specimen, of the style, both of the writer and of the man Jean Jacques
Rousseau. The writer's style they must have felt even through the medium
of imperfect anonymous translation, to be a charming one. If they have
felt the style of the man to be contrasted, as squalor is contrasted
with splendor, that they must not suppose to be a contrast of which Jean
Jacques himself, the confessor, was in the least displacently conscious.
Far from it. In the latter part of his "Confessions," a part that deals
with the author as one already now acknowledged a power in the world of
letters, though with all his chief works still to write, Rousseau speaks
thus of himself (he was considering at the time the ways and means
available to him of obtaining a livelihood):
I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my genius,
and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in my heart,
and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of thinking....
It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for a livelihood.
Is not that finely said? And one need not doubt that it was said with
perfect sincerity. For our own part, paradoxical though it be to declare
it, we are wholly willing to insist that Rousseau did think on a lofty
plane. The trouble with him was, not that he thus thought with his
heart, rather than with his head--which, however, he did--but that he
thought with his heart alone, and not at all with his conscience and his
will. In a word, his thought was sentiment rather than thought. He was a
sentimentalist instead of a thinker. One illustration of the divorce
that he decreed for himself, or rather--for we have used too positive a
form of expression--that he allowed to subsist, between sentiment and
conduct, will suffice. It was presently to be his fortune, as author of
a tract on education (the "Emile"), to change the habit of a nation in
the matter of the nurture for babes. French mothers of the higher social
class in Rousseau's time almost universally gave up their infants to be
nursed at alien bosoms. Rousseau so eloquently denounced the
unnaturalness of this, that from his time it became the fashion for
French mothers to suckle their children themselves. Meantime, the
preacher himself of this beautiful humanity, living in unwedded union
with a woman (not Madame de Warens, but a woman of the laboring class,
found after Madame de Warens was abandoned), sent his illegitimate
children, against the mother's remonstrance, one after another, to the
number of five, to be brought up unknown at the hospital for foundlings!
He tells the story himself in his "Confessions." This course on his own
part he subsequently laments with many tears and many self-upbraidings.
But these, alas, he intermingles with self-justifications, nearly as
many--so that at last it is hard to say whether the balance of his
judgment inclines for or against himself in the matter. A paradox of
inconsistencies and self-contradictions, this man--a problem in human
character, of which the supposition of partial insanity in him, long
working subtly in the blood, seems the only solution. The occupation
finally adopted by Rousseau for obtaining subsistence was the copying of
music. It extorts from one a measure of involuntary respect for
Rousseau, to see patiently toiling at this slavish work, to earn its
owner bread, the same pen which had lately set all Europe in ferment
with the "Emile" and "The Social Contract."
From Rousseau's "Confessions," we have not room to purvey further. It is
a melancholy book--written under monomaniac suspicion on the part of the
author that he was the object of a wide-spread conspiracy against his
reputation, his peace of mind, and even his life. The poor, shattered,
self-consumed sensualist and sentimentalist paid dear in the agonies of
his closing years for the indulgences of an unregulated life. The
tender-hearted, really affectionate, and loyal friend came at length to
live in a world of his own imagination, full of treachery to himself.
David Hume, the Scotchman, tried to befriend him; but the monomaniac was
incapable of being befriended. Nothing could be more pitiful than were
the decline and the extinction that occurred of so much brilliant
genius, and so much lovable character. It is even doubtful whether
Rousseau did not at last take his own life. The voice of accusation is
silenced in the presence of an earthly retribution so dreadful. One may
not indeed approve, but one may at least be free to pity, more than he
blames, in judging Rousseau.
Accompanying, and in some sort complementing the "Confessions," are
often published several detached pieces called "Reveries," or "Walks."
These are very peculiar compositions, and very characteristic of the
author. They are dreamy meditations or reveries, sad, even somber, in
spirit, but "beautiful exceedingly," in form of expression. Such works
as the "Rene" of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French
literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau's "Walks."
This author's books in general are now little read. They worked their
work and ceased. But there are in some of them passages that continue to
live. Of these, perhaps quite the most famous is the "Savoyard Curate's
Confession of Faith," a document of some length, incorporated into the
"Emile." This, taken as a whole, is the most seductively eloquent
argument against Christianity that perhaps ever was written. It
contains, however, concessions to the sublime elevation of Scripture and
to the unique virtue and majesty of Jesus, which are often quoted, and
which will bear quoting here. The Savoyard Curate is represented
speaking to a young friend as follows:--
I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures
strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its
influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with all
their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared
with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and
sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible that the
Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be himself a mere
man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an enthusiast or ambitious
sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in his manners! What an
affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What sublimity in his maxims!
What profound wisdom in his discourses! What presence of mind, what
subtilty, what truth, in his replies! How great the command over his
passions! Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live
and die, without weakness and without ostentation? When Plato
described his imaginary good man loaded with all the shame of guilt,
yet meriting the highest reward of virtue, he described exactly the
character of Jesus Christ: the resemblance was so striking that all
the Fathers perceived it.
What prepossession, what blindness, must it be to compare the son of
Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion there
is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy, easily
supported his character to the last; and if his death, however easy,
had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted whether Socrates,
with all his wisdom, was anything more than a vain sophist. He
invented, it is said, the theory of morals. Others, however, had
before put them in practice; he had only to say what they had done,
and reduce their examples to precepts. Aristides had been _just_
before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas gave up his life for his
country before Socrates declared patriotism to be a duty; the Spartans
were a sober people before Socrates recommended sobriety; before he
had even defined virtue Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where
could Jesus learn, among his compatriots, that pure and sublime
morality of which he only has given us both precept and example? The
greatest wisdom was made known amidst the most bigoted fanaticism, and
the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest
people on the earth. The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing
with his friends, appears the most agreeable that could be wished for;
that of Jesus, expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused,
insulted, cursed by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be
feared. Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the
weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of
excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if
the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death
of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic history a
mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks of fiction; on
the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody presumes to doubt,
is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ. Such a supposition,
in fact, only shifts the difficulty without removing it; it is more
inconceivable that a number of persons should agree to write such a
history, than that one only should furnish the subject of it. The
Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the
morality contained in the Gospel, the marks of whose truth are so
striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing
character than the hero.
So far in eloquent ascription of incomparable excellence to the Bible
and to the Founder of Christianity. But then immediately Rousseau's
Curate proceeds:--
And yet, with all this, the same Gospel abounds with incredible
relations, with circumstances repugnant to reason, and which it is
impossible for a man of sense either to conceive or admit.
The compliment to Christianity almost convinces you--until suddenly you
are apprised that the author of the compliment was not convinced
himself!
Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the preface to his "Confessions," appealed
from the judgment of men to the judgment of God. This judgment it was
his habit, to the end of his days, thanks to the effect of his early
Genevan education, always to think of as certainly impending. Let us
adjourn our final sentence upon him until we hear that Omniscient award.
In pendant to what we have said and have shown of Rousseau, some notice
may here properly be given of another celebrated writer, or writer
perhaps we should say of a celebrated book, who stands to Rousseau in
the relation of sequel and echo. We mean ST. PIERRE, the author of "Paul
and Virginia."
This is a very famous little classic. It is a kind of prose idyll, a
pastoral of lowly and simple life, a life lived by the subjects of it in
the spirit of return to the conditions of nature, such as Jean Jacques
Rousseau idealized the conditions of nature to be. The author's own
personal experience furnished him the hint, the ground, and the
material, of his bucolic romance. It had happened to St. Pierre, in the
course of a somewhat fruitless and vagabond life, to be sent in an
official capacity to Mauritius, or the Isle of France. In this remote
island, as in a kind of Utopia, the scene of the story of "Paul and
Virginia" is laid.
St. Pierre was already thirty-one years old when he took his distant
voyage; he stayed three years in Mauritius, and then he waited sixteen
years, becoming therefore, fifty years old, before he made use of what
he had experienced in publishing his romance of "Paul and Virginia." He
had meantime seen a great deal of Rousseau during the latter's declining
years, and from him had learned that art of writing by virtue of which
he was destined to constitute the second of succession in a literary
line to be continued after him in Chateaubriand and Lamartine, in Madame
de Stael and George Sand.
It is the historical importance thus attaching to St. Pierre's name,
even more perhaps than it is the merit and the fame of his books, or of
his book--for of his books other than "Paul and Virginia," we need not
trouble our readers with even the titles--that warrants us in listing
him, as we do, among the select "immortals" of French literature. St.
Pierre's distinguishing note was the supposed return to nature and to
natural unsophisticated sentiment accomplished in his writings.
But the return, with him, was by no means completely satisfactory. There
was always something unreal in St. Pierre's passion for nature; and the
feeling with which he wrote seems, to us of to-day, to have been neither
very deep nor very sincere. Still, all was accepted and was highly
effective in its time; Europe was flooded with tears in reading "Paul
and Virginia," much as afterward it was flooded with tears in reading an
equally notable, but far less wholesome book, that prose masterpiece of
the youthful Goethe, "The Sorrows of Werther." The "Corinne" of Madame
de Stael afterward, later the "Jocelyn" of Lamartine, later again the
passionate earlier novels of George Sand, served to their respective
fresh generations of readers a somewhat similar office, that of
stimulating and of expressing the vague longing and aspiration of youth.
The plot of "Paul and Virginia" is simplicity itself. Two young French
widows--widows we may euphemistically call the women both, though the
mother of Paul had never been married--meet, strangers to each other, in
Mauritius, and their children, Paul and Virginia respectively, grow up
from babyhood together, as if brother and sister, in a state of nature
such as never was anywhere in the world outside of a romance, until at
last, Virginia undertaking a vain voyage to France to bring round a rich
alienated aunt of her mother's, perishes by shipwreck on her return; in
prompt sequel of which calamity, all the remaining personages of the
tale, down to the very dog, naturally and sentimentally, one after
another, die. The story is represented as told to a traveler in the Isle
of France by a sympathetic old man who had been an eye-witness of all.
Two extracts, one from the beginning, and one from the end, of the
romance, will sufficiently indicate its quality.
Paul and Virginia being now about twelve years of age, Virginia goes,
accompanied by Paul, to restore to the master a runaway female slave to
whom he had been cruel, and to intercede with him on the sufferer's
behalf. She has accomplished her purpose, and the two have set out to
return. They lose their way. This is the state of the case at the point
at which our first extract begins, as follows:
"God will have pity on us," replied Virginia; "he listens to the voice
of the little birds which ask him for food." She had scarcely uttered
these words when they heard the noise of water falling from a
neighboring rock. They hastened to it, and, after having quenched
their thirst at this spring clearer than crystal, they gathered and
ate a few cresses which grew on its banks. As they were looking around
them to find some more substantial nourishment, Virginia descried a
young palm-tree among the trees of the wood. The cabbage which is
found at the top of this tree, inclosed within its leaves, is an
excellent food; but although its stalk is not thicker than a man's leg
it was more than sixty feet high. The wood of this tree is indeed
composed only of a collection of filaments; but its internal bark is
so hard that it blunts the sharpest hatchets, and Paul had not even a
knife. He thought of setting fire to this palm-tree at its foot.
Another difficulty--he had no steel to strike fire with, and besides,
in this island so covered with rocks, I do not believe it would be
possible to find a single flint. Necessity inspires industry, and
often the most useful inventions have come from men reduced to
extremity. Paul resolved to light a fire after the manner of the
negroes. With the sharp end of a stone he made a small hole in the
branch of a tree that was very dry, which he placed under his feet; he
then with the edge of the stone made a point to another branch
equally dry, but of a different kind of wood. He next placed the piece
of pointed wood in the small hole of the branch which was under his
feet, and turning it rapidly round in his hands, as one turns a mill
to froth chocolate, he in a few moments perceived smoke and sparks
arise from the point of contact. He collected together dry herbs and
other branches of trees, and set fire to the foot of the palm-tree,
which soon afterward fell with a violent noise. The fire served him
also in stripping the cabbage of the long woody and prickly leaves
which enclosed it. Virginia and he ate a part of this cabbage raw, and
the rest cooked in the ashes, and they found them equally agreeable to
the taste.... After their meal ... an hour of walking brought them to
the banks of a large river, which barred their way.... The noise of
its waters terrified Virginia; she dared not try to ford it. Paul
accordingly took Virginia on his back, and passed thus laden over the
slippery rocks of the river, regardless of the turbulence of the
waters. "Fear not," said he to her; "I feel myself very strong with
you." ... When Paul had passed over, and was on the bank, he wished to
continue his journey laden with his sister, flattering himself that he
could ascend in that manner the mountain of the Three Peaks, which he
saw before him at the distance of half a league; but his strength soon
began to fail, and he was obliged to set her on the ground and to
throw himself down beside her.... Virginia plucked from an old tree,
which hung over the banks of the river, some long leaves of hart's
tongue which hung down from its trunk. She made of these a kind of
buskins with which she bound her feet, which the stones of the way had
caused to bleed, for in her hurry to do good she had forgotten to put
on her shoes. Feeling herself relieved by the freshness of the leaves
she broke off a branch of bamboo and began to walk, leaning with one
hand on the cane and with the other on her brother.
In this manner they walked on slowly through the woods; but the height
of the trees and the thickness of their foliage made them soon lose
sight of the mountain of the Three Peaks, by which they had directed
themselves, and even of the sun, which was already setting. After some
time they quitted, without perceiving it, the beaten path which they
had till then followed, and found themselves in a labyrinth of trees,
shrubs, and rocks, which had no farther outlet. Paul made Virginia sit
down, and ran almost distracted in search of a path out of this thick
wood; but he wearied himself in vain. He climbed to the top of a lofty
tree, to discover at least the mountain of the Three Peaks, but he
could perceive nothing around him but tops of trees, some of which
were illuminated by the last rays of the setting sun. Already the
shadow of the mountains covered the forests in the valleys; the wind
was going down, as is usual at sunset; a profound silence reigned in
these solitudes, and no noise was heard but the cry of the stags who
came to seek repose in these unfrequented recesses. Paul, in the hope
that some hunter might hear him, cried out as loud as he could:
"Come! Come! and help Virginia!" But only the echoes of the forest
answered to his voice and repeated several times successively:
"Virginia! Virginia!"
Paul now descended from the tree, overcome with fatigue and
disappointment; ... he began to weep. Virginia said to him: "Do not
weep, my dear, unless you wish to overwhelm me with grief.... O! I
have been very imprudent." And she began to shed tears. Nevertheless,
she said to Paul, "Let us pray to God, my brother, and he will have
pity on us." Scarcely had they finished their prayer when they heard
the barking of a dog.... "I believe," said Virginia, "it is Fidele,
our house-dog."
Of course all turned out happily. A rescue party had come in search of
the estray, and they were soon brought with rejoicing home.
Such as the foregoing passage will have served to show is the charm of
unfallen simplicity and innocence represented by St. Pierre to have been
cast, forming as if an Eden in the wilderness, about these happy
children of nature on whom society had had no chance to exercise its
baneful power. True, they suffered, though in Eden. True, others sinned,
as well as suffered, about them, for there was slavery and there was
cruelty; but that was in the wilderness outside; in Eden they did not
sin. It was all Rousseauism in experiment and reduced to absurdity. By
Rousseauism we indicate the doctrinal dream of that dreamer; by no means
the actual waking practice of the man that dreamed.
It may seem a strange marring of the idea of a sufficiency in nature,
let nature but be unhindered by society, to renew the world in the
purity of paradise, that the end of the idyll of Paul and Virginia
should have come about through an effort on the part of Virginia's
mother, made quite in the spirit of the present artificial order of
things, to secure a bequest from an aunt of hers in France, whom the
niece had offended by marrying as she did; but so it was. Virginia
undertakes the necessary voyage, and, as we have already said, perishes
by shipwreck on the coast of Mauritius in returning. The heart-rending
agony of the final catastrophe we have no space to exhibit. The author
seems to hint that Virginia might have been saved, could she have
brought herself to assent to the desire of an entreating honest
stalwart seaman that she should disembarrass her person of her clothes.
It is almost the step taken from the sublime to the ridiculous for the
author to make his heroine perish thus as a martyr to her own invincible
modesty.
The bereaved mother has visions of her departed daughter's accomplished
felicity in the world unseen. These she describes to the neighbor, who,
a venerable old man, tells the traveler the tale. Now for the final
extract from the text of the book:
"O my worthy neighbor!" said she [Paul's mother] to me [the old man
who tells the whole story]: "I thought last night I beheld Virginia
clothed in white, in the midst of groves and delicious gardens. She
said to me: 'I enjoy the most desirable happiness.' Then she
approached Paul with a smiling air and bore him away with her. As I
endeavored to retain my son I felt that I myself was quitting the
earth, and that I was following him with inexpressible pleasure. I
then wished to bid my friend farewell, when I perceived her following
us with Mary and Domingo. [These are negro slaves of the two mothers.]
But what seems still more strange is, that Madame de la Tour
[Virginia's mother] had the same night a dream attended with similar
circumstances."
I replied to her, "My friend, I believe that nothing happens in the
world without the permission of God. Dreams do sometimes foretell the
truth."
Madame de la Tour related to me that the same night she had also had a
dream entirely similar. I had never observed in these two ladies the
least propensity to superstition; I was therefore struck with the
resemblance of their dreams, and I had no doubt but that they would be
soon realized. This opinion, that truth sometimes presents itself to
us during our sleep, is generally spread among all the nations of the
earth. The most illustrious men of antiquity have entertained it,
amongst others, Alexander, Caesar, the Scipios, the two Catos, and
Brutus, who were by no means inclined to superstition. The Old and the
New Testament supply us with a variety of examples of dreams that have
been realized....
But whether this opinion concerning dreams be true or not, those of my
unfortunate friends were speedily realized. Paul died two months after
the death of his dear Virginia, whose name he incessantly pronounced.
Margaret [Paul's mother] beheld her end approach a week after that of
her son with a joy which virtue only can feel. She bade Madame de la
Tour the most tender farewell, "in the hope," she said, "of a sweet
and eternal reunion. Death is the greatest of all blessings," added
she; "we ought to desire it. If life be a punishment we ought to wish
for its end; if it be a trial, we should wish it short."
The governor took care of Domingo and Mary, who were no longer able to
labor, and who did not long survive their mistresses. As for poor
Fidele, he pined away about the same time as he lost his master.
I conducted Madame de la Tour to my house. She bore up under these
heavy afflictions with an incredible fortitude of mind. She had
comforted Paul and Margaret up to their last moments, as if she had
only their misfortune to support. When she no longer beheld them, she
spoke of them every day as of beloved friends who were in the
neighborhood. She survived them, however, but a month....