THE TRUMPETER OF REVOLUTION
We have seen that Voltaire was a Tory as to art; his revolution was of
the intellect. There was needed a revolutionist of the feelings, and he
appeared in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a stormy, embittered,
unhappy man, the object of endless controversy, continuing to our own
day; a character full of contradictions, difficult to cover within the
limits of a chapter.
His father was a watch-maker in Geneva; he ran away from home and became
a vagabond, and remained that all his life. He never had any property;
as for friends, he had them only for short periods, because he quarreled
with everyone. Among the occupations he followed in youth was that of a
footman, which ought to have barred him from rising in eighteenth
century France. But he wrote ballets, operas, comedies, and won an
entrée to the salons of the great.
Here is another “pure” artist; and did you ever hear of him in that
“pure” capacity? Did you know that Jean-Jacques had written ballets,
operas and comedies? Could you name one of these works? Unless you are a
specialist in literary history, you could not; and if Rousseau had
followed that easy career, and kept his entrée to the Paris salons, you
would never have heard his name. It was only when he became a
propagandist that he earned world fame, and it is as a propagandist that
we know him.
He was thirty-seven years old when Diderot, editor of the great
“Encyclopedia,” the Bible of the new learning in France, was put into
prison for writing an atheistical pamphlet. Rousseau went to visit him
and, while thus wrought up, he fell to thinking about the depraved state
of society, and the causes thereof; he wrote an essay, and so was
launched upon his career as maker of intellectual dynamite. He was
pursued by the authorities, until he acquired a persecution complex;
before he died he became convinced that everyone he knew was in a
conspiracy to destroy him.
His first important book was “The Social Contract,” a study of the state
and its authority. What is the basis of sovereignty? What right has the
state to command my obedience? The answer of Rousseau’s time was that
God had appointed a king to rule you, and if you disobeyed this king you
were hanged, drawn and quartered, and later on roasted to eternity.
Rousseau’s thesis was that the basis of sovereignty is popular consent;
the state is made by the general will, and lacking such sanction, no
sovereignty exists. The opening words give the keynote of the book: “Man
was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A study of history and
anthropology convinces us that the first part of this statement is
false; but that did not keep the words from becoming a revolutionary
slogan.
The next important book was “The New Heloise,” a love story written in
the form of a series of letters. French women were rebelling against
being sold in marriage; their natural desire to marry the man of their
own choice was reaching a point dangerous to the old convention. To be
sure, Heloise obeyed her parents and married according to their command;
but her sufferings were so moving that she was more effective as an
inspirer of revolt than if she had herself revolted.
Then came another novel, “Emile, or The Sentimental Education”--that is
to say, an education according to the dictates of the natural feelings.
The physical and moral soundness of the infant Emile were based upon the
fact that his mother suckled him, instead of turning him over to a wet
nurse, according to the fashion of the great world of France. The child
was raised in close contact with nature, and followed the dictates of
those natural desires, which Rousseau believed were always wholesome and
trustworthy. The youth was taught to work and be useful instead of being
a culture parasite; and in due course a pure and beautiful maiden
appeared to deserve his love. Today Rousseau’s ideas of education are
freely applied in the Ferrer schools; but in 1762 “Emile” was condemned
by the Sorbonne, and burned by the common executioner, and its author
was forced to flee to Switzerland, and finally to England.
In his later years of desolation Rousseau produced the story of his
life, known as the “Confessions.” His other works are not easy for us to
read, but the “Confessions” will be read so long as man is interested in
his own heart. Here for the first time in the history of our race a man
of first-rate genius told the full truth about himself. A great deal of
it is painful truth; we read it with dismay, and on the basis of it
Rousseau’s enemies have condemned him to infamy.
But never forget, we know these painful things because Rousseau tells
them to us; if he had concealed them, or dressed them up to look
romantic, then we should have had quite a different Rousseau in our
minds. Many authors have done that, and live enthroned in our regard.
But this man says to us: much as I care about myself--and I care a great
deal--I care still more about enabling my fellowmen to understand
reality. And that is the spirit in which we take the “Confessions.” We
realize that we are not dealing with one of those feeble natures which
first commit offenses, and then find pleasure in talking about them; we
are sharing life with a deeply serious man, who seeks in agony a cure
for human ills.
I doubt if there has ever been a preacher of doctrine who delivered
himself more completely to his enemies than Jean-Jacques. He tells us
how, not knowing how to get his bread, he left his newly born children
in care of a foundling asylum. This was a custom of the time; but as a
rule those who followed the custom did not go away and write a book
advising other people how to rear and educate their children! For such
inconsistencies his critics ridiculed him unmercifully. And yet, in
spite of all they could say, he became the trumpeter of the revolution,
political, economic, and cultural, which was on the way in France. He
remains in our time a trumpeter of the social revolution which is
happening before our eyes.
That does not mean that we are blind to the fallacies and absurdities in
his doctrines. We of today study education in the light of a mass of
psychological knowledge, we study government in the light of historical
and economic knowledge, we study the human soul in the light of biology,
sociology, chemistry, psychoanalysis--a host of sciences whose very
names were unknown to Rousseau. But how do we come to possess this
knowledge? We possess it because Jean-Jacques, with the divination of a
prophet and the fervor of a moral genius, proclaimed from the housetops
the right of the human spirit to be free, and to face the facts of life,
and to choose its path in accordance with its own happiness and health.
With any critic of Rousseau there is one question to be settled at the
outset. Why do you quarrel with this man? Is it because you wish to
correct his errors, and clear the way to his goal of liberty, equality,
and fraternity? Or are you one of those who dread the torrent of new
ideas and new feelings which Rousseau let loose upon the world? Is it
your purpose to discredit the whole individualistic movement which he
fathered, and to take us back to the good old days when children obeyed
their parents, and servants obeyed their masters, and women obeyed their
husbands, and subjects obeyed their popes and kings, and students in
colleges accepted without question what their professors told them?
Says Mrs. Ogi: “I suspect that last phrase is meant for Professor
Babbitt.”
“It is wonderful,” says her husband, “that he should have that name. A
judgment of Providence, without doubt!”