the great prophet of sentimentalism, is that exaltation of the
immediate sensation at the expense of hard realities which is the mark
of all sentimentalism. He can enjoy intensely, but cannot restrain
a single impulse with a view to future enjoyment. He can sympathise
keenly with immediate sufferings, but shrinks from admitting that
indulgence may be the worst cruelty. His only rule of life is to give
free play to his impulses. All discipline is tyranny. Education is
to consist in stimulating the emotions at the expense of the reason.
And, therefore, facts in general are on the whole objectionable
and inconvenient things. Your practical man is merely a wheel in
a gigantic machinery, for ever grinding out barren results and
never leaving himself time for the pure happiness of feeling. He
would abolish space and time to make one dreamer happy. Dreamland
is the only true reality. There facts conform to feeling instead of
crushing it out of existence. There we can be optimists; see virtue
rewarded, simplicity honoured, genius appreciated, and the substance
of happiness pursued instead of its idle shadows—external show,
and hard-won triumphs that pall in the fruition. Nothing is more
characteristic of this tendency than the passage in which he describes
the composition of the 'Nouvelle Héloïse.' The impossibility, he
says, of grasping realities cast him into the land of chimeras:
seeing nothing in existence which was worthy of his delirium, he
nourished it in an ideal world which his creative imagination soon
peopled with beings after his own heart. He was in love—not with an
external object, but with love itself; he formed out of his passionate
longings those beautiful, unreal, highstrung beings, whose ecstasies
and agonies kept fine ladies sitting up all night in forgetfulness
of balls and assemblies, and which now, alas! have faded, as unreal
things are apt to fade, and become rather wearisome and slightly
absurd. Facts revenge themselves upon the man who denies their
existence; and poor Rousseau did not escape the inevitable Nemesis.
His follies and his crimes sprang from this fatal habit of sacrificing
everything to the immediate impulse; his reveries seduced him into the
region of downright illusions; and his optimism—by a curious, but not
uncommon inversion—became the strongest proof of his actual misery.
He found realities so painful that he swore that they must be dreams;
as dreams were so sweet, that they must be the true realities. 'All
men are born free,' as he says in his famous sentence; 'and men are
everywhere in chains.' That is the true Rousseau logic. Everything
must be right in some transcendental sense, because in an actual sense
everything is wrong. We say that men take a cheerful or a doleful
view of the universe according to the state of their own livers; but
sometimes the reverse seems to hold good. It requires, it would seem,
unusual buoyancy of spirits to endure the thought that the world is
a scene of misery; and the belief in its happiness is sometimes the
attempt of the miserable man to reconcile himself to his lot. Anyhow,
Rousseau had learnt this dangerous lesson. He suffered from a morbid
appetite for happiness; his intense longing for enjoyment stimulated
an effeminate shrinking from the possibility of the crumpled
rose-leaf. He identified himself with the man who left his mistress
in order to write letters to her. The absent—in this sense—have no
blemishes. And this is true of the past as of the distant. Foresight,
he says, always spoilt his enjoyment; the future is pure loss to him;
for to look forward is always to anticipate possibilities of evil. He
lives entirely, as he says elsewhere, in the present; but in a present
which includes the enjoyment of the past pleasures. 'Not heaven itself
upon the past has power,' and we can nowhere be absolutely safe except
in brooding over the moments of happiness which have survived by
reason of their pleasantness.
This is part of the charm of the 'Confessions.' Finding no pure
enjoyment in the present, he says, he returned by fits to the serene
days of his youth. He chewed the cud of past delight, and lived again
his life at the Charmettes. Hence sprang the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,'
placed amongst the scenery of his early youth and constantly reviving
real experiences. He apologises for giving us the details of his
youth; but the apology is clearly needless. He gives what he delights
in. His youthful memories grow brighter as the latter become effaced;
the least facts of that time please him, because they are of that
time. He remembers the place, the people, the time; the servant moving
in the room, the swallow entering the window, the fly settling on
his hand whilst he writes his lesson; he trembles with pleasure as
he recalls the minutest details—and we feel the reflection of his
delight. Indeed, this is one secret of most autobiography. There is
something touching in those introductory fragments which are so common
in autobiographies. The old man, we see, has been enticed to write
a book by the charm of the first chapter. He tells us with eager
interest the story of his early days; he remembers the village school
and his initiation into the alphabet, or calls up the sacred vision of
the mother whose figure still stands out amidst the mists of memory;
but as he reaches the point where the light of common day blends with
the romantic colouring of childhood, his hand fails, and he sums up
the remainder of his history, if he has the courage to continue, in a
few barren facts and dates. The phenomenon recurs again and again and
leaves us to infer, according to our tastes, that infancy is the time
of real happiness, or that the appearance of happiness always belongs
to the distant. Rousseau tries to explain it in his own case. He long
remained a child, he says; objects always made less impression upon
him than their memories; and as all his ideas were images, the first
engraved were the deepest, and the later rather blended with them than
effaced them.
To explain Rousseau's power over his generation, and even his
strongest interest for us, we should require to add other
considerations. Rousseau's dreams, in fact, were not those of the
mystic or of the poetical philosopher. If he cared, in one sense,
very little for facts, it was because the past and the present
overpowered the future. He could not cut himself apart from the
world, as some meditative minds have done who live by choice in the
region of abstract speculation. His temperament was too sensuous, his
sympathies with those around him too keen, to permit him to find a
permanent refuge in the gorgeous but unsubstantial world of poetic
imagery. His senses bound him fast to realities as upon a rock on
which he was always struggling impatiently and spasmodically. It
is in the vicissitudes of this struggle that the interest of his
personal story consists. For it leads him to find that solution
which has been preached in one form or other by so many moralists
in all ages, and which had a special meaning for the society of his
day. Ancient philosophers said that the great secret of life is in
placing your happiness in things which depend upon ourselves, and
not in things which are at the mercy of circumstance. Happiness,
says a modern prophet, is to be found by lessening your denominator,
not by increasing your numerator; by restricting your wants, not
by multiplying your enjoyments. The great illusion of life is the
childish fancy that you can get the moon by crying for it, instead
of learning that the moon is beyond your reach. You must learn the
great secret of renunciation. Rousseau's version of this doctrine
was given with an intensity of conviction which moved the hearts of
his contemporaries; and the 'Confessions' are a kind of continuous
comment upon the text. Are we, it may be asked, to take the ascetic
view—to admit that happiness is impossible in this life, and to
seek future blessedness by mortifying the affections which seek
for present gratification? No, Rousseau would say; happiness is
everything; to get as much enjoyment out of life as we possibly
can is the one conceivable end of a human being. Nobody could be a
more thorough hedonist. Then, should we seek for happiness in active
life devoted to some absorbing ambition, or rather in courting those
lofty emotions or those intellectual tastes which are the fruit of
a thorough cultivation of our faculties? No, again; for active life
means weariness and disappointment, and exchange of substance for
vain shadows; and the more men are cultivated, the more sophisticated
and unreal become their lives, and the less their real powers of
enjoyment. Then, should we be Epicureans of the vulgar type, and give
ourselves up to the indulgence of animal appetites? That, again,
though Rousseau sometimes falls into perilous approximation to that
error in practice, is as far as possible from his better mind.
Nobody, in fact—and it is the redeeming quality in his life—could set
a higher value upon the simple affections. A life of calm domestic
tranquillity—the idyllic life of unsophisticated country villages,
of regular labour, and innocent recreation—is the ideal which he set
before his generation with all the fervour of his eloquence. That
he made a terrible mess of it himself is undeniable; it is equally
undeniable that the praises of domestic life come with a very bad
grace from the man who sanctioned the worst practices of a corrupt
society by abandoning his own children, though he tries to represent
even that amazing delinquency as a corollary from his principles; and
it must also be admitted that his Arcadia has too often the taint of
sentimental unreality. But the doctrine takes a worthier form, not
only in those passages of his speculative writings which manifest his
deep sympathy with the poor and simple crushed under an effete system
of social tyranny, but in the many passages of the 'Confessions'
where he recalls his brief approximations to a realisation of his
dreams. He might claim to have found 'love in huts where poor men
lie;' and to have been qualified by experience for recognising the
surpassing beauty of simple happiness. That is the secret charm of
those eloquent passages to which the jaded fine ladies and gentlemen
of his days turned again and again with an enthusiastic sympathy
which it would be grossly unjust to set down as mere affectation.
Such, for example, is his description of the delicious strolls by his
beloved Lake of Geneva, where every scene was redolent of youthful
associations; where he seemed to be almost within reach of that sweet
tranquil life which was yet for him but a vanishing mirage; and where
alone he declares that he might obtain perfect happiness, if he had
but a faithful friend, a loving wife, a cow, and a little boat. He
smiles sadly enough at the simplicity which has frequently led him to
that region in search of this imaginary bliss, and at the contrast
between the dream and the reality. Even in Paris he could grasp a like
phantom. Here with his half-idiotic Theresa (who had, however, the
heart of an angel), he found perfect happiness for a time. He pictures
himself sitting at the open window, the sill forming his table, for
a frugal supper; looking down upon the street from the fourth story,
and enjoying a crust of bread, a few cherries, a bit of cheese, and
a bottle of wine. Who, he exclaims, can feel the happiness of these
feasts? Friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul, how
sweet is the seasoning you bring! And, of course, he soon passes to
a confession proving that his paradise had its snake. But the better
sentiment, though clogged and degraded by ignoble passions, almost
reconciles us to the man. Rousseau represents the strange combination
of a kind of sensual appetite for pure and simple pleasures. On
one side he reminds us of Keats, by his intense appreciation of
sensuous beauty; and, on the other, of Cowper, by his love of such
simple pleasures as our English poet enjoyed when sitting at Mrs.
Unwin's tea-urn. It is a strange, almost a contradictory mixture;
but Rousseau's life is a struggle between antagonisms; and until you
admit that human nature is in some sense a contradictory compound,
and can take delight in the queer results which grow out of them, you
are hardly qualified to be a student of autobiography. Your proper
biographer glides over these difficulties, or tries to find some
reconciliation. The man who tells his own story reveals them because
he is unconscious of their mixture.
Rousseau, I said, was the type of all autobiographers; and for the
obvious reason, that no man ever turned himself inside out for the
inspection of posterity so completely, and that even when he was
unconscious of the exposure. Even his affectations are instructive.
But when we think of some other autobiographers we may be inclined to
retract. There are, when one comes to reflect, more ways of killing a
cat than choking her with cream: and there are more ways of revealing
your character than by this deliberate introspection, this brooding
over past feelings, and laying bare every impulse of your nature. So,
if Rousseau is to be called the typical autobiographer, it is perhaps
in virtue simply of those strange contradictions which give piquancy
to his 'Confessions,' and to those of many other men to whom the great
problem of existence presented itself in different terms. So, for
example, it would be difficult to imagine a more complete antithesis
to Rousseau than we find in Benvenuto Cellini, whose autobiography
is almost equally interesting in a totally different way. He is a
man in whose company the very conception of sentimentalism seems to
be an absurdity; who is so incapable of reflective brooding that
he is just as proud of his worst crimes as of his greatest artistic
achievements; who tells with equal glee how he struck his dagger into
the nape of his enemy's neck, and made a gold button of unparalleled
beauty for the Pope's cope; who is so full of energy that his life
seems to be one desperate struggle, and who is most at home in the
periods of most overpowering excitement, whether firing guns at the
siege of Rome, or pitching all his plate into the furnace to help the
fusing of the statue of Perseus; so full of intense vitality that when
we read his memoirs it becomes difficult to realise the fact that
all these throbbing passions and ambitions are still for ever, and
that we peaceable readers are alive; at once a man of high artistic
genius, and yet such a braggart and a liar as to surpass Bobadil
or the proverbial Ferdinand Mendez Pinto; a standing refutation of
that pleasant moral commonplace which tries to associate genius with
modesty; a queer compound of reckless audacity and defiance of all
constituted authority with abject superstition; a man, in short,
who makes us wonder, as we read, whether the world has advanced
or gone back; whether we have gained or lost by substituting the
douce, respectable jeweller, and the vulgar blackguard of modern
London, for this magnificent goldsmith bravo of the Florence of the
sixteenth century. The only writer in our own literature who, at a
long interval, recalls this brilliant apparition, is Lord Herbert
of Cherbury. In him, too, we find the singular combination of the
fire-eating duellist with the man of high intellectual power. Horace
Walpole, who procured the publication of his autobiography, says
that the reader will be astonished to find that the 'history of Don
Quixote was the life of Plato.' Herbert, it is true, was not quite a
Plato nor a Quixote. His thirst for chivalrous adventures may indeed
remind us of the Don or of Cellini; yet somehow, though he wandered
through Europe in true knight-errant spirit, always on the look-out
for occasions of proving that courage for which, so he declares, he
had as high a reputation as any man of his time, and was as irritable,
punctilious, and given to dare-devil deeds as the most precise of
cavaliers could desire, he seems to have had singular ill-luck.
Somehow, the authorities always interpose to prevent his fighting.
The vanity of Lord Herbert is of a more reflective and priggish type
than that of Cellini. Instead of taking himself for granted, with
the superlative audacity of his predecessor, he contemplates his
own perfections complacently, and draws his own portrait for the
benefit of his descendants, as an embodiment of the perfect gentleman
accomplished in all knightly arts, and full to overflowing of the
most becoming sentiments. He has, in fact, a rather obtrusive moral
sense, whereas an entire absence of any encumbrance of that kind is
one of Cellini's peculiarities; or, at least, the Italian assumes
that whatever he does must be right, whereas the Englishman is simply
convinced that he does whatever is right. Herbert parades himself
as a model with an amazing consciousness of his own perfection, and
sets forth his various natural endowments—such, for example, as the
delicious odour which exudes from his body and perfumes even his
clothes—as a kind of providential testimony to his merits. When a
voice from heaven orders him to publish his great book 'De Veritate,'
we feel that no human _imprimatur_ would be adequate to so important
an occasion. And, in spite of his swelling self-satisfaction, we must
admit that he has real claims upon our respect; in fact, Herbert,
though not so great a poet as his brother George, at least wrote one
poem which has a curious interest as anticipating, not only the metre,
but, in some degree, the sentiment, of 'In Memoriam;' and, though
less conspicuous as a philosopher than Bacon or Hobbes, wrote books
in which it is possible to trace some remarkable analogies to the
teaching of Kant. When Walpole and Gray first tried to read the life
they could not get on for 'laughing and screaming,' and Walpole was
rather vexed when people took Herbert a little too seriously, and were
inclined to admire him as a worthy successor to Sir Philip Sidney.
Yet Herbert is but one of many proofs (perhaps Walpole himself was
another) that all coxcombs are not fools.
We have, it is plain, got a long way from Rousseau. We are almost,
it may be said, at the very opposite pole of character. If vanity be
a determining force in both cases, it is in the two cases controlled
and directed by opposite passions. Combined with a morbid tendency to
retrospection, a weak self-pity, an effeminate shrinking from pain, it
reveals itself as a perverse pleasure in baring to public gaze those
viler impulses which most men shrink from revealing to themselves. In
the masterful, overbearing, active character, it appears in the more
natural shape of straightforward ostentation, though it sometimes
leads to the same end; for it displays follies and vices, not because
they are shameful, but for the opposite reason that it sees nothing in
them to be ashamed of. Whether it should be called by the same name,
as manifested in the one or in the other combination, is a question
for the unlucky psychologist who has already a sufficient burden
of insoluble problems. And we might find new puzzles in abundance
for the same person by tracing the manifold transformations of the
same Protean quality. We might skip from the Quixote-Plato—rather,
one might say, the Bobadil-Kant—to another biographer, like him
in little but the power of amusing, the vivacious Colley Cibber.
Cibber's vanity is of a simpler type. It seems to be an unaccountable
freak of nature that Cibber should have been the descendant of a
Schleswig-Holstein father and an English mother. We could have sworn
that he was a born Frenchman. His vanity is that which we generally
attribute to the race whom we used to call our 'lively neighbours.'
In other words, instead of being priggish or sulky like the English,
it is closely allied to good sense, good humour, and simplicity. It
implies unfeigned self-complacency quite unalloyed by self-deception.
It supplied the excellent Colley with an armour of proof which made
him absolutely impervious even to the most vicious stings of Pope's
poisonous satire. He took all ridicule with the most imperturbable
good temper, because he fully recognised, and was perfectly reconciled
to the fact that he was ridiculous. He writes his life, as he tells
us with admirable serenity, because he was vain, and liked to talk
about himself. What can the critic say more? 'Expose me? Why, dear
sir, does not every man that writes expose himself? Can you make
me more ridiculous than nature has made me?' To hurt such a man by
correct portraiture was impossible; and when Pope tried to injure
him by giving him the absurdly incorrect name of Dunce, the satirist
missed his mark too palpably to hurt anybody but himself. And so,
though the laughing-stock of all the wits, assailed by Pope and
Fielding, the lucky Cibber, lapped in his invulnerable vanity, went
gaily through his eighty-six years of life, as brisk and buoyant to
the end as when he had only to go upon the stage with his natural
manners to be the ideal representative of the Foppingtons and Easys
of his own comedy. If the autobiography be slightly deficient on the
side of sentiment, we may console ourselves by admitting that some of
the descriptions of the actors of the time would not disgrace Charles
Lamb. Would we find another variety of innocent and excessive vanity?
Take up the memoirs—unfortunately fragmentary—of one whose long life
ran side by side with Cibber's for some eighty-two years, though
in oddly different surroundings,—Swift's 'wicked Will Whiston,' so
called because so transparently guileless and well-meaning that even
bigots could only smile at his absurdities. In reading him we fancy
that we must be studying a new version of the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'
In truth, however, that good Dr. Primrose was one of Whiston's
disciples, and got into trouble, as we may remember, by advocating a
crotchet learnt from his predecessor a little too warmly. The master,
however, suffered longer than the disciple, and shows just the same
innocuous vanity in regard to his own supposed discoveries, and the
same simple-minded wonder that others should fail to be converted,
or should refuse to sacrifice preferment to crotchets about the date
of the Apostolic Constitutions. Whiston's self-complacency reappears
with a difference in Baxter's ponderous autobiography. The copious
outpourings of the good man help us to understand the report, which he
can happily deny, that his multitudinous publications had ruined his
bookseller; but it is full of interesting display of character, and
nowhere more than in the profound conviction that if he had been able
to apply a few more sermons he would have converted Cromwell and his
troopers from their rebellious purposes, and the innocent enthusiasm
with which he hurls his elaborate syllogisms at the heads of Charles
II.'s bishops, believing, poor man, in all good faith that the policy
of the Restoration government was to be determined by scholastic
argumentation.
If we seek for an excellent contrast we may go to those admirable
representatives of the worldly bishop of the now extinct type, Newton
or Watson. There is something quite touching in Watson's complaints
of an unappreciative world. He had been made a professor of chemistry
without having studied the very elements of the science, a professor
of divinity without having studied theology before, or taking the
trouble to study it afterwards. He was appointed to a bishopric
because he was a sound Whig, and passed his life in a delightful
country town on the banks of Windermere without ever bothering himself
to reside in his Welsh diocese. But the stoppage of his preferment
at this point is for him a conclusive proof that true Christian
principles could not meet with their reward in this world. How else
account for this scandalous neglect of one who, in addition to all
his other merits, had taken great trouble to plant trees, and to make
an honourable provision for his children—as well as giving them a
sound education? It is a natural corollary that the man whose memoirs
are thus a continuous grumble over the absence of preferment should
specially pride himself on his thorough self-respect. He belongs, he
says, to the oaks, not to the willows. Whenever he asks for a vacant
bishopric, he explains that it is only in deference to the wishes
of his friends. For himself he asks for nothing better than a life
of retirement, though the king and his ministers will be eternally
disgraced for having left him to enjoy that blessing. The finest
satirist, Fielding or Thackeray, might have been proud of portraying
this ingenious and yet transparent self-deception; of unravelling the
artifice by which worldliness and preferment hunting are so wrapped
in blustering self-assertion as to appear—to the actor himself—as
dignified independence of spirit.