Innate love of justice and horror of fanaticism had inspired Voltaire

with his zeal on behalf of persecuted Protestants; a more personal

feeling, a more profound sympathy, caused his grief and his dread when

Chevalier de la Barre, accused of having mutilated a crucifix, was

condemned, in 1766, to capital punishment; the scepticism of the

eighteenth century had sudden and terrible reactions towards fanatical

violence, as a protest and a pitiable struggle against the doubt which

was invading it on all sides; the chevalier was executed; he was not

twenty years old. He was an infidel and a libertine, like the majority

of the young men of his day and of his age; the crime he expiated so

cruelly was attributed to reading bad books, which had corrupted him.

“I am told,” writes Voltaire to D’Alembert, “that they said at their

examination that they had been led on to the act of madness they

committed by the works of the _Encyclopaedists_. I can scarcely believe

it; these madmen don’t read; and certainly no philosopher would have

counselled profanation. The matter is important; try to get to the

bottom of so odious and dangerous a report.” And, at another time, to

Abbe Morellet, “You know that Councillor Pasquier said in full Parliament

that the young men of Abbeville who were put to death had imbibed their

impiety in the school and the works of the modern philosophers. . . .

They were mentioned by name; it is a formal denunciation. . . . Wise

men, under such terrible circumstances, should keep quiet and wait.”

Whilst keeping quiet, Voltaire soon grew frightened; he fancied himself

arrested even on the foreign soil on which he had sought refuge. “My

heart is withered,” he exclaims, “I am prostrated, I am tempted to go and

die in some land where men are less unjust.” He wrote to the Great

Frederick, with whom he had resumed active correspondence, asking him for

an asylum in the town of Cleves, where he might find refuge together with

the persecuted philosophers. His imagination was going wild. “I went to

him,” says the celebrated physician, Tronchin, an old friend of his;

“after I had pointed out to him the absurdity of his fearing that, for a

mere piece of imprudence, France would come and seize an old man on

foreign soil to shut him up in the Bastille, I ended by expressing my

astonishment that a head like his should be deranged to the extent I saw

it was. Covering his eyes with his clinched hands and bursting into

tears, ‘Yes, yes, my friend, I am mad!’ was all he answered. A few days

afterwards, when reflection had driven away fear, he would have defied

all the powers of malevolence.”

Voltaire did not find his brethren in philosophy so frightened and

disquieted by ecclesiastical persecution as to fly to Cleves, far from

the “home of society,” as he had himself called Paris. In vain he wrote

to Diderot, “A man like you cannot look save with horror upon the country

in which you have the misfortune to live; you really ought to come away

into a country where you would have entire liberty not only to express

what you pleased, but to preach openly against superstitions as

disgraceful as they are sanguinary. You would not be solitary there; you

would have companions and disciples; you might establish a chair there,

the chair of truth. Your library might go by water, and there would not

be four leagues’ journey by land. In fine, you would leave slavery for

freedom.”

All these inducements having failed of effect, Voltaire gave up the

foundation of a colony at Cleves, to devote all his energy to that at

Ferney. There he exercised signorial rights with an active and restless

guardianship which left him no illusions and but little sympathy in

respect of that people whose sacred rights he had so often proclaimed.

“The people will always be sottish and barbarous,” he wrote to M. Bordes;

“they are oxen needing a yoke, a goad, and a bit of hay.” That was the

sum and substance of what he thought; he was a stern judge of the French

character, the genuine and deep-lying resources of which he sounded

imperfectly, but the infinite varieties of which he recognized. “I

always find it difficult to conceive,” he wrote to M. de Constant, “how

so agreeable a nation can at the same time be so ferocious, how it can so

easily pass from the opera to the St. Bartholomew, be at one time made up

of dancing apes and at another of howling bears, be so ingenious and so

idiotic both together, at one time so brave and at another so dastardly.”

Voltaire fancied himself at a comedy still; the hour of tragedy was at

hand. He and his friends were day by day weakening the foundations of

the edifice; for eighty years past the greatest minds and the noblest

souls have been toiling to restore it on new and strong bases; the work

is not finished, revolution is still agitating the depths of French

society, which has not yet recovered the only proper foundation-stones

for greatness and order amongst a free people.

Henceforth Voltaire reigned peacefully over his little empire at Ferney,

courted from afar by all the sovereigns of Europe who made any profession

of philosophy. “I have a sequence of four kings” (_brelan de roi

quatrieme_), he would say with a laugh when he counted his letters from

royal personages. The Empress of Russia, Catherine II., had dethroned,

in his mind, the Great Frederick. Voltaire had not lived in her

dominions and at her court; he had no grievance against her; his vanity

was flattered by the eagerness and the magnificent attentions of the

Semiramis of the North, as he called her. He even forgave her the most

odious features of resemblance to the Assyrian princess. “I am her

knight in the sight and in the teeth of everybody,” he wrote to Madame du

Deffand; “I am quite aware that people bring up against her a few trifles

on the score of her husband; but these are family matters with which I do

not meddle, and besides it is not a bad thing to have a fault to repair.

It is an inducement to make great efforts in order to force the public to

esteem and admiration, and certainly her knave of a husband would never

have done any one of the great things my Catherine does every day.” The

portrait of the empress, worked in embroidery by herself, hung in

Voltaire’s bedroom. In vain had he but lately said to Pastor Bertrand,

“My dear philosopher, I have, thank God, cut all connection with kings;”

instinct and natural inclination were constantly re-asserting themselves.

Banished from the court of Versailles by the disfavor of Louis XV., he

turned in despite towards the foreign sovereigns who courted him.

“Europe is enough for me,” he writes; “I do not trouble myself much about

the Paris clique, seeing that that clique is frequently guided by envy,

cabal, bad taste, and a thousand petty interests which are always opposed

to the public interest.”

Voltaire, however, returned to that Paris in which he was born, in which

he had lived but little since his early days, to which he belonged by the

merits as well as the defects of his mind, and in which he was destined

to die. In spite of his protests about his being a rustic and a

republican, he had never allowed himself to slacken the ties which united

him to his Parisian friends; the letters of the patriarch of Ferney

circulated amongst the philosophical fraternity; they were repeated in

the correspondence of Grimm and Diderot with foreign princes; from his

splendid retreat at Ferney he cheered and excited the literary zeal and

often the anti-religious ardor of the _Encyclopaedists_. He had,

however, ceased all working connection with that great work since it had

been suspended and afterwards resumed at the orders and with the

permission of government. The more and more avowed materialistic

theories revolted his shrewd and sensible mind; without caring to go to

the bottom of his thought and contemplate its consequences, he clung to

the notion of Providence as to a waif in the great shipwreck of positive

creeds; he could not imagine

“This clock without a Maker could exist.”

It is his common sense, and not the religious yearnings of his soul, that

makes him write in the poem of La Loi naturelle,--

O God, whom men ignore, whom everything reveals,

Hear Thou the latest words of him who now appeals;

‘Tis searching out Thy law that hath bewildered me;

My heart may go astray, but it is full of Thee.

When he was old and suffering, he said to Madame Necker, in one of those

fits of melancholy to which he was subject, “The thinking faculty is lost

just like the eating, drinking, and digesting faculties. The marionettes

of Providence, in fact, are not made to last so long as It.” In his

dying hour Voltaire was seen showing more concern for terrestrial

scandals than for the terrors of conscience, crying aloud for a priest,

and, with his mouth full of the blood he spat, still repeating in a half

whisper, “I don’t want to be thrown into the kennel.” A sad confession

of the insufficiency of his convictions and of the inveterate levity of

his thoughts; he was afraid of the judgment of man without dreading the

judgment of God. Thus was revealed the real depth of an infidelity of

which Voltaire himself perhaps had not calculated the extent and the

fatal influences.

Voltaire was destined to die at Paris; there he found the last joys of

his life and there he shed the last rays of his glory. For the twenty-

seven years during which he had been away from it he had worked much,

written much, done much. Whilst almost invariably disavowing his works,

he had furnished philosophy with pointed and poisoned weapons against

religion; he had devoted to humanity much time and strength; one of the

last delights he had tasted was the news of the decree which cleared the

memory of M. de Lally; he had received into his house, educated and found

a husband for the grand-niece of the great Corneille; he had applied the

inexhaustible resources of his mind at one time to good and at another to

evil, with almost equal ardor; he was old, he was ill, yet this same

ardor still possessed him when he arrived at Paris on the 10th of

February, 1778. The excitement caused by his return was extraordinary.

“This new prodigy has stopped all other interest for some time,” writes

Grimm; it has put an end to rumors of war, intrigues in civil life,

squabbles at court. Encyclopeadic pride appeared diminished by half, the

Sorbonne shook all over, the Parliament kept silence; all the literary

world is moved, all Paris is ready to fly to the idol’s feet.” So much

attention and so much glory had been too much for the old man. Voltaire

was dying; in his fright he had sent for a priest and had confessed; when

he rose from his bed by a last effort of the marvellous elasticity,

inherent in his body and his mind, he resumed for a while the course of

his triumphs. “M. de Voltaire has appeared for the first time at the

Academy and at the play; he found all the doors, all the approaches to

the Academy besieged by a multitude which only opened slowly to let him,

pass and then rushed in immediately upon his footsteps with repeated

plaudits and acclamations. The Academy came out into the first room to

meet him, an honor it had never yet paid to any of its members, not even

to the foreign princes who had deigned to be present at its meetings.

The homage he received at the Academy was merely the prelude to that

which awaited him at the National theatre. As soon as his carriage

was seen at a distance, there arose a universal shout of joy. All the

curb-stones, all the barriers, all the windows were crammed with

spectators, and, scarcely was the carriage stopped, when people were

already on the imperial and even on the wheels to get a nearer view of

the divinity. Scarcely had he entered the house when Sieur Brizard came

up with a crown of laurels, which Madame de Villette placed upon the

great man’s head, but which he immediately took off, though the public

urged him to keep it on by clapping of hands and by cheers which

resounded from all corners of the house with such a din as never was

heard.

“All the women stood up. I saw at one time that part of the pit which

was under the boxes going down on their knees, in despair of getting a

sight any other way. The whole house was darkened with the dust raised

by the ebb and flow of the excited multitude. It was not without

difficulty that the players managed at last to begin the piece. It was

_Irene,_ which was given for the sixth time. Never had this tragedy been

better played, never less listened to, never more applauded. The

illustrious old man rose to thank the public, and, the moment afterwards,

there appeared on a pedestal in the middle of the stage a bust of this

great man, and the actresses, garlands and crowns in hand, covered it

with laurels; M. de Voltaire seemed to be sinking beneath the burden of

age and of the homage with which he had just been overwhelmed. He

appeared deeply affected, his eyes still sparkled amidst the pallor of

his face, but it seemed as if he breathed no longer save with the

consciousness of his glory. The people shouted, ‘Lights! lights! that

everybody may see him!’ The coachman was entreated to go at a walk, and

thus he was accompanied by cheering and the crowd as far as Pont Royal.”

Thus is described in the words of an eye-witness the last triumph of an

existence that had been one of ceaseless agitation, owing to Voltaire

himself far more than to the national circumstances and events of the

time at which he lived. His anxious vanity and the inexhaustible

movement of his mind had kept him constantly fluctuating between

alternations of intoxication and despair; he had the good fortune to die

at the very pinnacle of success and renown, the only immortality he could

comprehend or desire, at the outset of a new and hopeful reign; he did

not see, he had never apprehended the terrible catastrophe to which he

had been thoughtlessly contributing for sixty years. A rare piece of

good fortune and one which might be considered too great, if the limits

of eternal justice rested upon earth and were to be measured by our

compass.

Voltaire’s incessant activity bore many fruits which survived him; he

contributed powerfully to the triumph of those notions of humanity,

justice, and freedom, which, superior to his own ideal, did honor to the

eighteenth century; he became the model of a style, clear, neat,

brilliant, the natural exponent of his own mind, far more than of the as

yet confused hopes and aspirations of his age; he defended the rights of

common sense, and sometimes withstood the anti-religious passion of his

friends, but he blasted both minds and souls with his sceptical gibes;

his bitter and at the same time temperate banter disturbed consciences

which would have been revolted by the materialistic doctrines of the

Encyclopaedists; the circle of infidelity widened under his hands; his

disciples were able to go beyond him on the fatal path he had opened to

them. Voltaire has remained the true representative of the mocking and

stone-flinging phase of free-thinking, knowing nothing of the deep

yearnings any more than of the supreme wretchlessness of the human soul,

which it kept imprisoned within the narrow limits of earth and time. At

the outcome from the bloody slough of the French Revolution and from the

chaos it caused in men’s souls, it was the infidelity of Voltaire which

remained at the bottom of the scepticism and moral disorder of the France

of our day. The demon which torments her is even more Voltairian than

materialistic.

Other influences, more sincere and at the same time more dangerous, were

simultaneously undermining men’s minds. The group of Encyclopaedists,

less prudent and less temperate than Voltaire, flaunted openly the flag

of revolt. At the head marched Diderot, the most daring of all, the most

genuinely affected by his own ardor, without perhaps being the most sure

of his ground in his negations. His was an original and exuberant

nature, expansively open to all new impressions. “In my country,” he

says, “we pass within twenty-four hours from cold to hot, from calm to

storm, and this changeability of climate extends to the persons. Thus,

from earliest infancy, they are wont to shift with every wind. The head

of a Langrois stands on his shoulders like a weathercock on the top of a

church-steeple; it is never steady at one point, and, if it comes round

again to that which it had left, it is not to stop there. As for me, I

am of my country; only residence of the capital and constant application

have corrected me a little.”

[Illustration: Diderot----314]

Narrow circumstances had their share in the versatility of Diderot’s

genius as well as in the variety of his labors. Son of a cutler at

Langres, a strict and virtuous man, Denys Diderot, born in 1715, had at

first been intended by his father for the church. He was educated at

Harcourt College, and he entered an attorney’s office. The young man

worked incessantly, but not a law-book did he open. “What do you mean to

be, pray?” the lawyer asked him one day; “do you think of being an

attorney?” “No.” “A barrister?” “No.” “A doctor?” “No more than the

rest.” “What then?” “Nothing at all. I like study, I am very happy,

very contented, I ask no more.” Diderot’s father stopped the allowance

he had been making his son, trusting thus to force him to choose a

profession. But the young man gave lessons for a livelihood.

“I know a pretty good number of things,” he wrote towards the end of his

life, “but there is scarcely a man who doesn’t know his own thing better

than I do. This mediocrity in every sort is the consequence of

insatiable curiosity and of means so small, that they never permitted me

to devote myself to one single branch of human knowledge. I have been

forced all my life to follow pursuits for which I was not adapted, and to

leave on one side those for which I had a call from inclination.” Before

he was thirty years old, and without any resource but his lessons and the

work of every sort he did for third parties, Diderot married; he had not

asked the consent of his parents, but this did not prevent him from

saddling them before long with his wife and child. “She started

yesterday,” he writes quite simply to his father, “she will be with you

in three days; you can say anything you like to her, and when you are

tired of her, you can send her back.” Diderot intended to be free at any

price, and he threw off, one after another, the fetters he had forged for

himself, not without remorse, however, and not without acknowledging that

he was thus wanting to all natural duties. “What can you expect,” he

would exclaim, “of a man who has neglected wife and daughter, got into

debt, given up being husband and father?”

Diderot never neglected his friends; amidst his pecuniary embarrassments,

when he was reduced to coin his brain for a livelihood, his labor and his

marvellous facility were always at the service of all. It was to satisfy

the requirements of a dangerous fair friend that he wrote his _Pensees

philosophiques,) the sad tale of the _Bijoux indiscrets_ and the _Lettre

sur les Aveugles,_ those early attacks upon religious faith which sent

him to pass a few months in prison at the Castle of Vincennes. It was to

oblige Grimm that he for the first time gave his mind to painting, and

wrote his _Salons,_ intended to amuse and instruct the foreign princes.

“A pleasure which is only for myself affects me but slightly and lasts

but a short time,” he used to say; “it is for self and friends that I

read, reflect, write, meditate, hear, look, feel. In their absence, my

devotion towards them refers everything to them. I am always thinking of

their happiness. Does a beautiful line strike me, they shall know it.

Have I stumbled upon a beautiful trait, I make up my mind to communicate

it to them. Have I before my eyes some enchanting scene; unconsciously,

I meditate an account of it for them. To them I have dedicated the use

of all my senses and of all my faculties, and that perhaps is the reason

why everything is exaggerated, everything is embellished a little in my

imagination and in my talk; and they sometimes reproach me with this, the

ingrates!”

It was, further, in conjunction with his friends and in community of

ideas that Diderot undertook the immense labor of the _Encyclopaedia_.

Having, in the first instance, received a commission from a publisher to

translate the English collection of [Ephraim] Chambers, Diderot was

impressed with a desire to unite in one and the same collection all the

efforts and all the talents of his epoch, so as to render joint homage to

the rapid progress of science. Won over by his enthusiasm, D’Alembert

consented to share the task; and he wrote the beautiful exposition in the

introduction. Voltaire sent his articles from Delices. The Jesuits had

proposed to take upon themselves a certain number of questions, but their

co-operation was declined: it was a monument to philosophy that the

Encyclopaedists aspired to raise; the clergy were in commotion at seeing

the hostile army, till then uncertain and unbanded, rally organized and

disciplined around this vast enterprise. An early veto, soon, however,

taken off, compelled the philosophers to a certain moderation; Voltaire

ceased writing for the _Encyclopaedia;_ it was not sufficiently

free-going for him. “You admit articles worthy of the Trevoux journal,”

he said to D’Alembert. New severities on the part of the Parliament and

the grand council dealt a blow to the philosophers before long: the

editors’ privilege was revoked. Orders were given to seize Diderot’s

papers. Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who was at that time director of the

press, and favorable to freedom without ever having abused it in thought

or action, sent him secret warning. Diderot ran home in consternation.

“What’s to be done?” he cried; “how move all my manuscripts in twenty-

four hours? I haven’t time even to make a selection. And, above all,

where find people who would and can take charge of them safely?” “Send

them all to me,” replied M. de Malesherbes; “nobody will come thither to

look for them.”

Feeble governments are ill served even by their worthiest servants; the

severities ordered against the _Encyclopaedia_ did not stop its

publication; D’Alembert, however, weary of the struggle, had ceased to

take part in the editorship. Naturally cool and moderate, when it was

nothing to do with Mdlle. de Lespinasse, the great affection of his life,

the illustrious geometer was content with a little. “Twelve hundred

livres a year are enough for me,” he wrote to the Great Frederick who was

pressing him to settle in his dominions. “I will not go and reap the

succession to Maupertuis during his lifetime. I am overlooked by

government, just as so many others by Providence; persecuted as much as

anybody can be, if some day I have to fly my country, I will simply ask

Frederick’s permission to go and die in his dominions, free and poor.”

[Illustration: Alembert----317]

Frederick II. gave D’Alembert a pension; it had but lately been Louis

XIV. who thus lavished kindnesses on foreign scholars: he made an offer

to the Encyclopaedists to go and finish their vast undertaking at Berlin.

Catherine II. made the same offers, asking D’Alembert, besides, to take

charge of the education of her son. “I know your honesty too well,” she

wrote, “to attribute your refusals to vanity; I know that the cause is

merely love of repose in order to cultivate literature and friendship.

But what is to prevent your coming with all your friends? I promise you

and them too all the comforts and every facility that may depend upon me;

and perchance you will find more freedom and repose than you have at

home. You do not yield to the entreaties of the King of Prussia, and to

the gratitude you owe him, it is true, but then he has no son. I confess

that I have my son’s education so much at heart, and that you are so

necessary to me, that perhaps I press you too much. Pardon my

indiscretion for the reason’s sake, and rest assured that it is esteem

which has made me so selfish.”

D’Alembert declined the education of the hereditary Grand Duke, just as

he had declined the presidency of the Academy at Berlin; an infidel and

almost a materialist by the geometer’s rule, who knows no power but the

laws of mathematics, he did not carry into anti-religious strife the

bitterness of Voltaire, or the violence of Diderot. “Squelch the thing!

you are always repeating to me,” he said to Voltaire on the 4th of May,

1762. “Ah! my good friend, let it go to rack and ruin of itself, it is

hurrying thereto faster than you suppose.” More and more absorbed by

pure science, which he never neglected save for the French Academy, whose

perpetual secretary he had become, D’Alembert left to Diderot alone the

care of continuing the _Encyclopaedia_. When he died, in 1783, at

fifty-six years of age, the work had been finished nearly twenty years.

In spite of the bad faith of publishers, who mutilated articles to render

them acceptable, in spite of the condemnation of the clergy and the

severities of the council, the last volumes of the _Encyclopaedia_ had

appeared in 1765.

This immense work, unequal and confused as it was, a medley of various

and often ill-assorted elements, undertaken for and directed to the fixed

end of an aggressive emancipation of thought, had not sufficed to absorb

the energy and powers of Diderot. “I am awaiting with impatience the

reflections of _Pantophile Diderot on Tancrede,_” wrote Voltaire:

“everything is within the sphere of activity of his genius: he passes

from the heights of metaphysics to the weaver’s trade, and thence he

comes to the stage.”

The stage, indeed, occupied largely the attention of Diderot, who sought

to introduce reforms, the fruit of his own thought as well as of

imitation of the Germans, which he had not perhaps sufficiently

considered. For the classic tragedies, the heritage of which Voltaire

received from the hands of Racine, Diderot aspired to substitute the

natural drama. His two attempts in that style, _Le Pere de Famille_ and

_Le Fils natural,_ had but little success in France, and contributed to

develop in Germany the school already founded by Lessing. An excess of

false sensibility and an inflation of expression had caused certain true

ideas to fall flat on the French stage.

“You have the inverse of dramatic talent,” said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot;

“the proper thing is to transform one’s self into all the characters, and

you transform all the characters into yourself.” The criticism did

Diderot wrong: he had more wits than his characters, and he was worth

more at bottom than those whom he described. Carried away by the

richness as well as the unruliness of his mind, destitute as he was of

definite and fixed principles, he recognized no other moral law than the

natural impulse of the soul. “There is no virtue or vice,” he used to

say, “but innate goodness or badness.” Certain religious cravings,

nevertheless, sometimes: asserted themselves in his conscience: he had.

a glimmering perception of the necessity for a higher rule and law.

“O God, I know not whether Thou art,” he wrote in his _Interpretation de

la Nature,_ but I will think as if Thou didst see into my soul, I will

act as if I were in Thy presence.”

A strange illusion on the part of the philosopher about the power of

ideas as well as about the profundity of evil in the human heart!

Diderot fancied he could regulate his life by a perchance, and he was

constantly hurried away by the torrent of his passion into a violence of

thought and language foreign to his natural benevolence. It was around

his name that the philosophic strife had waxed most fierce: the active

campaign undertaken by his friends to open to him the doors of the French

Academy remained unsuccessful. “He has too many enemies,” said Louis XV.

“his election shall not be sanctioned.” Diderot did not offer himself;

he set out for St. Petersburg; the Empress Catherine had loaded him with

kindnesses. Hearing of the poverty of the philosopher who was trying to

sell his library to obtain a dower for his daughter, she bought the

books, leaving the enjoyment of them to Diderot, whom she appointed her

librarian, and, to secure his maintenance in advance, she had a sum of

fifty thousand livres remitted to him. “So here I am obliged, in

conscience, to live fifty years,” said Diderot.

[Illustration: Diderot and Catherine II----321]

He passed some months in Russia, admitted several hours a day to the

closet of the empress, chatting with a frankness and a freedom which

sometimes went to the extent of license. Catherine II. was not alarmed.

“Go on,” she would say; amongst men anything is allowable.” When the

philosopher went away, he shed hot tears, and “so did she, almost,” he

declares. He refused to go to Berlin; absolute power appeared to him

more arbitrary and less indulgent in the hands of Frederick than with

Catherine. “It is said that at Petersburg Diderot is considered a

tiresome reasoner,” wrote the King of Prussia to D’ Alembert in January,

1774; “he is incessantly harping on the same things. All I know is that

I couldn’t stand the reading of his, books, intrepid reader as I am;

there is a self-sufficient tone and an arrogance in them which revolts my

sense of freedom.” The same sense of freedom which the king claimed for

himself whilst refusing it to the philosopher, the philosopher, in his

turn, refused to Christians not less intolerant than he. The eighteenth

century did not practise on its own account that respect for conscience

which it, nevertheless, powerfully and to its glory promoted.

Diderot died on the 29th of July, 1784, still poor, an invalid for some

time past, surrounded to the end by his friends, who rendered back to him

that sincere and devoted affection which he made the pride of his life.

Hearing of his sufferings from Grimm, the Empress Catherine had hired a

furnished apartment for him; he had just installed himself in it when he

expired; without having retracted any one of his works, nearly all

published under the veil of the anonymous, he was, nevertheless, almost

reconciled with the church, and was interred quietly in the chapel of the

Virgin at St. Roch. The charm of his character had often caused people

to forget his violence, which he himself no longer remembered the next

day. “I should like to know this hot-headed metaphysician,” was the

remark made to Buffon by President De Brosses, who happened to be then at

Paris; and he afterwards added,

“He is a nice fellow, very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher,

a mighty arguer, but a maker of perpetual digressions. Yesterday he made

quite five and twenty between nine o’clock and one, during which time he

remained in my room. O, how much more lucid is Buffon than all those

gentry!”

The magistrate’s mind understood and appreciated the great naturalist’s

genius. Diderot felt in his own fashion the charm of nature, but, as was

said by Chevalier Chastellux, “his ideas got drunk and set to work

chasing one another.” The ideas of Buffon, on the other hand, came out

in the majestic order of a system under powerful organization, and

informed as it were with the very secrets of the Creator. “The general

history of the world,” he says, “ought to precede the special history of

its productions; and the details of singular facts touching the life and

habits of animals, or touching the culture and vegetation of plants,

belong perhaps less to natural history than do the general results of the

observations which have been made on the different materials which

compose the terrestrial globe, on the elevations, the depressions, and

the unevennesses of its form, on the movement of the seas, on the

trending of mountains, on the position of quarries, on the rapidity and

effects of the currents of the sea--this is nature on the grand scale.”

M. Fleurens truly said, “ Bufon aggrandizes every subject he touches.”

Born at Montbard in Burgundy on the 7th of September, 1707, Buffon

belonged to a family of wealth and consideration in his province. In his

youth he travelled over Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston; on

returning home, he applied himself at first to mathematics, with

sufficient success to be appointed at twenty-six years of age, in 1733,

adjunct in the mechanical class at the Academy of Sciences. In 1739, he

received the superintendence of the _Jardin du Roi,_ not long since

enlarged and endowed by Richelieu, and lovingly looked after by the

scholar Dufay, who had just died, himself designating Buffon as his

successor. He had shifted from mechanics to botany, “not,” he said,

“that he was very fond of that science, which he had learned and

forgotten three times,” but he was aspiring just then to the _Jardin du

Roi;_ his genius was yet seeking its proper direction. “There are some

things for me,” he wrote to President De Brosses, “but there are some

against, and especially my age; however, if people would but reflect,

they would see that the superintendence of the _Jardin du Roi_ requires

an active young man, who can stand the sun, who is conversant with plants

and knows the way to make them multiply, who is a bit of a connoisseur in

all the sorts used in demonstration there, and above all who understands

buildings, in such sort that, in my own heart, it appears to me that I

should be exactly made for them: but I have not as yet any great hope.”

[Illustration: Buffon 323]

In Buffon’s hands the _Jardin du Roi_ was transformed; in proportion as

his mind developed, the requirements of the study appeared to him greater

and greater; he satisfied them fearlessly, getting together collections

at his own expense, opening new galleries, constructing hot-houses, being

constantly seconded by the good-will of Louis XV., who never shrank from

expenses demanded by Buffon’s projects. The great naturalist died at

eighty years of age, without having completed his work; but he had

imprinted upon it that indisputable stamp of greatness which was the

distinctive feature of his genius. The _Jardin du Roi,_ which became the

_Jardin des Plantes,_ has remained unique in Europe.

Fully engaged as he was in those useful labors, from the age of thirty,

Buffon gave up living at Paris for the greater part of the year. He had

bought the ruins of the castle of Montbard, the ancient residence of the

Dukes of Burgundy, overlooking his native town. He had built a house

there which soon became dear to him, and which he scarcely ever left for

eight months in the year. There it was, in a pavilion which overhung the

garden planted in terraces, and from which he had a view of the rich

plains of La Brenne, that the great naturalist, carefully dressed by five

o’clock in the morning, meditated the vast plan of his works as he walked

from end to end and side to side. “I passed delightful hours there,” he

used to say. When he summoned his secretary, the work of composition was

completed. “M. de Buffon gives reasons for the preference he shows as to

every word in his discourses, without excluding from the discussion even

the smallest particles, the most insignificant conjunctions,” says Madame

Necker; “he never forgot that he had written ‘the style is the man.’

The language could not be allowed to derogate from the majesty of the

subject. ‘I made it a rule,’ he used to say, ‘to always fix upon the

noblest expressions.’”

It was in this dignified and studious retirement that Buffon quietly

passed his long life. “I dedicated,” he says, “ twelve, nay, fourteen,

hours to study; it was my whole pleasure. In truth, I devoted myself to

it far more than I troubled myself about fame; fame comes afterwards, if

it may, and it nearly always does.”

Buffon did not lack fame; on the appearance of the first three volumes of

his “Histoire naturelle,” published in 1749, the breadth of his views,

the beauty of his language, and the strength of his mind excited general

curiosity and admiration. The Sorbonne was in a flutter at certain bold

propositions; Buffon, without being disconcerted, took pains to avoid

condemnation. “I took the liberty,” he says in a letter to M. Leblant,

“of writing to the Duke of Nivernais (then ambassador at Rome), who has

replied to me in the most polite and most obliging way in the world; I

hope, therefore, that my book will not be put in the Index, and, in

truth, I have done all I could not to deserve it and to avoid theological

squabbles, which I fear far more than I do the criticisms of physicists

and geometricians.” “Out of a hundred and twenty assembled doctors,” he

adds before long, “I had a hundred and fifteen, and their resolution even

contains eulogies which I did not expect.” Despite certain boldnesses

which had caused anxiety, the Sorbonne had reason to compliment the great

naturalist. The unity of the human race as well as its superior dignity

were already vindicated in these first efforts of Buffon’s genius, and

his mind never lost sight of this great verity. “In the human species,”

he says, “the influence of climate shows itself only by slight varieties,

because this species is one, and is very distinctly separated from all

other species; man, white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and

red in America, is only the same man tinged with the hue of climate; as

he is made to reign over the earth, as the whole globe is his domain, it

seems as if his nature were ready prepared for all situations; beneath

the fires of the south, amidst the frosts of the north, he lives, he

multiplies, he is found to be so spread about everywhere from time

immemorial that he appears to affect no climate in particular. . . .

Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and the monkey,

the interval which separates them is immense, since internally he is

garnished with mind and externally with speech.”

Buffon continued his work, adroitly availing himself of the talent and

researches of the numerous co-operators whom he had managed to gather

about him, directing them all with indefatigable vigilance in their

labors and their observations. “Genius is but a greater aptitude for

perseverance,” he used to say, himself justifying his definition by the

assiduity of his studies. “I had come to the sixteenth volume of my work

on natural history,” he writes with bitter regret, “when a serious and

long illness interrupted for nearly two years the course of my labors.

This shortening of my life, already far advanced, caused one in my works.

I might, in the two years I have lost, have produced two or three volumes

of the history of birds, without abandoning for that my plan of a history

of minerals, on which I have been engaged for several years.”

In 1753 Buffon had been nominated a member of the French Academy. He had

begged his friends to vote for his compatriot, Piron, author of the

celebrated comedy _Metromanie,_ at that time an old man and still poor.

“I can wait,” said Buffon. “Two days before that fixed for the

election,” writes Grimm, “the king sent for President Montesquieu, to

whose lot it had fallen to be director of the Academy on that occasion,

and told him that, understanding that the Academy had cast their eyes

upon M. Piron, and knowing that he was the author of several licentious

works, he desired the Academy to choose some one else to fill the vacant

place. His Majesty at the same time told him that he would not have any

member belonging to the order of advocates.”

Buffon was elected, and on the 25th of August, 1754, St. Louis’ day, he

was formally received by the Academy; Grimm describes the session.

“M. de Buffon did not confine himself to reminding us that Chancellor

Seguier was a great man, that Cardinal Richelieu was a very great man,

that Kings Louis XIV. and Louis XV. were very great men too, that the

Archbishop of Sens (whom he succeeds) was also a great man, and finally

that all the forty were great men; this celebrated man, disdaining the

stale and heavy eulogies which are generally the substance of this sort

of speech, thought proper to treat of a subject worthy of his pen and

worthy of the Academy. He gave us his ideas on style, and it was said,

in consequence, that the Academy had engaged a writing-master.”

“Well-written works are the only ones which will go down to posterity,”

said Buffon in his speech; “quantity of knowledge, singularity of facts,

even novelty in discoveries, are not certain guaranties of immortality;

knowledge, facts, discoveries, are easily abstracted and transferred.

Those things are outside the man; the style is the man himself; the

style, then, cannot be abstracted, or transferred, or tampered with; if

it be elevated, noble, sublime, the author will be equally admired at all

times, for it is only truth that is durable and even eternal.”

Never did the great scholar who has been called “the painter of nature”

relax his zeal for painstaking as a writer. “I am every day learning to

write,” he would still say at seventy years of age.

To the _Theorie de la Terre,_ the _Idees generales sur les Animaux,_ and

the _Histoire de l’Homme,_ already published when Buffon was elected by

the French Academy, succeeded the twelve volumes of the _Histoire des

Quadrupedes,_ a masterpiece of luminous classifications and incomparable

descriptions; eight volumes on _Oiseaux_ appeared subsequently, a short

time before the _Histoire des Mineraux;_ lastly, a few years before his

death, Buffon gave to the world the _Epoques de la Nature_. “As in civil

history one consults titles, hunts up medals, deciphers antique

inscriptions to determine the epochs of revolutions amongst mankind, and

to fix the date of events in the moral world, so, in natural history, we

must ransack the archives of the universe, drag from the entrails of the

earth the olden monuments, gather together their ruins and collect into a

body of proofs all the indications of physical changes that can guide us

back to the different ages of nature. It is the only way of fixing

certain points in the immensity of space, and of placing a certain number

of memorial-stones on the endless road of time.”

“This is what I perceive with my mind’s eye,” Buffon would say, “thus

forming a chain which, from the summit of Time’s ladder, descends right

down to us.” “This man,” exclaimed Hume, with an admiration which

surprised him out of his scepticism, “this man gives to things which no

human eye has seen a probability almost equal to evidence.”

Some of Buffon’s theories have been disputed by his successors’ science;

as D’Alembert said of Descartes: “If he was mistaken about the laws of

motion, he was the first to divine that there must be some.” Buffon

divined the epochs of nature, and by the intuition of his genius,

absolutely unshackled by any religious prejudice, he involuntarily

reverted to the account given in Genesis. “We are persuaded,” he says,

“independently of the authority of the sacred books, that man was created

last, and that he only came to wield the sceptre of the earth when that

earth was found worthy of his sway.”

It has often been repeated, on the strength of some expressions let fall

by Buffon amongst intimates, that the panorama of nature had shut out

from his eyes the omnipotent God, creator and preserver of the physical

world as well as of the moral law. Wrong has been done the great

naturalist; he had answered beforehand these incorrect opinions as to his

fundamental ideas. “Nature is not a being,” he said; “for that being

would be God;” and he adds, “Nature is the system of the laws established

by the Creator.” The supreme notion of Providence appears to his eyes in

all its grandeur, when he writes, “The verities of nature were destined

to appear only in course of time, and the Supreme Being kept them to

Himself as the surest means of recalling man to Him when his faith,

declining in the lapse of ages, should become weak; when, remote from his

origin, he might begin to forget it; when, in fine, having become too

familiar with the spectacle of nature, he would no longer be moved by it,

and would come to ignore the Author. It was necessary to confirm from

time to time, and even to enlarge, the idea of God in the mind and heart

of man. Now every new discovery produces this grand effect, every new

step that we make in nature brings us nearer to the Creator. A new

verity is a species of miracle; its effect is the same, and it only

differs from the real miracle in that the latter is a startling stroke

which God strikes instantaneously and rarely, instead of making use of

man to discover and exhibit the marvels which He has hidden in the womb

of Nature, and in that, as these marvels are operating every instant, as

they are open at all times and for all time to his contemplation, God is

constantly recalling him to Himself, not only by the spectacle of the

moment, but, further, by the successive development of His works.”

Buffon was still working at eighty years of age; he had undertaken a

dissertation on style, a development of his reception speech at the

French Academy. Great sorrows had crossed his life. Married late to a

young wife whom he loved, he lost her early; she left him a son, brought

up under his wing, and the object of his constant solicitude. Just at

the time of sending him to school, he wrote to Madame Daubenton, wife of

his able and learned co-operator: “I expect Buffonet on Sunday. I have

arranged all his little matters he will have a private room, with a

closet for his man-servant; I have got him a tutor in the school-house

itself, and a little companion of his own age. I do not think that he

will be at all unhappy.” And, at a later date, when he is expecting this

son who has reached man’s estate, and has been travelling in Europe: “My

son has just arrived; the empress and the grand-duke have treated him

very well, and we shall have some fine minerals, the collection of which

is being at this moment completed. I confess that anxiety about his

return has taken away my sleep and the power of thinking.”

When the young Count de Buffon, an officer in the artillery, and at first

warmly favorable to the noble professions of the French Revolution, had,

like his peers, to mount the scaffold of the Terror, he damned with one

word the judges who profaned in his person his father’s glory.

“Citizens,” he exclaimed from the fatal car, “my name is Buffon.” With

less respect for the rights of genius than was shown by the Algerian

pirates who let pass, without opening them, the chests directed to the

great naturalist, the executioner of the Committee of public safety cut

off his son’s head.

This last drop of bitterness, and the cruel spectacle of social disorder,

Buffon had been spared; he had died at the _Jardin du Roi_ on the 14th of

April, 1788, preserving at eighty years of age, and even in the

feebleness of ill health, all the powers of his intelligence and the calm

serenity of ‘his soul. His last lines dictated to his son were addressed

to Madame Necker, who had been for a long time past on the most intimate

terms with him. Faithful in death to the instincts of order and

regularity which had always controlled his mind even in his boldest

flight, he requested that all the ceremonies of religion should be

fulfilled around his body. His son had it removed to Montbard, where it

lies between his father and his wife.

Buffon had lived long, he had accomplished in peace his great work, he

had reaped the fruits of it. On the eve of the terrible shocks whereof

no presage disturbed his spirit, “directed for fifty years towards the

great objects of nature,” the illustrious scholar had been permitted to

see his statue placed during his lifetime in the _Jardin du Roi_. On

sending to the Empress Catherine his bust which she had asked him for,

he wrote to his son who had charge of it: “I forgot to remark to you,

whilst talking of bust and effigy, that, by the king’s order, they have

put at the bottom of my statue the following inscription: _Majestati

naturae par ingenium_ (Genius to match the majesty of nature). It is not

from pride that I send you this, but perhaps Her Majesty will have it put

at the bottom of the bust.”

“How many great men do you reckon?” Buffon was asked one day. “Five,”

answered he at once: “ Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself.”

This self-appreciation, fostered by the homage of his contemporaries,

which showed itself in Buffon undisguisedly with an air of ingenuous

satisfaction, had poisoned a life already extinguished ten years before

amidst the bitterest agonies. Taking up arms against a society in which

he had not found his proper place, Jean Jacques Rousseau had attacked the

present as well as the past, the Encyclopaedists as well as the old

social organization. It was from the first his distinctive trait to

voluntarily create a desert around him. The eighteenth century was in

its nature easily seduced; liberal, generous, and open to allurements, it

delighted in intellectual contentions, even the most dangerous and the

most daring; it welcomed with alacrity all those who thus contributed to

its pleasures. The charming drawing-rooms of Madame Geoffrin, of Madame

du Deffand, of Madlle. Lespinasse, belonged of right to philosophy.

“Being men of the world as well as of letters, the philosophers of the

eighteenth century had passed their lives in the pleasantest and most

brilliant regions of that society which was so much attacked by them.

It had welcomed them, made them famous; they had mingled in all the

pleasures of its elegant and agreeable existence; they shared in all its

tastes, its manners, all the refinements, all the susceptibilities of a

civilization at the same time old and rejuvenated, aristocratic and

literary; they were of that old regimen which was demolished by their

hands. The philosophical circle was everywhere, amongst the people of

the court, of the church, of the long robe, of finance; haughty here,

complaisant there, at one time indoctrinating, at another amusing its

hosts, but everywhere young, active, confident, recruiting and battling

everywhere, penetrating and fascinating the whole of society “ [M.

Guizot, Madame la comtesse de Rumford]. Rousseau never took his place in

this circle; in this society he marched in front like a pioneer of new

times, attacking tentatively all that he encountered on his way. “Nobody

was ever at one and the same time more factious and more dictatorial,” is

the clever dictum of M. Saint Marc Girardin.

Rousseau was not a Frenchman: French society always felt that, in

consequence of certain impressions of his early youth which were never to

be effaced. Born at Geneva on the 28th of June, 1712, in a family of the

lower middle class, and brought up in the first instance by an

intelligent and a pious mother, he was placed, like Voltaire and Diderot,

in an attorney’s office. Dismissed with disgrace “as good for nothing

but to ply the file,” the young man was bound apprentice to an engraver,

“a clownish and violent fellow,” says Rousseau, “who succeeded very

shortly in dulling all the brightness of my boyhood, brutalizing my

lively and loving character, and reducing me in spirit, as I was in

fortune, to my real position of an apprentice.”

Rousseau was barely sixteen when he began that roving existence which is

so attractive to young people, so hateful in ripe age, and which lasted

as long as his life. Flying from his master whose brutality he dreaded,

and taking refuge at Oharmettes in Savoy with a woman whom he at first

loved passionately, only to leave her subsequently with disgust, he had

reached the age of one and twenty, and had already gone through many

adventures when he set out, heart-sore and depraved, to seek at Paris a

means of subsistence. He had invented a new system of musical notation;

the Academy of Sciences, which had lent him a favorable ear, did not

consider the discovery useful. Some persons had taken an interest in

him, but Rousseau could never keep his friends; and he had many, zealous

and devoted. He was sent to Venice as secretary to the French ambassador

M. de Montaigu. He soon quarrelled with the ambassador and returned to

Paris. He found his way into the house of Madame Dupin, wife of a rich

farmer-general (of taxes). He was considered clever; he wrote little

plays, which he set to music. Enthusiastically welcomed by the friends

of Madame Dupin, he contributed to their amusements. “We began with the

_Engagement temeraire,_” says Madame d’Epinay in her Memoires: “it is a

new play by M. Rousseau, a friend of M. de Francueil’s, who introduced

him to us. The author played a part in his piece. Though it is only a

society play, it was a great success. I doubt, however, whether it would

be successful at the theatre, but it is the work of a clever man and no

ordinary man. I do not quite know, though, whether it is what I saw of

the author or of the piece that made me think so. He is complimentary

without being polite, or at least without having the air of it. He seems

to be ignorant of the usages of society, but it is easy to see that he

has infinite wit. He has a brown complexion, and eyes full of fire light

up his face. When he has been speaking and you watch him, you think him

good-looking; but when you recall him to memory, it is always as a plain

man. He is said to be in bad health; it is probably that which gives him

from time to time a wild look.”

It was amid this brilliant intimacy, humiliating and pleasant at the same

time, that Rousseau published his _Discours sur les Sciences et les

Arts_. It has been disputed whether the inspiration was such as he

claimed for this production, the first great work which he had ever

undertaken and which was to determine the direction of his thoughts.

“I was going to see Diderot at Vincennes,” he says, “and, as I walked, I

was turning over the leaves of the _Mercure de France,_ when I stumbled

upon this question proposed by the Academy of Dijon: Whether the advance

of sciences and arts has contributed to the corruption or purification of

morals. All at once I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights, crowds

of ideas presented themselves at once with a force and a confusion which

threw me into indescribable bewilderment; I felt my head seized with a

giddiness like intoxication, a violent palpitation came over me, my bosom

began to heave. Unable to breathe any longer as I walked, I flung myself

down under one of the trees in the avenue, and there spent half an hour

in such agitation that, on rising up, I found all the front of my

waistcoat wet with tears without my having had an idea that I had shed

any.” Whether it were by natural intuition or the advice of Diderot,

Jean Jacques had found his weapons; poor and obscure as he was, he

attacked openly the brilliant and corrupt society which had welcomed him

for its amusement. Spiritualistic at heart and nurtured upon Holy

Scripture in his pious childhood, he felt a sincere repugnance for the

elegant or cynical materialism which was every day more and more creeping

over the eighteenth century. “Sciences and arts have corrupted the

world,” he said, and he put forward, as proof of it, the falsity of the

social code, the immorality of private life, the frivolity of the

drawing-rooms into which he had been admitted. “Suspicions,

heart-burnings, apprehensions, coldness, reserve, hatred, treason, lurk

incessantly beneath that uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, under

that so much vaunted urbanity which we owe to the enlightenment of our

age.”

Rousseau had launched his paradox; the frivolous and polite society which

he attacked was amused at it without being troubled by it: it was a new

field of battle opened for brilliant jousts of wit; he had his partisans

and his admirers. In the discussion which ensued, Jean Jacques showed

himself more sensible and moderate than he had been in the first

exposition of his idea; he had wanted to strike, to astonish he soon

modified the violence of his assertions. “Let us guard against

concluding that we must now burn all libraries and pull down the

universities and academies,” he wrote to King Stanislaus: “we should only

plunge Europe once more into barbarism, and morals would gain nothing by

it. The vices would remain with us, and we should have ignorance

besides. In vain would you aspire to destroy the sources of the evil;

in vain would you remove the elements of vanity, indolence, and luxury;

in vain would you even bring men back to that primal equality, the

preserver of innocence and the source of all virtue: their hearts once

spoiled will be so forever. There is no remedy now save some great

revolution, almost as much to be feared as the evil which it might cure,

and one which it were blamable to desire and impossible to forecast. Let

us, then, leave the sciences and arts to assuage, in some degree, the

ferocity of the men they have corrupted. . .. The enlightenment of the

wicked is at any rate less to be feared than his brutal stupidity.”

Rousseau here showed the characteristic which invariably distinguished

him from the philosophers, and which ended by establishing deep enmity

between them and him. The eighteenth century espied certain evils,

certain sores in the social and political condition, believed in a cure,

and blindly relied on the power of its own theories. Rousseau, more

earnest, often more sincere, made a better diagnosis of the complaint; he

described its horrible character and the dangerousness of it, he saw no

remedy and he pointed none out. Profound and grievous impotence, whose

utmost hope is an impossible recurrence to the primitive state of

savagery! “In the private opinion of our adversaries,” says M. Roy de

Collard eloquently, “it was a thoughtless thing, on the great day of

creation, to let man loose, a free and intelligent agent, into the midst

of the universe; thence the mischief and the mistake. A higher wisdom

comes forward to repair the error of Providence, to restrain His

thoughtless liberality, and to render to prudently mutilated mankind the

service of elevating it to the happy innocence of the brute.”

Before Rousseau, and better than he, Christianity had recognized and

proclaimed the evil; but it had at the same time announced to the world a

remedy and a Saviour.

Henceforth Rousseau had chosen his own road: giving up the drawing-rooms

and the habits of that elegant society for which he was not born and the

admiration of which had developed his pride, he made up his mind to live

independent, copying music to get his bread, now and then smitten with

the women of the world who sought him out in his retirement,--in love

with Madame d’Epinay and Madame d’Houdetot, anon returning to the coarse

servant-wench whom he had but lately made his wife, and whose children he

had put in the foundling-hospital. Music at that time absorbed all

minds. Rousseau brought out a little opera entitled _Le Devin de

village_ (The Village Wizard), which had a great success. It was played

at Fontainebleau before the king. “I was there that day,” writes

Rousseau, “in the same untidy array which was usual with me; a great deal

of beard and wig rather badly trimmed. Taking this want of decency for

an act of courage, I entered in this state the very room into which would

come, a short time afterwards, the king, the queen, the royal family, and

all the court. . . . When the lights were lit, seeing myself in this.

array in the midst of people all extensively got up, I began to be ill at

ease; I asked myself if I were in my proper place, if I were properly

dressed, and, after a few moments’ disquietude, I answered yes, with an

intrepidity which arose perhaps more from the impossibility of getting

out of it than from the force of my arguments. After this little

dialogue, I plucked up so much, that I should have been quite intrepid if

there had been any need of it. But, whether it were the effect of the

master’s presence or natural kindness of heart, I observed nothing but

what was obliging and civil in the curiosity of which I was the object.

I was steeled against all their gibes, but their caressing air, which I

had not expected, overcame me so completely, that I trembled like a child

when things began. I heard all about me a whispering of women who seemed

to me as beautiful as angels, and who said to one another below their

breath, ‘This is charming, this is enchanting: there is not a note that

does not appeal to the heart.’ The, pleasure of causing emotion in so

many lovable persons moved me myself to tears.”

The emotions of the eighteenth century were vivid and easily roused;

fastening upon everything without any earnest purpose, and without any

great sense of responsibility, it grew as hot over a musical dispute as

over the gravest questions of morality or philosophy. Grimm had attacked

French music, Rousseau supported his thesis by a _Lettre sur la Musique_.

It was the moment of the great quarrel between the Parliament and the

clergy. “When my letter appeared, there was no more excitement save

against me,” says Rousseau; “it was such that the nation has never

recovered from it. When people read that this pamphlet probably

prevented a revolution in the state, they will fancy they must be

dreaming.” And Grimm adds in his correspondence: “The Italian actors who

have been playing for the last ten months on the stage of the Opera de

Paris and who are called here bouffons, have so absorbed the attention of

Paris that the Parliament, in spite of all its measures and proceedings

which should have earned it celebrity, could not but fall into complete

oblivion. A wit has said that the arrival of Manelli saved us from a

civil war; and Jean Jacques Rousseau of Geneva, whom his friends have

dubbed the citizen of citizens (_le citoyen par excellence_), that

eloquent and bilious foe of the sciences, has just set fire to the four

corners of Paris with a _Lettre sur la Musique,_ in which he proves that

it is impossible to set French words to music. . . . What is not easy

to believe, and is none the less true for all that, is that M. Rousseau

was afraid of being banished for this pamphlet. It would have been odd

to see Rousseau banished for having spoken ill of French music, after

having with impunity dealt with the most delicate political matter.”

Rousseau had just printed his _Discours sur l’Inegalite des conditions,_

a new and violent picture of the corruptions of human society.

“Inequality being almost nil in a state of nature,” he says, “it derives

its force and increment from the development of our faculties and from

the progress of the human mind . . . according to the poet it is gold

and silver, but according to the philosopher it is iron and corn which

have civilized men and ruined the human race.”

The singularity of his paradox had worn off; Rousseau no longer

astounded, he shocked the good sense as well as the aspirations,

superficial or generous, of the eighteenth century. The _Discours sur

l’Inegalite des conditions_ was not a success. “I have received, sir,

your new book against the human race,” wrote Voltaire; “I thank you for

it. You will please men to whom you tell truths about them, and you will

not make them any better. Never was so much good wit expended in the

desire to make beasts of us; one feels disposed to walk on all fours when

one reads your work. However, as it is more than sixty years since I

lost the knack, I unfortunately find it impossible to recover it, and I

leave that natural gait to those who are better fitted for it than you or

I. No more can I embark upon a visit to the savages of Canada, first,

because the illnesses to which I am subject render a European doctor

necessary to me; secondly, because war has been introduced into that

country, and because the examples of our nations have rendered the

savages almost as wicked as ourselves. I shall confine myself to being a

peaceable savage in the solitude I have selected hard by your own

country, where you ought to be.”

Rousseau had, indeed, thought of returning and settling at Geneva. In

1754, during a trip he made thither, he renounced the Catholic faith

which he had embraced at sixteen under the influence of Madame de Warens,

without any more conviction than he carried with him in his fresh

abjuration. “Ashamed,” says he, “at being excluded from my rights of

citizenship by the profession of a cult other than that of my fathers, I

resolved to resume the latter openly. I considered that the Gospel was

the same for all Christians, and that, as the fundamental difference of

dogma arose from meddling with explanations of what could not be

understood, it appertained in every country to the sovereigns alone to

fix both the cult and the unintelligible dogma, and that, consequently,

it was the duty of the citizen to accept the dogma and follow the cult

prescribed by law.” Strange eccentricity of the human mind! The

shackles of civilization are oppressive to Rousseau, and yet he would

impose the yoke of the state upon consciences. The natural man does not

reflect, and does not discuss his religion; whilst seeking to recover the

obliterated ideal of nature, the philosopher halts on the road at the

principles of Louis XIV. touching religious liberties.

[Illustration: Rousseau and Madame D’Epinay----338]

Madame d’Epinay had offered Rousseau a retreat in her little house, the

Hermitage. There it was that he began the tale of _La Nouvelle Heloise,_

which was finished at Marshal de Montmorency’s, when the susceptible and

cranky temper of the philosopher had justified the malevolent predictions

of Grimm. The latter had but lately said to Madame d’Epinay “I see in

Rousseau nothing but pride concealed everywhere about him; you will do

him a very sorry service in giving him a home at the Hermitage, but you

will do yourself a still more sorry one. Solitude will complete the

blackening of his imagination; he will fancy all his friends unjust,

ungrateful, and you first of all, if you once refuse to be at his beck

and call; he will accuse you of having bothered him to live under your

roof and of having prevented him from yielding to the wishes of his

country. I already see the germ of these accusations in the turn of the

letters you have shown me.”

Rousseau quarrelled with Madame d’Epinay, and shortly afterwards with all

the philosophical circle: Grimm, Helvetius, D’Holbach, Diderot; his

quarrels with the last were already of old date, they had made some

noise. “Good God!” said the Duke of Castries in astonishment, “wherever

I go I hear of nothing but this Rousseau and this Diderot! Did anybody

ever? Fellows who are nobody, fellows who have no house, who lodge on a

third floor! Positively, one can’t stand that sort of thing!” The

rupture was at last complete, it extended to Grimm as well as to Diderot.

“Nobody can put himself in my place,” wrote Rousseau, “and nobody will

see that I am a being apart, who has not the character, the maxims, the

resources of the rest of them, and who must not be judged by their

rules.”

Rousseau was right; he was a being apart; and the philosophers could not

forgive him for his independence. His merits as well as his defects

annoyed them equally: his “Lettre contre les Spectacles” had exasperated

Voltaire, the stage at Deuces as in danger. “It is against that Jean

Jacques of yours that I am most enraged,” he writes in his correspondence

with D’Alembert: “he has written several letters against the scandal to

deacons of the Church of Geneva, to my ironmonger, to my cobbler. This

arch-maniac, who might have been something if he had left himself in your

hands, has some notion of standing aloof: he writes against theatricals

after having done a bad play; he writes against France which is a mother

to him; he picks up four or five rotten old hoops off Diogenes’ tub and

gets inside them to bay; he cuts his friends; he writes to me myself the

most impertinent letter that ever fanatic scrawled. He writes to me in

so many words, ‘You have corrupted Geneva in requital of the asylum she

gave you;’ as if I cared to soften the manners of Geneva, as if I wanted

an asylum, as if I had taken any in that city of Socinian preachers, as

if I were under any obligation to that city!”

More moderate and more equitable than Voltaire, D’Alembert felt the

danger of discord amongst the philosophical party. In vain he wrote to

the irritated poet: “I come to Jean Jacques, not Jean Jacques Lefranc de

Pompignan, who thinks he is somebody, but to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who

thinks be is a cynic, and who is only inconsistent and ridiculous. I

grant that he has written you an impertinent letter; I grant that you and

your friends have reason to complain of that; in spite of all this,

however, I do not approve of your declaring openly against him, as you

are doing, and, thereanent, I need only quote to you your own words:

‘What will become of the little flock, if it is divided and scattered?’

We do not find that Plato, or Aristotle, or Sophocles, or Euripides,

wrote against Diogenes, although Diogenes said something insulting to

them all. Jean Jacques is a sick man with a good deal of wit, and one

who only has wit when he has fever; he must neither be cured nor have his

feelings hurt.” Voltaire replied with haughty temper to these wise

counsels, and the philosophers remained forever embroiled with Rousseau.

Isolated henceforth by the good as well as by the evil tendencies of his

nature, Jean Jacques stood alone against the philosophical circle which

he had dropped, as well as against the Protestant or Catholic clergy

whose creeds he often offended. He had just published _Le Contrat

Social,_ “The Gospel,”; says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, “of the theory as to

the sovereignty of the state representing the sovereignty of the people.”

The governing powers of the time had some presentiment of its danger;

they had vaguely comprehended what weapons might be sought therein by

revolutionary instincts and interests; their anxiety and their anger as

yet brooded silently; the director of publications (_de la librairie_),

M. de Malesherbes, was one of the friends and almost one of the disciples

of Rousseau whom he shielded; he himself corrected the proofs of the

_Emile_ which Rousseau had just finished. The book had barely begun to

appear, when, on the 8th of June, 1762, Rousseau was awakened by a

message from la Marchale de Luxembourg: the Parliament had ordered

_Emile_ to be burned, and its author arrested. Rousseau took flight,

reckoning upon finding refuge at Geneva. The influence of the French

government pursued him thither; the Grand Council condemned _Emile_.

One single copy had arrived at Geneva it was this which was burned by the

hand of the common hangman, nine days after the, burning at Paris in the

Place de Greve. “The Contrat Social has received its whipping on the

back of Emile,” was the saying at Geneva. “At the instigation of M. de

Voltaire they have avenged upon me the cause of God,” Jean Jacques

declared.

Rousseau rashly put his name to his book; Voltaire was more prudent.

One day, having been imprisoned for some verses which were not his, he

had taken the resolution to impudently repudiate the paternity of his own

works. “You must never publish anything under your own name,” he wrote

to Helvetius; “La Pucelle was none of my doing, of course. Master Joly

de Fleury will make a fine thing of his requisition; I shall tell him

that he is a calumniator, that La Pucelle is his own doing, which he

wants to put down to me out of spite.”

Geneva refused asylum to the proscribed philosopher; he was warned of

hostile intentions on the part of the magnific signiors of Berne.

Neuchatel and the King of Prussia’s protection alone were left; thither

he went for refuge. Received with open arms by the governor, my lord

Marshal (Keith), he wrote thence to the premier syndic Favre a letter

abdicating his rights of burghership and citizenship in the town of

Geneva. “I have neglected nothing,” he said, “to gain the love of my

compatriots; nobody could have had worse success. I desire to indulge

them even in their hate; the last sacrifice remaining for me to make is

that of a name which was dear to me.”

Some excitement, nevertheless, prevailed at Geneva; Rousseau had

partisans there. The success of _Emile_ had been immense at Paris, and

was destined to exerciso a serious influence upon the education of a

whole generation. It is good,” wrote Voltaire, “that the brethren should

know that yesterday six hundred persons came, for the third time, to

protest on behalf of Jean Jacques against the Council of Geneva, which

had dared to condemn the Vicaire savoyard.” The Genevese magistrates

thought it worth while to defend their acts; the _Lettres ecrites de la

Campagne,_ published to that end, were the work of the attorney-general

Robert Tronchin. Rousseau replied to them in the _Lettres de la

Montagne,_ with a glowing eloquence having a spice of irony. He hurled

his missiles at Voltaire, whom, with weakly exaggeration, he accused of

being the author of all his misfortunes. “Those gentlemen of the Grand

Council,” he said, “see M. de Voltaire so often, how is it that he did

not inspire them with a little of that tolerance which he is incessantly

preaching, and of which he sometimes has need? If they had consulted him

a little on this matter, it appears to me that he might have addressed

them pretty nearly thus: ‘Gentlemen, it is not the arguers who do harm;

philosophy can gang its ain gait without risk;’ the people either do not

hear it at all or let it babble on, and pay it back all the disdain it

feels for them. I do not argue myself, but others argue, and what harm

comes of it? We have arranged that my great influence in the court and

my pretended omnipotence should serve you as a pretext for allowing a

free, peaceful course to the sportive jests of my advanced years; that is

a good thing, but do not, for all that, burn graver writings, for that

would be too shocking. I have so often preached tolerance! It must not

be always required of others and never displayed towards them. This poor

creature believes in God, let us pass over that; he will not make a sect.

He is a bore; all arguers are. If all bores of books were to be burned,

the whole country would have to be made into one great fireplace. Come,

come, let us leave those to argue who leave us to joke; let us burn

neither people nor books and remain at peace, that is my advice. That,

in my opinion, is what might have been said, only in better style, by M.

Voltaire, and it would not have been, as it seems to me, the worst advice

he could have given.”

My lord Marshal had left Neuchatel; Rousseau no longer felt safe there;

he made up his mind to settle in the Island of St. Pierre, in the middle

of the Lake of Bienne. Before long an order from the Bernese senate

obliged, him to quit it “within four and twenty hours, and with a

prohibition against ever returning, under the heaviest penalties.”

Rousseau went through Paris and took refuge in England, whither he was

invited by the friendliness of the historian Hume. There it was that he

began writing his _Confessions_.

Already the reason of the unhappy philosopher, clouded as it had

sometimes been by the violence of his emotions, was beginning to be

shaken at the foundations; he believed himself to be the victim of an

immense conspiracy, at the head of which was his friend Hume. The latter

flew into a rage; he wrote to Baron d’Holbach: “My dear Baron, Rousseau

is a scoundrel.” Rousseau was by this time mad.

He returned to France. The Prince of Conti, faithful to his

philosophical affections, quartered him at the castle of Trye, near

Gisors. Thence he returned to Paris, still persecuted, he said, by

invisible enemies. Retiring, finally, to the pavilion of Ermenonville,

which had been offered to him by M. de Girardin, he died there at the age

of sixty-six, sinking even more beneath imaginary woes than under the

real sorrows and bitter deceptions of his life. The disproportion

between his intellect and his character, between the boundless pride and

the impassioned weakness of his spirit, had little by little estranged

his friends and worn out the admiration of his contemporaries. By his

writings Rousseau acted more powerfully upon posterity than upon his own

times: his personality had ceased to do his genius injustice.

He belonged moreover and by anticipation to a new era; from the restless

working of his mind, as well as from his moral and political tendencies,

he was no longer of the eighteenth century properly speaking, though the

majority of the philosophers outlived him; his work was not their work,

their world was never his. He had attempted a noble reaction, but one

which was fundamentally and in reality impossible. The impress of his

early education had never been thoroughly effaced: he believed in God, he

had been nurtured upon the Gospel in childhood, he admired the morality

and the life of Jesus Christ; but he stopped at the boundaries of

adoration and submission. “The spirit of Jean Jacques Rousseau inhabits

the moral world, but not that other which is above,” M. Joubert has said

in his _Pensees_. The weapons were insufficient and the champion was too

feeble for the contest; the spirit of the moral world was vanquished as a

foregone conclusion. Against the systematic infidelity which was more

and more creeping over the eighteenth century, the Christian faith alone,

with all its forces, could fight and triumph. But the Christian faith

was obscured and enfeebled, it clung to the vessel’s rigging instead of

defending its powerful hull; the flood was rising meanwhile, and the

dikes were breaking one after, another. The religious belief of the

Savoyard vicar, imperfect and inconsistent, such as it is set forth in

_Emile,_ and that sincere love of nature which was recovered by Rousseau

in his solitude, remained powerless to guide the soul and regulate life.

“What the eighteenth century lacked [M. Guizot, _Melanges biographiques_

(Madame la Comtesse de Rumford)], “what there was of superficiality in

its ideas and of decay in its morals, of senselessness in its pretensions

and of futility in its creative power, has been strikingly revealed to us

by experience; we have learned it to our cost. We know, we feel the evil

bequeathed to us by that memorable epoch. It preached doubt, egotism,

materialism. It laid for some time an impure and blasting hand upon

noble and beautiful phases of human life. But if the eighteenth century

had done only that, if such had been merely its chief characteristic, can

any one suppose that it would have carried in its wake so many and such

important matters, that it would have so moved the world? It was far

superior to all its sceptics, to all its cynics. What do I say?

Superior? Nay, it was essentially opposed to them and continually gave

them the lie. Despite the weakness of its morals, the frivolity of its

forms, the mere dry bones of such and such of its doctrines, despite its

critical and destructive tendency, it was an ardent and a sincere

century, a century of faith and disinterestedness. It had faith in the

truth, for it claimed the right thereof to reign in this world. It had

faith in humanity, for it recognized the right thereof to perfect itself

and would have had that right exercised without obstruction. It erred,

it lost itself amid this twofold confidence; it attempted what was far

beyond its right and power; it misjudged the moral nature of man and the

conditions of the social state. Its ideas as well as its works

contracted the blemish of its views. But, granted so much, the original

idea, dominant in the eighteenth century, the belief that man, truth, and

society are made for one another, worthy of one another, and called upon

to form a union, this correct and salutary belief rises up and overtops

all its history. That belief it was the first to proclaim and would fain

have realized. Hence its power and its popularity over the whole face of

the earth. Hence also, to descend from great things to small, and from

the destiny of man to that of the drawing-room, hence the seductiveness

of that epoch and the charm it scattered over social, life. Never before

were seen all the conditions, all the classes that form the flower of a

great people, however diverse they might have been in their history and

still were in their interests, thus forgetting their past, their

personality, in order to draw near to one another, to unite in a

communion of the sweetest manners, and solely occupied in pleasing one

another, in rejoicing and hoping together during fifty years which were

to end in the most terrible conflicts between them.”

At the death of King Louis XV., in 1774, the easy-mannered joyance, the

peaceful and brilliant charm of fashionable and philosophical society

were reaching their end: the time of stern realities was approaching with

long strides.