "Ah, " he answered, "there are two Rousseaus in the world; one rich, or who might have been if he had chosen; a man capricious, singular, fantastic; this is the Rousseau of the public; the other is obliged to work for his living, the Rousseau whom you see. "[393]

They often took long rambles together, and all proceeded mostharmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered to pay for such refreshment asthey might take, when a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here isone more picture, without explosion. 

 _An Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Valérien. _

 We made an appointment at a café in the Champs Elysées. In the morning we took some chocolate. The wind was westerly, and the air fresh. The sun was surrounded by white clouds, spread in masses over an azure sky. Reaching the Bois de Boulogne by eight o'clock, Jean Jacques set to work botanising. As he collected his little harvest, we kept walking along. We had gone through part of the wood, when in the midst of the solitude we perceived two young girls, one of whom was arranging the other's hair. --[Reminded them of some verses of Virgil. ]. . . . 

 Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry with a number of people whom devotion was taking to Mont Valérien. We climbed an extremely stiff slope, and were hardly on the top before hunger overtook us and we began to think of dining. Rousseau then led the way towards a hermitage, where he knew we could make sure of hospitality. The brother who opened to us, conducted us to the chapel, where they were reciting the litanies of providence, which are extremely beautiful. . . . When we had prayed, Jean Jacques said to me with genuine feeling: "Now I feel what is said in the gospel, 'Where several of you are gathered together in my name, there will I be in the midst of them. ' There is a sentiment of peace and comfort here that penetrates the soul. " I replied, "If Fénelon were alive, you would be a Catholic. " "Ah, " said he, the tears in his eyes, "if Fénelon were alive, I would seek to be his lackey. "

 Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated ourselves during the reading. The subject was the injustice of the complainings of man: God has brought him from nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the reading, Rousseau said to me in a voice of deep emotion: "Ah, how happy is the man who can believe. . . . " We walked about for some time in the cloister and the gardens. They command an immense prospect. Paris in the distance reared her towers all covered with light, and made a crown to the far-spreading landscape. The brightness of the view contrasted with the great leaden clouds that rolled after one another from the west, and seemed to fill the valley. . . . In the afternoon rain came on, as we approached the Porte Maillot. We took shelter along with a crowd of other holiday folk under some chestnut-trees whose leaves were coming out. One of the waiters of a tavern perceiving Jean Jacques, rushed to him full of joy, exclaiming, "What, is it you, _mon bonhomme_? Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you. " Rousseau replied cheerfully, "'Tis because my wife has been ill, and I myself have been out of sorts. " "_Mon pauvre bonhomme_, " replied the lad, "you must not stop here; come in, come in, and I will find room for you. " He hurried us along to a room upstairs, where in spite of the crowd he procured for us chairs and a table, and bread and wine. I said to Jean Jacques, "He seems very familiar with you. " He answered, "Yes, we have known one another some years. We used to come here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a cutlet of an evening. "[394]

Things did not continue to go thus smoothly. One day St. Pierre wentto see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomymien. He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book, and this drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room. For morethan two months they did not meet. At length they had an accidentalencounter at a street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with agradually warming sensibility proceeded thus: "There are days when Iwant to be alone and crave privacy. I come back from my solitaryexpeditions so calm and contented. There I have not been wanting toanybody, nor has anybody been wanting to me, " and so on. [395] Heexpressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when hesaid that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men asfrom Parthian arrows. As one said who knew from experience, the fateof his most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture. [396]Another of them declared that he knew Rousseau's style of discarding afriend by letter so thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supplyRousseau's place in case of illness or absence. [397] In much of thiswe suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality meant afutile display before unworthy and condescending curiosity. "It is notI whom they care for, " he very truly said, "but public opinion andtalk about me, without a thought of what real worth I may have. " Hencehis steadfast refusal to go out to dine or sup. The mere impertinenceof the desire to see him was illustrated by some coxcombs who insistedwith a famous actress of his acquaintance, that she should invite thestrange philosopher to meet them. She was aware that no known forcewould persuade Rousseau to come, so she dressed up her tailor asphilosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and vanish suddenlywithout a word of farewell. The tailor was long philosophicallysilent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue, the rest ofthe company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed Rousseauwas chattering vulgar nonsense. [398] We can believe that with admirersof this stamp Rousseau was well pleased to let tailors or others standin his place. There were some, however, of a different sort, whoflitted across his sight and then either vanished of their own accord, or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to Grétry andGluck. With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting his music toFrench words, when he must have known that Italian was the only tonguefit for music. [399] Yet it was remarked that no one ever heard himspeak ill of others. His enemies, the figures of his delusion, werevaguely denounced in many dronings, but they remained in dark shadowand were unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous last visit to thecapital (1778), some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by makinga mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseauharshly checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he gave tosome few of his acquaintances one or more readings of the Confessions, although they contained much painful matter for many people stillliving, among the rest for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote justifiablyenough to the lieutenant of police, praying that all such readingsmight be prohibited, and it is believed that they were soprohibited. [400]

In 1769, when Polish anarchy was at its height, as if to show at oncehow profound the anarchy was, and how profound the faith among manyminds in the power of the new French theories, an application was madeto Mably to draw up a scheme for the renovation of distracted Poland. Mably's notions won little esteem from the persons who had sought forthem, and in 1771 a similar application was made to Rousseau in hisParisian garret. He replied in the Considerations on the Government ofPoland, which are written with a good deal of vigour of expression, but contain nothing that needs further discussion. He hinted to thePoles with some shrewdness that a curtailment of their territory bytheir neighbours was not far off, [401] and the prediction was rapidlyfulfilled by the first partition of Poland in the following year. 

He was asked one day of what nation he had the highest opinion. Heanswered, the Spanish. The Spanish nation, he said, has a character;if it is not rich, it still preserves all its pride and self-respectin the midst of its poverty; and it is animated by a single spirit, for it has not been scourged by the conflicting opinions ofphilosophy. [402]

He was extremely poor for these last eight years of his life. He seemsto have drawn the pension which George III. Had settled on him, fornot more than one year. We do not know why he refused to receive itafterwards. A well-meaning friend, when the arrears amounted tobetween six and seven thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf, and a draft for the money was sent. Rousseau gave the offender avigorous rebuke for meddling in affairs that did not concern him, andthe draft was destroyed. Other attempts to induce him to draw thismoney failed equally. [403] Yet he had only about fifty pounds a yearto live on, together with the modest amount which he earned by copyingmusic. [404]

The sting of indigence began to make itself felt towards 1777. Hishealth became worse and he could not work. Theresa was waxing old, andcould no longer attend to the small cares of the household. More thanone person offered them shelter and provision, and the olddistractions as to a home in which to end his days began once again. At length M. Girardin prevailed upon him to come and live atErmenonville, one of his estates some twenty miles from Paris. A densecloud of obscure misery hangs over the last months of this forlornexistence. [405] No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. Theresa'scharacter seems to have developed into something truly bestial. Rousseau's terrors of the designs of his enemies returned with greatviolence. He thought he was imprisoned, and he knew that he had nomeans of escape. One day (July 2, 1778), suddenly and without a singlewarning symptom, all drew to an end; the sensations which had been theruling part of his life were affected by pleasure and pain no more, the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The surgeons reported thatthe cause of his death was apoplexy, but a suspicion has haunted theworld ever since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol-shot. Wecannot tell. There is no inherent improbability in the fact of hishaving committed suicide. In the New Heloïsa he had thrown theconditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct formula. Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within theconditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditatingaction. [406] Only seven years before, he had implied that a man hadthe right to deliver himself of the burden of his own life, if itsmiseries were intolerable and irremediable. [407] This, however, countsfor nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and ofthat there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a littledoubtful. [408] Once more, we cannot tell. 

By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his body was put under theground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throwshadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny ofmortals. Here it remained for sixteen years. Then amid the roar ofcannon, the crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of apopulace gone mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that thepoor dust should be transported to the national temple of great men. 

FOOTNOTES:

[385] Streckeisen, ii. 315-328. 

[386] Streckeisen, ii. 337. 

[387] June 19, 1767. _Corr. _, v. 172. 

[388] _Corr. _, v. 267, 375. 

[389] _Corr. _, v. 330-381, 408, etc. 

[390] Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July 1770. 

[391] See above, vol. I. Chap. Iv. 

[392] The life of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was nearly asirregular as that of his friend and master. But his character wasessentially crafty and selfish, like that of many othersentimentalists of the first order. 

[393] _Oeuv. _, xii. 69, 73. 

[394] _Oeuv. _, xii. 104, etc. ; and also the _Préambule de l'Arcadie_, _Oeuv. _, vii. 64, 65. 

[395] St. Pierre, xii. 81-83. 

[396] Dusaulx, p. 81. For his quarrel with Rousseau, see pp. 130, etc. 

[397] Rulhières in Dusaulx, p. 179. For a strange interview betweenRulhières and Rousseau, see pp. 185-186. 

[398] Musset-Pathay, i. 181. 

[399] _Ib. _

[400] Musset-Pathay, i. 209. Rousseau gave a copy of the Confessionsto Moultou, but forbade the publication before the year 1800. Notwithstanding this, printers procured copies surreptitiously, perhaps through Theresa, ever in need of money; the first part waspublished four years, and the second part with many suppressionseleven years, after his death, in 1782 and 1789 respectively. SeeMusset-Pathay, ii. 464. 

[401] Ch. V. Such a curtailment, he says, "would no doubt be a greatevil for the parts dismembered, but it would be a great advantage forthe body of the nation. " He urged federation as the condition of anysolid improvement in their affairs. 

[402] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 37. Comte had a similar admirationfor Spain and for the same reason. 

[403] Corancez, quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 239. Also _Corr. _, vi. 295. 

[404] _Corr. _, vi. 303. 

[405] Robespierre, then a youth, is said to have invited him here. SeeHamel's _Robespierre_, i. 22. 

[406] See above, vol. I. Pp. 16, 17. 

[407] _Corr. _, vi. 264. 

[408] The case stands thus:--(1) There was the certificate of fivedoctors, attesting that Rousseau had died of apoplexy. (2) Theassertion of M. Girardin, in whose house he died, that there was nohole in his head, nor poison in the stomach or viscera, nor other signof self-destruction. (3) The assertion of Theresa to the same effect. On the other hand, we have the assertion of Corancez, that on hisjourney to Ermenonville on the day of Rousseau's burial a horse-masteron the road had said, "Who would have supposed that M. Rousseau wouldhave destroyed himself!"--and a variety of inferences from the wordingof the certificate, and of Theresa's letter. Musset-Pathay believes inthe suicide, and argued very ingeniously against M. Girardin. But hisarguments do not go far beyond verbal ingenuity, showing that suicidewas possible, and was consistent with the language of the documents, rather than adducing positive testimony. See vol. I. Of his _History_, pp. 268, etc. The controversy was resumed as late as 1861, between the_Figaro_ and the _Monde Illustré_. See also M. Jal's _Dict. Crit. DeBiog. Et d'Hist. _, p. 1091. 

INDEX. 

ACADEMIES (French) local, i. 132. 

Academy, of Dijon, Rousseau writes essays for, i. 133; French, prize essay against Rousseau's Discourse, i. 150, _n. _

Actors, how regarded in France in Rousseau's time, i. 322. 

Althusen, teaches doctrine of sovereignty of the people, ii. 147. 

America (U. S. ), effects in, of the doctrine of the equality of men, i. 182. 

American colonists indebted in eighteenth century to Rousseau's writings, i. 3. 

Anchorite, distinction between the old and the new, i. 234. 

Annecy, i. 34, 50; Rousseau's room at, i. 54; Rousseau's teachers at, i. 56; seminary at, i. 82. 

Aquinas, protest against juristical doctrine of law being the pleasure of the prince, ii. 144, 145. 

Aristotle on Origin of Society, i. 174. 

Atheism, Rousseau's protest against, i. 208; St. Lambert on, i. 209, _n. _; Robespierre's protest against, ii. 178; Chaumette put to death for endeavouring to base the government of France on, ii. 180. 

Augustine (of Hippo), ii. 272, 303. 

Austin, John, ii. 151, _n. _; on Sovereignty, ii. 162. 

Authors, difficulties of, in France in the eighteenth century, ii. 55-61. 

BABOEUF, on the Revolution, ii. 123, _n. _

Barbier, ii. 26. 

Basedow, his enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, ii. 251. 

Beaumont, De, Archbishop of Paris, mandate against Rousseau issued by, ii. 83; argument from, ii. 86. 

Bernard, maiden name of Rousseau's mother, i. 10. 

Bienne, Rousseau driven to take refuge in island in lake of, ii. 108; his account of, ii. 109-115. 

Bodin, on Government, ii. 147; his definition of an aristocratic state, ii. 168, _n. _

Bonaparte, Napoleon, ii. 102, _n. _

Bossuet, on Stage Plays, i. 321. 

Boswell, James, ii. 98; visits Rousseau, ii. 98, also _ib. _ _n. _; urged by Rousseau to visit Corsica, ii. 100; his letter to Rousseau, ii. 101. 

Boufflers, Madame de, ii. 5, _ib. _ _n. _

Bougainville (brother of the navigator), i. 184, _n. _

Brutus, how Rousseau came to be panegyrist of, i. 187. 

Buffon, ii. 205. 

Burke, ii. 140, 192. 

Burnet, Bishop, on Genevese, i. 225. 

Burton, John Hill, his _Life of Hume_ (on Rousseau), ii. 283, _n. _

Byron, Lord, antecedents of highest creative efforts, ii. 1; effect of nature upon, ii. 40; difference between and Rousseau, ii. 41. 

CALAS, i. 312. 

Calvin, i. 4, 189; Rousseau on, as a legislator, ii. 131; and Servetus, ii. 180; mentioned, ii. 181. 

_Candide_, thought by Rousseau to be meant as a reply to him, i. 319. 

Cardan, ii. 303. 

Cato, how Rousseau came to be his panegyrist, i. 187. 

Chambéri, probable date of Rousseau's return to, i. 62, _n. _; takes up his residence there, i. 69; effect on his mind of a French column of troops passing through, i. 72, 73; his illness at, i. 73, _n. _

Charmettes, Les, Madame de Warens's residence, i. 73; present condition of, i. 74, 75, _n. _; time spent there by Rousseau, i. 94. 

Charron, ii. 203. 

Chateaubriand, influenced by Rousseau, i. 3. 

Chatham, Lord, ii. 92. 

Chaumette, ii. 178; guillotined on charge of endeavouring to establish atheism in France, ii. 179. 

Chesterfield, Lord, ii. 15. 

Choiseul, ii. 57, 64, 72. 

Citizen, revolutionary use of word, derived from Rousseau, ii. 161. 

Civilisation, variety of the origin and process of, i. 176; defects of, i. 176; one of the worst trials of, ii. 102. 

Cobbett, ii. 42. 

Collier, Jeremy, on the English Stage, i. 323. 

Condillac, i. 95. 

Condorcet, i. 89; on Social Position of Women, i. 335; human perfectibility, ii. 119; inspiration of, drawn from the school of Voltaire and Rousseau, ii. 194; belief of, in the improvement of humanity, ii. 246; grievous mistake of, ii. 247. 

Confessions, the, not to be trusted for minute accuracy, i. 86, _n. _; or for dates, i. 93; first part written 1766, ii. 301; their character, ii. 303; published surreptitiously, ii. 324, _n. _; readings from, prohibited by police, ii. 324. 

Conti, Prince of, ii. 4-7; receives Rousseau at Trye, ii. 118. 

Contract, Social, i. 136. 

Corsica, struggles for independence of, ii. 99; Rousseau invited to legislate for, ii. 99-102; bought by France, ii. 102. 

Cowper, i. 20; ii. 41; on Rousseau, ii. 41 _n. _; lines in the Task, ii. 253; his delusions, ii. 301. 

Cynicism, Rousseau's assumption of, i. 206. 

D'AIGUILLON, ii. 72. 

D'Alembert, i. 89; Voltaire's staunchest henchman, i. 321; his article on Geneva, i. 321; on Stage Plays, i. 326, _n. _; on Position of Women in Society, i. 335; on Rousseau's letter on the Theatre, i. 336; suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from Frederick of Prussia, ii. 288; advises Hume to publish account of Rousseau's quarrel with him, ii. 294. 

D'Argenson, ii. 180. 

Dates of Rousseau's letters to be relied on, not those of the Confessions, i. 93. 

Davenport, Mr. , provides Rousseau with a home at Wootton, ii. 286; his kindness to Rousseau, ii. 306. 

Deism, Rousseau's, ii. 260-275; that of others, ii. 262-265; shortcomings of Rousseau's, ii. 270. 

Democracy defined, ii. 168; rejected by Rousseau, as too perfect for men, ii. 171. 

D'Epinay, Madame, i. 194, 195, 205; gives the Hermitage to Rousseau, i. 229, _n. _; his quarrels with, i. 271; his relations with, i. 273, 276; journey to Geneva of, i. 284; squabbles arising out of, between, and Rousseau, Diderot, and Grimm, i. 285-290; mentioned, ii. 7, 26, 197; wrote on education, ii. 199; applies to secretary of police to prohibit Rousseau's readings from his Confessions, ii. 324. 

D'Epinay, Monsieur, i. 254; ii. 26. 

Descartes, i. 87, 225; ii. 267. 

Deux Ponts, Duc de, Rousseau's rude reply to, i. 207. 

D'Holbach, i. 192; Rousseau's dislike of his materialistic friends, i. 223; ii. 37, 256. 

D'Houdetot, Madame, i. 255-270; Madame d'Epinay's jealousy of, i. 278; mentioned, ii. 7; offers Rousseau a home in Normandy, ii. 117. 

Diderot, i. 64, 89, 133; tries to manage Rousseau, i. 213; his domestic misconduct, i. 215; leader of the materialistic party, i. 223; on Solitary Life, i. 232; his active life, i. 233; without moral sensitiveness, i. 262; mentioned, i. 262, 269, 271; ii. 8; his relations with Rousseau, i. 271; accused of pilfering Goldoni's new play, i. 275; his relations and contentions with Rousseau, i. 275, 276; lectures Rousseau about Madame d'Epinay, i. 284; visits Rousseau after his leaving the Hermitage, i. 289; Rousseau's final breach with, i. 336; his criticism, and plays, ii. 34; his defects, ii. 34; thrown into prison, ii. 57; his difficulties with the Encyclopædists, ii. 57; his papers saved from the police by Malesherbes, ii. 62. 

Dijon, academy of, i. 132. 

Discourses, The, Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse, i. 133-136; summary of it, i. 138-145 disastrous effect of the progress of sciences and arts, i. 140, 141; error more dangerous than truth useful, i. 141; uselessness of learning and art, i. 141, 142; terrible disorders caused in Europe by the art of printing, i. 143; two kinds of ignorance, i. 144; the relation of this Discourse to Montaigne, i. 145; its one-sidedness and hollowness, i. 148; shown by Voltaire, i. 148; its positive side, i. 149, 150; second Discourse, origin of the Inequality of Man, i. 154; summary of it, i. 159, 170; state of nature, i. 150, 162; Hobbes's mistake, i. 161; what broke up the "state of nature, " i. 164; its preferableness, i. 166, 167; origin of society and laws, i. 168; "new state of nature, " i. 169; main position of the Discourse, i. 169; its utter inclusiveness, i. 170; criticism on its method, i. 170; on its matter, i. 172; wanting in evidence, i. 172; further objections to it, i. 173; assumes uniformity of process, i. 176; its unscientific character, i. 177; its real importance, i. 178; its protest against the mockery of civilisation, i. 178; equality of man, i. 181; different effects of this doctrine in France and the United States explained, i. 182, 183; discovers a reaction against the historical method of Montesquieu, i. 183, 184; pecuniary results of, i. 196; Diderot's praise of first Discourse, i. 200; Voltaire's acknowledgement of gift of second Discourse, i. 308; the, an attack on the general ordering of society, ii. 22; referred to, ii. 41. 

Drama, its proper effect, i. 326; what would be that of its introduction into Geneva, i. 327; true answer to Rousseau's contentions, i. 329. 

Dramatic morality, i. 326. 

Drinkers, Rousseau's estimate of, i. 330. 

Drunkenness, how esteemed in Switzerland and Naples, i. 331. 

Duclos, i. 206; ii. 62. 

Duni, i. 292. 

Dupin, Madame de, Rousseau secretary to, i. 120; her position in society, i. 195; Rousseau's country life with, i. 196; friend of the Abbé de Saint Pierre, i. 244. 

EDUCATION, interest taken in, in France in Rousseau's time, ii. 193, 194; its new direction ii. 195; Locke, the pioneer of, ii. 202, 203; Rousseau's special merit in connection with, ii. 203; his views on (see Emilius, _passim_, as well as for general consideration of) what it is, ii. 219; plans of, of Locke and others, designed for the higher class, ii. 254; Rousseau's for all, ii. 254. 

_Emile_, i. 136, 196. 

Emilius, character of, ii. 2, 3; particulars of the publication of, ii. 59, 60; effect of, on Rousseau's fortunes, ii. 62-64; ordered to be burnt by public executioner at Paris, ii. 65; at Geneva, ii. 72; condemned by the Sorbonne, ii. 82; supplied (as also did the Social Contract) dialect for the longing in France and Germany to return to nature, ii. 193; substance of, furnished by Locke, ii. 202; examination of, ii. 197-280; mischief produced by its good advice, ii. 206, 207; training of young children, ii. 207, 208; constantly reasoning with them a mistake of Locke's, ii. 209; Rousseau's central idea, disparagement of the reasoning faculty, ii. 209, 210; theories of education, practice better than precept, ii. 211; the idea of property, the first that Rousseau would have given to a child, ii. 212; modes of teaching, ii. 214, 215; futility of such methods, ii. 215, 216; where Rousseau is right, and where wrong, ii. 219, 220; effect of his own want of parental love, ii. 220; teaches that everybody should learn a trade, ii. 223; no special foresight, ii. 224, 225; supremacy of the common people insisted upon, ii. 226, 227; three dominant states of mind to be established by the instructor, ii. 229, 230; Rousseau's incomplete notion of justice, ii. 231; ideal of Emilius, ii. 232, 233; forbids early teaching of history, ii. 237, 238; disparages modern history, ii. 239; criticism on the old historians, ii. 240; education of women, ii. 241; Rousseau's failure here, ii. 242, 243; inconsistent with himself, ii. 244, 245; worthlessness of his views, ii. 249; real merits of the work, ii. 249; its effect in Germany, ii. 251, 252; not much effect on education in England, ii. 252; Emilius the first expression of democratic teaching in education, ii. 254; Rousseau's deism, ii. 258, 260, 264-267, 269, 270, 276; its inadequacy for the wants of men, ii. 267-270; his position towards Christianity, ii. 270-276; real satisfaction of the religious emotions, ii. 275-280. 

Encyclopædia, The, D'Alembert's article on Geneva in, i. 321. 

Encyclopædists, the society of, confirms Rousseau's religious faith, i. 221; referred to, ii. 257. 

Evil, discussions on Rousseau's, Voltaire's, and De Maistre's teachings concerning, i. 313, _n. _, 318; different effect of existence of, on Rousseau and Voltaire, i. 319. 

FÉNELON, ii. 37, 248; Rousseau's veneration for, ii. 321. 

Ferguson, Adam, ii. 253. 

Filmer contends that a man is not naturally free, ii. 126. 

Foundling Hospital, Rousseau sends his children to the, i. 120. 

France, debt of, to Rousseau, i. 3; Rousseau the one great religious writer of, in the eighteenth century, i. 26; his wanderings in the east of, i. 61; his fondness for, i. 62-72; establishment of local academies in, i. 132; decay in, of Greek literary studies, i. 146; effects in, of doctrine of equality of man, i. 182; effects in, of Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws, " i. 183; amiability of, in the eighteenth century, i. 187; effect of Rousseau's writings in, i. 187; collective organisation in, i. 222; St. Pierre's strictures on government of, i. 244; Rousseau on government of, i. 246; effect of Rousseau's spiritual element on, i. 306; patriotism wanting in, i. 332; difficulties of authorship in, ii. 55-64; buys Corsica from the Genoese, ii. 102; state of, after 1792, apparently favourable to the carrying out of Rousseau's political views, ii. 131, 132; in 1793, ii. 135; haunted by narrow and fervid minds, ii. 142. 

Francueil, Rousseau's patron, i. 99; grandfather of Madame George Sand, i. 99, _n. _; Rousseau's salary from, i. 120; country-house of, i. 196. 

Franklin, Benjamin, ii. 42. 

Frederick of Prussia, relations between, and Rousseau, ii. 73-78; "famous bull" of, ii. 90. 

Freeman on Growth of English Constitution, ii. 164. 

French, principles of, revolution, i. 1, 2, 3; process and ideas of, i. 4; Rousseau of old, stock, i. 8; poetry, Rousseau on, i. 90, _ib. N. _; melody, i. 105; academy, thesis for prize, i. 150, _n. _; philosophers, i. 202, music, i. 291; music, its pretensions demolished by Rousseau, i. 294; ecclesiastics opposed to the theatre, ii. 322; stage, Rousseau on, i. 325; morals, depravity of, ii. 26, 27; Barbier on, ii. 26; thought, benefit, or otherwise of revolution on, ii. 54; history, evil side of, in Rousseau's time, ii. 56; indebted to Holland for freedom of the press, ii. 59; catholic and monarchic absolutism sunk deep into the character of the, ii. 167. 

French Convention, story of member of the, ii. 134, _n. _

GALUPPI, effect of his music, i. 105. 

Geneva, i. 8; characteristics of its people, i. 9; Rousseau's visit to, i. 93; influence of, on Rousseau, i. 94; he revisits it in 1754, i. 186-190, 218; turns Protestant again there, i. 220; religious opinion in, i. 223 (also i. 224, _n. _); Rousseau thinks of taking up his abode in, i. 228; Voltaire at, i. 308; D'Alembert's article on, in Encyclopædia, i. 321; Rousseau's notions of effect of introducing the drama at, i. 327; council of, order public burning of Emilius and the Social Contract, and arrest of the author if he came there, ii. 72; the only place where the Social Contract was actually burnt, ii. 73, _n. _; Voltaire suspected to have had a hand in the matter, ii. 81; council of, divided into two camps by Rousseau's condemnation, in 1762, ii. 102; Rousseau renounces his citizenship in, ii. 104; working of the republic, ii. 104. 

Genevese, Bishop Burnet on, i. 225; Rousseau's distrust of, i. 228; his panegyric on, i. 328; manners of, according to Rousseau, i. 330; their complaint of it, i. 331. 

Genlis, Madame de, ii. 323. 

Genoa, Rousseau in quarantine at, i. 103; Corsica sold to France by, ii. 102. 

Germany, sentimental movements in, ii. 33. 

Gibbon, Edward, at Lausanne, ii. 96. 

Girardin, St. Marc, on Rousseau, i. 111, _n. _; on Rousseau's discussions, ii. 11, _n. _; offers Rousseau a home, ii. 326. 

Gluck, i. 291, 296; Rousseau quarrels with, for setting his music to French words, ii. 323. 

Goethe, i. 20. 

Goguet on Society, ii. 127, _n. _; on tacit conventions, ii. 148, _n. _; on law, ii. 153, _n. _

Goldoni, Diderot accused of pilfering his new play, i. 275. 

Gothic architecture denounced by Voltaire and Turgot, i. 294. 

Gouvon, Count, Rousseau servant to, i. 42. 

Government, disquisitions on, ii. 131-206; remarks on, ii. 131-141; early democratic ideas of, ii. 144-148; Hobbes' philosophy of, ii. 151; Rousseau's science of, ii. 155, 156; De la Rivière's science of, ii. 156, _n. _; federation recommended by Rousseau to the Poles, ii. 166; three forms of government defined, ii. 169; definition inadequate, ii. 169; Montesquieu's definition, ii. 169; Rousseau's distinction between _tyrant_ and _despot_, ii. 169, _n. _; his objection to democracy, ii. 172; to monarchy, ii. 173; consideration of aristocracy, ii. 174; his own scheme, ii. 175; Hobbes's "Passive Obedience, " ii. 181, 182; social conscience theory, ii. 183-187; government made impossible by Rousseau's doctrine of social contract, ii. 188-192; Burke on expediency in, ii. 192; what a civilised nation is, ii. 194; Jefferson on, ii. 227, 228, _n. _

Governments, earliest, how composed, i. 169. 

Graffigny, Madame de, ii. 199. 

Gratitude, Rousseau on, ii. 14, 15; explanation of his want of, ii. 70. 

Greece, importance of history of, i. 184, and _ib. _ _n. _

Greek ideas, influence of, in France in the eighteenth century, i. 146. 

Grenoble, i. 93. 

Grétry, i. 292, 296; ii. 323. 

Grimm, description of Rousseau by, i. 206; Rousseau's quarrels with, i. 279; letter of, about Rousseau and Diderot, i. 275; relations of, with Rousseau, i. 279; some account of his life, i. 279; his conversation with Madame d'Epinay, i. 281; criticism on Rousseau, i. 281; natural want of sympathy between the two, i. 282; Rousseau's quarrel with, i. 285-290; ii. 65, 199. 

Grotius, on Government, ii. 148. 

HÉBERT, ii. 178; prevents publication of a book in which the author professed his belief in a god, ii. 179. 

Helmholtz, i. 299. 

Helvétius, i. 191; ii. 65, 199. 

Herder, ii. 251; Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315. 

Hermitage, the, given to Rousseau by Madame d'Epinay, i. 229 (also _ib. _ _n. _); what his friends thought of it, i. 231; sale of, after the Revolution, i. 237, _n. _; reasons for Rousseau's leaving, i. 286. 

Hildebrand, i. 4. 

Hobbes, i. 143, 161; his "Philosophy of Government, " ii. 151; singular influence of, upon Rousseau, ii. 151, 183; essential difference between his views and those of Rousseau, ii. 159; on Sovereignty, ii. 162; Rousseau's definition of the three forms of government adopted by, inadequate, ii. 168; would reduce spiritual and temporal jurisdiction to one political unity, ii. 183. 

Holbachians, i. 337; ii. 2. 

Hooker, on Civil Government, ii. 148. 

Hôtel St. Quentin, Rousseau at, i. 106. 

Hume, David, i. 64, 89; his deep-set sagacity, i. 156, ii. 6, 75; suspected of tampering with Boswell's letter, ii. 98, _n. _; on Boswell, ii. 101, _n. _; his eagerness to find Rousseau a refuge in England, ii. 282, 283; his account of Rousseau, ii. 284; finds him a home at Wootton, ii. 286; Rousseau's quarrel with, ii. 286-291 (also ii. 290, _n. _); his innocence of Walpole's letter, ii. 292; his conduct in the quarrel, ii. 293; saves Rousseau from arrest of French Government, ii. 295; on Rousseau's sensitiveness, ii. 299. 

IMAGINATION, Rousseau's, i. 247. 

JACOBINS, the, Rousseau's Social Contract, their gospel, ii. 132, 133; their mistake, ii. 136; convenience to them of some of the maxims of the Social Contract, ii. 142; Jacobin supremacy and Hobbism, ii. 152; how they might have saved France, ii. 167. 

Jansen, his propositions, i. 81. 

Jansenists, Rousseau's suspicions of, ii. 63; mentioned, ii. 89. 

Jean Paul, ii. 216, 252. 

Jefferson, ii. 227, _n. _

Jesuits, Rousseau's suspicions of the, ii. 64; the, and parliaments, ii. 65; movement against, ii. 65; suppression of the, leads to increased thought about education, ii. 199. 

Johnson, ii. 15, 98. 

KAMES, Lord, ii. 253. 

LAMENNAIS, influenced by Rousseau, ii. 228. 

Language, origin of, i. 161. 

Latour, Madame, ii. 19, _ib. N. _

Lavater favourable to education on Rousseau's plan, ii. 251 (also _ib. _ _n. _)

Lavoisier, reply to his request for a fortnight's respite, ii. 227, _n. _

Law, not a contract, ii. 153. 

Lecouvreur, Adrienne, refused Christian burial on account of her being an actress, i. 323. 

Leibnitz, i. 87; his optimism, i. 309; on the constitution of the universe, i. 312. 

Lessing, on Pope, i. 310, _n. _

"Letters from the Mountain, " ii. 104; burned, by command, at Paris and the Hague, ii. 105. 

Liberty, English, Rousseau's notion of, ii. 163, _n. _

Life, Rousseau's condemnation of the contemplative, i. 10; his idea of household, i. 41; easier for him to preach than for others to practise, i. 43. 

Lisbon, earthquake of, Voltaire on, i. 310; Rousseau's letter to Voltaire on, i. 310, 311. 

Locke, his Essay, i. 87; his notions, i. 87; his influence upon Rousseau, ii. 121-126; on Marriage, ii. 126; on Civil Government, ii. 149, 150, _n. _; indefiniteness of his views, ii. 160; the pioneer of French thought on education, ii. 202, 203; Rousseau's indebtedness to, ii. 203; his mistake in education, ii. 209; subjects of his theories, ii. 254. 

Lulli (music), i. 291. 

Luther, i. 4. 

Luxembourg, the Duke of, gives Rousseau a home, ii. 2-7, 9. 

Luxembourg, the Maréchale de, in vain seeks Rousseau's children, i. 128; helps to get Emilius published, ii. 63-64, 67. 

Lycurgus, ii. 129, 131; influence of, upon Saint Just, ii. 133. 

Lyons, Rousseau a tutor at, i. 95-97. 

MABLY, De, i. 95; his socialism, i. 184; applied to for scheme for the government of Poland, ii. 324. 

Maistre, De, i. 145; on Optimism, i. 314. 

Maitre, Le, teaches Rousseau music, i. 58. 

Malebranche, i. 87. 

Malesherbes, Rousseau confesses his ungrateful nature to, ii. 14; his dishonest advice to Rousseau, ii. 60; helps Diderot, ii. 62; and Rousseau in the publishing of Emilius, ii. 62, 63; endangered by it, ii. 67; asks Rousseau to collect plants for him, ii. 76. 

Man, his specific distinction from other animals, i. 161; his state of nature, i. 161; Hobbes wrong concerning this, i. 161; equality of, i. 180; effects of this doctrine in France and in the United States, i. 182; not naturally free, ii. 126. 

Mandeville, i. 162. 

Manners, Rousseau's, Marmontel, and Grimm on, i. 205, 206; Rousseau on Swiss, i. 329, 330; depravity of French, in the eighteenth century, ii. 25, 26. 

Marischal, Lord, friendship between, and Rousseau, ii. 79-81; account of, ii. 80; on Boswell, ii. 98

Marmontel, on Rousseau's manners, i. 206; on his success, ii. 2. 

Marriage, design of the New Heloïsa to exalt, ii. 46-48, _ib. _ _n. _

Marsilio, of Padua, on Law, ii. 145. 

Men, inequality of, Rousseau's second Discourse (see Discourses), dedicated to the republic of Geneva, i. 190; how received there, i. 228. 

Mirabeau the elder, Rousseau's letter to, from Wootton, ii. 305, 306; his character, ii. 309-312; receives Rousseau at Fleury, ii. 311. 

Mirabeau, Gabriel, Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315. 

Molière (Misanthrope of), Rousseau's criticism on, i. 329; D'Alembert on, i. 329. 

Monarchy, Rousseau's objection to, ii. 171. 

Montaigu, Count de, avarice of, i. 101, 102. 

Montaigne, Rousseau's obligations to, i. 145; influence of, on Rousseau, ii. 203. 

Montesquieu, "incomplete positivity" of, i. 156; on Government, i. 157; effect of his Spirit of Laws on Rousseau, i. 183; confused definition of laws, ii. 153; balanced parliamentary system of, ii. 163; his definition of forms of government, ii. 169. 

Montmorency, Rousseau goes to live there, i. 229; his life at, ii. 2-9. 

Montpellier, i. 92. 

Morals, state of, in France in the eighteenth century, ii. 26. 

Morellet, thrown into the Bastile, ii. 57. 

Morelly, his indirect influence on Rousseau, i. 156; his socialistic theory, i. 157, 158; his rules for organising a model community, i. 158, _n. _; his terse exposition of inequality contrasted with that of Rousseau, i. 170; on primitive human nature, i. 175; his socialism, ii. 52; influence of his "model community" upon St. Just, ii. 133, _n. _; advice to mothers, ii. 205. 

Motiers, Rousseau's home there, ii. 77; attends divine service at, ii. 91; life at, ii. 91, 93. 

Moultou (pastor of Motiers), his enthusiasm for Rousseau, ii. 82. 

Music, Rousseau undertakes to teach, i. 60; Rousseau's opinion concerning Italian, i. 105; effect of Galuppi's, i. 105; Rousseau earns his living by copying, i. 196; ii. 315; Rameau's criticism on Rousseau's _Muses Galantes_, i. 211; French, i. 291; Rousseau's letter on, i. 292; Italian, denounced at Paris, i. 292; Rousseau utterly condemns French, i. 294; quarrels with Gluck for setting his, to French words, ii. 323. 

Musical notation, Rousseau's, i. 291; his Musical Dictionary, i. 296; his notation explained, i. 296-301; his system inapplicable to instruments, i. 301. 

NAPLES, drunkenness, how regarded in, i. 331. 

_Narcisse_, Rousseau's condemnation of his own comedy of, i. 215. 

Nature, Rousseau's love of, i. 234-241; ii. 39; state of, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume on, i. 156-158; Rousseau's, in Second Discourse, i. 171-180; his starting-point of right, and normal constitution of civil society, ii. 124. See State of Nature. 

Necker, ii. 54, 98, _n. _

Neuchâtel, flight to principality of, by Rousseau, ii. 73; history of, ii. 73, _n. _; outbreak at, arising from religious controversy, ii. 90; preparations for driving Rousseau out of, defeated by Frederick of Prussia, ii. 90; clergy of, against Rousseau, ii. 106. 

New Heloïsa, first conception of, i. 250; monument of Rousseau's fall, ii. 1; when completed and published, ii. 2; read aloud to the Duchess de Luxembourg, ii. 3; letter on suicide in, ii. 16; effects upon Parisian ladies of reading the, ii. 18, 19; criticism on, ii. 20-55; his scheme proposed in it, ii. 21; its story, ii. 24; its purity, contrasted with contemporary and later French romances, ii. 24; its general effect, ii. 27; Rousseau absolutely without humour, ii. 27; utter selfishness of hero of, ii. 30; its heroine, ii. 30; its popularity, ii. 231, 232; burlesque on it, ii. 31, _n. _; its vital defect, ii. 35; difference between Rousseau, Byron, and others, ii. 42; sumptuary details of the story, ii. 44, 45; its democratic tendency, ii. 49, 50; the bearing of its teaching, ii. 54; hindrances to its circulation in France, ii. 57; Malesherbes's low morality as to publishing, ii. 61. 

OPTIMISM of Pope and Leibnitz, i. 309-310; discussed, ii. 128-130. 

Origin of inequality among men, i. 156. See also Discourses. 

PALEY, ii. 191, _n. _

Palissot, ii. 56. 

Paris, Rousseau's first visit to, i. 61; his second, i. 63, 97, 102; third visit, i. 106; effect in, of his first Discourse, i. 139, _n. _; opinions in, on religion, laws, etc. , i. 185; "mimic philosophy" there, i. 193; society in, in Rousseau's time, i. 202-211; his view of it, i. 210; composes there his _Muses Galantes_, i. 211; returns to, from Geneva, i. 228; his belief of the unfitness of its people for political affairs, i. 246; goes to, in 1741, with his scheme of musical notation, i. 291; effect there of his letter on music, i. 295; Rousseau's imaginary contrast between, and Geneva, i. 329; Emilius ordered to be publicly burnt in, ii. 65; parliament of, orders "Letters from the Mountain" to be burnt, ii. 295; also Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, ii. 295; Danton's scheme for municipal administration of, ii. 168, _n. _; two parties (those of Voltaire and of Rousseau) in, in 1793, ii. 178; excitement in, at Rousseau's appearance in 1765, ii. 283; he goes to live there in 1770, ii. 314; Voltaire's last visit to, ii. 323, 324. 

Pâris, Abbé, miracles at his tomb, ii. 88. 

Parisian frivolity, i. 193, 220, 329. 

Parliament and Jesuits, ii. 64. 

Pascal, ii. 37. 

Passy, Rousseau composes the "Village Soothsayer" at, i. 212. 

Paul, St. , effect of, on western society, i. 4. 

Peasantry, French, oppression of, i. 67, 68. 

Pedigree of Rousseau, i. 8, _n. _

Pelagius, ii. 272. 

Peoples, sovereignty of, Rousseau not the inventor of doctrine of, ii. 144-148; taught by Althusen, i. 147; constitution of Helvetic Republic in 1798, a blow at, ii. 165. 

Pergolese, i. 292. 

Pestalozzi indebted to Emilius, ii. 252. 

Philidor, i. 292. 

Philosophers, of Rousseau's time, contradicting each other, i. 87; Rousseau's complaint of the, i. 202; war between the, and the priests, i. 322; Rousseau's reactionary protest against, i. 328; troubles of, ii. 59; parliaments hostile to, ii. 64. 

Philosophy, Rousseau's disgust at mimic, at Paris, i. 193; drew him to the essential in religion, i. 220; Voltaire's no perfect, i. 318. 

Phlipon, Jean Marie, Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315. 

Plato, his republic, i. 122; his influence on Rousseau, i. 146, 325, _n. _; Milton on his Laws, ii. 178. 

Plays (stage), Rousseau's letter on, to D'Alembert, i. 321; his views of, i. 323; Jeremy Collier and Bossuet on, i. 323; in Geneva, i. 333, 334, _n. _; Rousseau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert on, i. 332-337. 

Plutarch, Rousseau's love for, i. 13. 

Plutocracy, new, faults of, i. 195. 

Pompadour, Madame de, and the Jesuits, ii. 64. 

Pontverre (priest) converts Rousseau to Romanism, i. 31-35. 

Pope, his Essay on Man translated by Voltaire, i. 309; Berlin Academy and Lessing on it, i. 310, _n. _; criticism on it by Rousseau, i. 312; its general position reproduced by Rousseau, i. 315. 

Popelinière, M. De, i. 211. 

Positive knowledge, i. 78. 

Press, freedom of the, ii. 59. 

Prévost, Abbé, i. 48. 

_Projet pour l'Education_, i. 96, _n. _

Property, private, evils ascribed to i. 157, 185; Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking, i. 123, _n. _

Protestant principles, effect of development of, ii. 146-147. 

Protestantism, his conversion to, i. 220; its influence on Rousseau, i. 221. 

RAMEAU on Rousseau's _Muses Galantes_, i. 119, 211; mentioned, i. 291. 

Rationalism, i. 224, 225; influence of Descartes on, i. 225. 

Reason, De Saint Pierre's views of, i. 244. 

Reform, essential priority of social over political, ii. 43. 

Religion, simplification of, i. 3; ideas of, in Paris, i. 186, 187, 207, 208; Rousseau's view of, i. 220; doctrines of, in Geneva, i. 223-227, also _n. _; curious project concerning it, by Rousseau, i. 317; separation of spiritual and temporal powers deemed mischievous by Rousseau, ii. 173; in its relation to the state may be considered as of three kinds, ii. 175; duty of the sovereign to establish a civil confession of faith, ii. 176, 177; positive dogmas of this, ii. 176; Rousseau's "pure Hobbism, " ii. 177. See Savoyard Vicar (Emilius), ii. 256, 281. 

Renou, Rousseau assumes name of, i. 129; ii. 312. 

Revelation, Christian, Rousseau's controversy on, with Archbishop of Paris, ii. 86-91. 

_Rêveries_, Rousseau's relinquishing society, i. 199; description of his life in the isle of St. Peter, in the, ii. 109-115; their style ii. 314. 

Revolution, French, principles of, i. 1, 2; benefits of, or otherwise, ii. 54; Baboeuf on, ii. 123, 124, _n. _; the starting point in the history of its ideas, ii. 160. 

Revolutionary process and ideal i. 4, 5. 

Revolutionists, difference among, i. 2. 

Richardson (the novelist), ii. 25, 28. 

Richelieu's brief patronage of Rousseau, i. 195, 302. 

Rivière, de la, origin of society, ii. 156, 157; anecdote of, ii. 156, 157, _n. _

Robecq, Madame de, ii. 56. 

Robespierre, ii. 123, 134, 160, 178, 179; his "sacred right of insurrection, " ii. 188, _n. _; Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315. 

Rousseau, Didier, i. 8. 

Rousseau, Jean Baptiste, i. 61, _n. _

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, influence of his writings on France and the American colonists, i. 1, 2; on Robespierre, Paine, and Chateaubriand, i. 3; his place as a leader, i. 3; starting-point, of his mental habits, i. 4; personality of, i. 4; influence on the common people, i. 5; his birth and ancestry, i. 8; pedigree, i. 8, _n. _; parents, i. 10, 11; influence upon him of his father's character, i. 11, 12; his reading in childhood, i. 12, 13; love of Plutarch, i. 13; early years, i. 13, 14; sent to school at Bossey, i. 15; deterioration of his moral character there, i. 17; indignation at an unjust punishment, i. 17, 18; leaves school, i. 20; youthful life at Geneva, i. 21, 22; his remarks on its character, i. 24; anecdotes of it, i. 22, 24; his leading error as to the education of the young, i. 25, 26; religious training, i. 25; apprenticeship, i. 26; boyish doings, i. 27; harshness of his master, i. 27; runs away, i. 29; received by the priest of Confignon, i. 31; sent to Madame de Warens, i. 84; at Turin, i. 35; hypocritical conversion to Roman Catholicism, i. 37; motive, i. 38; registry of his baptism, i. 38, _n. _; his forlorn condition, i. 39; love of music, i. 39; becomes servant to Madame de Vercellis, i. 39; his theft, lying, and excuses for it, i. 39, 40; becomes servant to Count of Gouvon, i. 42; dismissed, i. 43; returns to Madame de Warens, i. 45; his temperament, i. 46, 47; in training for the priesthood, but pronounced too stupid, i. 57; tries music, i. 57; shamelessly abandons his companion, i. 58; goes to Freiburg, Neuchâtel, and Paris, i. 61, 62; conjectural chronology of his movements about this time. I. 62, _n. _; love of vagabond life, i. 62-68; effect upon him of his intercourse with the poor, i. 68; becomes clerk to a land surveyor at Chambéri, i. 69; life there, i. 69-72; ill-health and retirement to Les Charmettes, i. 73; his latest recollection of this time, i. 75-77; his "form of worship, " i. 77; love of nature, i. 77, 78; notion of deity, i. 77; peculiar intellectual feebleness, i. 81; criticism on himself, i. 83; want of logic in his mental constitution, i. 85; effect on him of Voltaire's Letters on the English, i. 85; self-training, i. 86; mistaken method of it, i. 86, 87; writes a comedy, i. 89; enjoyment of rural life at Les Charmettes, i. 91, 92; robs Madame de Warens, i. 92; leaves her, i. 93; discrepancy between dates of his letters and the Confessions, i. 93; takes a tutorship at Lyons, i. 95; condemns the practice of writing Latin, i. 96, _n. _; resigns his tutorship, and goes to Paris, i. 97; reception there, i. 98-100; appointed secretary to French Ambassador at Venice, i. 100-106; in quarantine at Genoa, i. 104; his estimate of French melody, i. 105; returns to Paris, i. 106; becomes acquainted with Theresa Le Vasseur, i. 106; his conduct criticised, i. 107-113; simple life, i. 113; letter to her, i. 115-119; his poverty, i. 119; becomes secretary to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. De Francueil, i. 119; sends his children to the foundling hospital, i. 120, 121; paltry excuses for the crime, i. 121-126; his pretended marriage under the name of Renou, i. 129; his Discourses, i. 132-186 (see Discourses); writes essays for academy of Dijon, i. 132; origin of first essay, i. 133-137; his "visions" for thirteen years, i. 138; evil effect upon himself of the first Discourse, i. 138; of it, the second Discourse and the Social Contract upon Europe, i. 138; his own opinion of it, i. 138, 139; influence of Plato upon him, i. 146; second Discourse, i. 154; his "State of Nature, " i. 159; no evidence for it, i. 172; influence of Montesquieu on him, i. 183; inconsistency of his views, i. 124; influence of Geneva upon him, i. 187, 188; his disgust at Parisian philosophers, i. 191, 192; the two sides of his character, i. 193; associates in Paris, i. 193; his income, i. 196, 197, _n. _; post of cashier, i. 196; throws it up, i. 197, 198; determines to earn his living by copying music, i. 198, 199; change of manners, i. 201; dislike of the manners of his time, i. 202, 203; assumption of a seeming cynicism, i. 206; Grimm's rebuke of it, i. 206; Rousseau's protest against atheism, i. 208, 209; composes a musical interlude, the Village Soothsayer, i. 212; his nervousness loses him the chance of a pension, i. 213; his moral simplicity, i. 214, 215; revisits Geneva, i. 216; re-conversion to Protestantism, i. 220; his friends at Geneva, i. 227; their effect upon him, i. 227; returns to Paris, i. 227; the Hermitage offered him by Madame d'Epinay, i. 229, 230 (and _ib. N. _); retires to it against the protests of his friends, i. 231; his love of nature, i. 234, 235, 236; first days at the Hermitage, i. 237; rural delirium, i. 237; dislike of society, i. 242; literary scheme, i. 242, 243; remarks on Saint Pierre, i. 246; violent mental crisis, i. 247; employs his illness in writing to Voltaire on Providence, i. 250, 251; his intolerance of vice in others, i. 254; acquaintance with Madame de Houdetot, i. 255-269; source of his irritability, i. 270, 271; blind enthusiasm of his admirers, i. 273, also _ib. N. _; quarrels with Diderot, i. 275; Grimm's account of them, i. 276; quarrels with Madame d'Epinay, i. 276, 288; relations with Grimm, i. 279; want of sympathy between the two, i. 279; declines to accompany Madame d'Epinay to Geneva, i. 285; quarrels with Grimm, i. 285; leaves the Hermitage, i. 289, 290; aims in music, i. 291; letter on French music, i. 293, 294; writes on music in the Encyclopædia, i. 296; his Musical Dictionary, i. 296; scheme and principles of his new musical notation, i. 269; explained, i. 298, 299; its practical value, i. 299; his mistake, i. 300; minor objections, i. 300; his temperament and Genevan spirit, i. 303; compared with Voltaire, i. 304, 305; had a more spiritual element than Voltaire, i. 306; its influence in France, i. 307; early relations with Voltaire, i. 308; letter to him on his poem on the earthquake at Lisbon, i. 312, 313, 314; reasons in a circle, i. 316; continuation of argument against Voltaire, i. 316, 317; curious notion about religion, i. 317; quarrels with Voltaire, i. 318, 319; denounces him as a "trumpet of impiety, " i. 320, _n. _; letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays, i. 321; true answer to his theory, i. 323, 324; contrasts Paris and Geneva, i. 327, 328; his patriotism, i. 329, 330, 331; censure of love as a poetic theme, i. 334, 335; on Social Position of Women, i. 335; Voltaire and D'Alembert's criticism on his Letter on Stage Plays, i. 336, 337; final break with Diderot, i. 336; antecedents of his highest creative efforts, ii. 1; friends at Montmorency, ii. 2; reads the New Heloïsa to the Maréchale de Luxembourg, ii. 2; unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. 5; his relations with the Duke and Duchess de Luxembourg, ii. 7; misunderstands the friendliness of Madame de Boufflers, ii. 7; calm life at Montmorency, ii. 8; literary jealousy, ii. 8; last of his peaceful days, ii. 9; advice to a young man against the contemplative life, ii. 10; offensive form of his "good sense" concerning persecution of Protestants, ii. 11, 12; cause of his unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. 13, 14; owns his ungrateful nature, ii. 15; ill-humoured banter, ii. 15; his constant bodily suffering, ii. 16; thinks of suicide, ii. 16; correspondence with the readers of the New Heloïsa, ii. 19, 20; the New Heloïsa, criticism on, ii. 20-55 (see New Heloïsa); his publishing difficulties, ii. 56; no taste for martyrdom, ii. 59, 60; curious discussion between, ii. 59; and Malesherbes, ii. 60; indebted to Malesherbes in the publication of Emilius, ii. 61, 62; suspects Jesuits, Jansenists, and philosophers of plotting to crush the book, ii. 63; himself counted among the latter, ii. 65; Emilius ordered to be burnt by public executioner, on the charge of irreligious tendency, and its author to be arrested, ii. 65; his flight, ii. 67; literary composition on the journey to Switzerland, ii. 69; contrast between him and Voltaire, ii. 70; explanation of his "natural ingratitude, " ii. 71; reaches the canton of Berne, and ordered to quit it, ii. 72; Emilius and Social Contract condemned to be publicly burnt at Geneva, and author arrested if he came there, ii. 72, 73; takes refuge at Motiers, in dominions of Frederick of Prussia, ii. 73; characteristic letters to the king, ii. 74, 77; declines pecuniary help from him, ii. 75; his home and habits at Motiers, ii. 77, 78; Voltaire supposed to have stirred up animosity against him at Geneva, ii. 81; Archbishop of Paris writes against him, ii. 83; his reply, and character as a controversialist, ii. 83-90; life at Val de Travers (Motiers), ii. 91-95; his generosity, ii. 93; corresponds with the Prince of Würtemberg on the education of the prince's daughter, ii. 95, 96; on Gibbon, ii. 96; visit from Boswell, ii. 98; invited to legislate for Corsica, ii. 99, _n. _; urges Boswell to go there, ii. 100; denounces its sale by the Genoese, ii. 102; renounces his citizenship of Geneva, ii. 103; his Letters from the Mountain, ii. 104; the letters condemned to be burned at Paris and the Hague, ii. 105; libel upon, ii. 105; religious difficulties with his pastor, ii. 106; ill-treatment of, in parish, ii. 106; obliged to leave it, ii. 108; his next retreat, ii. 108; account in the _Rêveries_ of his short stay there, ii. 109-115; expelled by government of Berne, ii. 116; makes an extraordinary request to it, ii. 116, 117; difficulties in finding a home, ii. 117; short stay at Strasburg, ii. 117, _n. _; decides on going to England, ii. 118; his Social Contract, and criticism on, ii. 119, 196 (see Social Contract); scanty acquaintance with history, ii. 129; its effects on his political writings, ii. 129, 136; his object in writing Emilius, ii. 198; his confession of faith, under the character of the Savoyard Vicar (see Emilius), ii. 257-280; excitement caused by his appearance in Paris in 1765, ii. 282; leaves for England in company with Hume, ii. 283; reception in London, ii. 283, 284; George III. Gives him a pension, ii. 284; his love for his dog, ii. 286; finds a home at Wootton, ii. 286; quarrels with Hume, ii. 287; particulars in connection with it, ii. 287-296; his approaching insanity at this period, ii. 296; the preparatory conditions of it, ii. 297-301; begins writing the Confessions, ii. 301; their character, ii. 301-304; life at Wootton, ii. 305, 306; sudden flight thence, ii. 306; kindness of Mr. Davenport, ii. 306, 307; his delusion, ii. 307; returns to France, ii. 308; received at Fleury by the elder Mirabeau, ii. 310, 311; the prince of Conti next receives him at Trye, ii. 312; composes the second part of the Confessions here, ii. 312; delusion returns, ii. 312, 313; leaves Trye, and wanders about the country, ii. 312, 313; estrangement from Theresa, ii. 313; goes to Paris, ii. 314; writes his Dialogues there, ii. 314; again earns his living by copying music, ii. 315; daily life in, ii. 315, 316; Bernardin St. Pierre's account of him, ii. 317-321; his veneration for Fénelon, ii. 321; his unsociality, ii. 322; checks a detractor of Voltaire, ii. 324; draws up his Considerations on the Government of Poland, ii. 324; estimate of the Spanish, ii. 324; his poverty, ii. 325; accepts a home at Ermenonville from M. Girardin, ii. 326; his painful condition, ii. 326; sudden death, ii. 326; cause of it unknown, ii. 326 (see also _ib. N. _); his interment, ii. 326; finally removed to Paris, ii. 328. 

SAINTE BEUVE on Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay, i. 279, _n. _; on Rousseau, ii. 40. 

Saint Germain, M. De, Rousseau's letter to, i. 123. 

Saint Just, ii. 132, 133; his political regulations, ii. 133, _n. _; base of his system, ii. 136; against the atheists, ii. 179. 

Saint Lambert, i. 244; offers Rousseau a home in Lorraine, ii. 117. 

Saint Pierre, Abbé de, Rousseau arranges papers of, i. 244; his views concerning reason, _ib. _; boldness of his observations, i. 245. 

Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, account of his visit to Rousseau at Paris, ii. 317-321. 

Sand, Madame G. , i. 81, _n. _; Savoy landscape, i. 99, _n. _; ancestry of, i. 121, _n. _

Savages, code of morals of, i. 178-179, _n. _

Savage state, advantages of, Rousseau's letter to Voltaire, i. 312. 

Savoy, priests of, proselytisers, i. 30, 31, 33 (also _ib. _ _n. _)

Savoyard Vicar, the, origin of character of, ii. 257-280 (see Emilius). 

Schiller on Rousseau, ii. 192 (also _ib. _ _n. _); Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315. 

Servetus, ii. 180. 

Simplification, the revolutionary process and ideal of, i. 4; in reference to Rousseau's music, i. 291. 

Social conscience, theory and definition of, ii. 234, 235; the great agent in fostering, ii. 237. 

Social Contract, the, ill effect of, on Europe, i. 138; beginning of its composition, i. 177; ideas of, i. 188; its harmful dreams, i. 246; influence of, ii. 1; price of, and difficulties in publishing, ii. 59; ordered to be burnt at Geneva, ii. 72, 73, 104; detailed criticism of, ii. 119-196; Rousseau diametrically opposed to the dominant belief of his day in human perfectibility, ii. 119; object of the work, ii. 120; main position of the two Discourses given up in it, ii. 120; influenced by Locke, ii. 120; its uncritical, illogical principles, ii. 123, 124; its impracticableness, ii. 128; nature of his illustrations, ii. 128-133; the "gospel of the Jacobins, " ii. 132, 133; the desperate absurdity of its assumptions gave it power in the circumstances of the times, ii. 135-141; some of its maxims very convenient for ruling Jacobins, ii. 142; its central conception, the sovereignty of peoples, ii. 144; Rousseau not its inventor, ii. 144, 145; this to be distinguished from doctrine of right of subjects to depose princes, ii. 146; Social Contract idea of government, probably derived from Locke, ii. 150; falseness of it, ii. 153, 154; origin of society, ii. 154; ill effects on Rousseau's political speculation, ii. 155; what constitutes the sovereignty, ii. 158; Rousseau's Social Contract different from that of Hobbes, ii. 159; Locke's indefiniteness on, ii. 160; attributes of sovereignty, ii. 163; confederation, ii. 164, 165; his distinction between _tyrant_ and _despot_, ii. 169, _n. _; distinguishes constitution of the state from that of the government, ii. 170; scheme of an elective aristocracy, ii. 172; similarity to the English form of government, ii. 173; the state in respect to religion, ii. 173; habitually illogical form of his statements, ii. 173, 174; duty of sovereign to establish civil profession of faith, ii. 175, 176; infringement of it to be punished, even by death, ii. 176; Rousseau's Hobbism, ii. 177; denial of his social compact theory, ii. 183, 184; futility of his disquisitions on, ii. 185, 186; his declaration of general duty of rebellion (arising out of the universal breach of social compact) considered, ii. 188; it makes government impossible, ii. 188; he urges that usurped authority is another valid reason for rebellion, ii. 190; practical evils of this, ii. 192; historical effect of the Social Contract, ii. 192-195. 

Social quietism of some parts of New Heloïsa, ii. 49. 

Socialism: Morelly, and De Mably, ii. 52; what it is, ii. 159. 

Socialistic theory of Morelly, i. 158, 159 (also i. 158, _n. _)

Society, Aristotle on, i. 174; D'Alembert's statements on, i. 174, _n. _; Parisian, Rousseau on, i. 209; dislike of, i. 242; Rousseau's origin of, ii. 153; true grounds of, ii. 155, 156. 

Socrates, i. 131, 140, 232; ii. 72, 273. 

Solitude, eighteenth century notions of, i. 231, 232. 

Solon, ii. 133. 

Sorbonne, the, condemns Emilius, ii. 82. 

Spectator, the, Rousseau's liking for, i. 86. 

Spinoza, dangerous speculations of, i. 143. 

Staël, Madame de, i. 217, _n. _

Stage players, how treated in France, i. 322. 

Stage plays (see Plays). 

State of Nature, Rousseau's, i. 159, 160; Hobbes on, i. 161 (see Nature). 

Suicide, Rousseau on, ii. 16; a mistake to pronounce him incapable of, ii. 19. 

Switzerland, i. 330. 

TACITUS, i. 177. 

Theatre, Rousseau's letter, objecting to the, i. 133; his error in the matter, i. 134. 

Theology, metaphysical, Descartes' influence on, i. 226. 

Theresa (see Le Vasseur). 

Thought, school of, division between rationalists and emotionalists, i. 337. 

Tonic Sol-fa notation, close correspondence of the, to Rousseau's system, i. 299. 

Tronchin on Voltaire, i. 319, _n. _, 321. 

Turgot, i. 89; his discourses at the Sorbonne in 1750, i. 155; the one sane eminent Frenchman of eighteenth century, i. 202; his unselfish toil, i. 233; ii. 193; mentioned, ii. 246, 294. 

Turin, Rousseau at, i. 34-43; leaves it, i. 45; tries to learn Latin at, i. 91. 

Turretini and other rationalisers, i. 226; his works, i. 226, _n. _

UNIVERSE, constitution of, discussion on, i. 311-317. 

VAGABOND life, Rousseau's love of, i. 63, 68. 

Val de Travers, ii. 77; Rousseau's life in, ii. 91-95. 

Vasseur, Theresa Le, Rousseau's first acquaintance with, i. 106, 107, also _ib. _ _n. _; their life together, i. 110-113; well befriended, ii. 80, _n. _; her evil character, ii. 326. 

Vauvenargues on emotional instinct, ii. 34. 

Venice, Rousseau at, i. 100-106. 

Vercellis, Madame de, Rousseau servant to, i. 39. 

Verdelin, Madame de, her kindness to Theresa, ii. 80, _n. _; to Rousseau, ii. 118, _n. _

Village Soothsayer, the (_Devin du Village_), composed at Passy, performed at Fontainebleau and Paris, i. 212; marked a revolution in French Music, i. 291. 

Voltaire, i. 2, 21, 63; effect on Rousseau of his Letters on the English, i. 86; spreads a derogatory report about Rousseau, i. 101, _n. _; his "Princesse de Navarre, " i. 119; criticism on Rousseau's first Discourse, i. 147; effect on his work of his common sense, i. 155; avoids the society of Paris, i. 202; his conversion to Romanism, i. 220, 221; strictures on Homer and Shakespeare, i. 280; his position in the eighteenth century, i. 301; general difference between, and Rousseau, i. 301; clung to the rationalistic school of his day, i. 305; on Rousseau's second Discourse, i. 308; his poem on the earthquake of Lisbon, i. 309, 310; his sympathy with suffering, i. 311, 312; entreated by Rousseau to draw up a civil profession of religious faith, i. 317; denounced by Rousseau as a "trumpet of impiety, " i. 317, 320, _n. _; his satire and mockery irritated Rousseau, i. 319; what he was to his contemporaries, i. 321; the great play-writer of the time, i. 321; his criticism of Rousseau's Letter on the Theatre, i. 336; his indignation at wrong, ii. 11; ridicule of the New Heloïsa, ii. 34; less courageous than Rousseau, ii. 65; contrast between the two, i. 99, ii. 75; supposed to have stirred up animosity at Geneva against Rousseau, ii. 81; denies it, ii. 81; his notion of how the matter would end, ii. 81; his fickleness, ii. 83; on Rousseau's connection with Corsica, ii. 101; his Philosophical Dictionary burnt by order at Paris, ii. 105; his opinion of Emilius, ii. 257; prime agent in introducing English deism into France, ii. 262; suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from the King of Prussia, ii. 288; last visit to Paris, ii. 324. 

WALKING, Rousseau's love of, i. 63. 

Walpole, Horace, writer of the pretended letter from the King of Prussia, ii. 288, _n. _; advises Hume not to publish his account of Rousseau's quarrel with him, ii. 295. 

War arising out of the succession to the crown of Poland, i. 72. 

Warens, Madame de, Rousseau's introduction to, i. 34; her personal appearance, i. 34; receives Rousseau into her house, i. 43; her early life, i. 48; character of, i. 49-51; goes to Paris, i. 59; receives Rousseau at Chambéri, and gets him employment, i. 69; her household, i. 70; removes to Les Charmettes, i. 73; cultivates Rousseau's taste for letters, i. 85; Saint Louis, her patron saint, i. 91; revisited by Rousseau in 1754, i. 216; her death in poverty and wretchedness, i. 217, 218 (also i. 219, _n. _)

Wesleyanism, ii. 258. 

Women, Condorcet on social position of, i. 335; D'Alembert and Condorcet on, i. 335. 

Wootton, Rousseau's home at, ii. 286. 

World, divine government of, Rousseau vindicates, i. 312. 

Würtemberg, correspondence between Prince of, and Rousseau, on the education of the little princess, ii. 95; becomes reigning duke, ii. 95, _n. _; seeks permission for Rousseau to live in Vienna, ii. 117. 

THE END. 

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh. _