YOUTH.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of old
French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city of
refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither to
establish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before the
first visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mother
city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mother
city of the old. Three generations in a direct line separated Jean
Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the
first emigrant.[1] Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family
dates from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have
exerted the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction
with the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens
of the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians
that out of three thousand families who composed the population of
Geneva towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly
fifty who before the Reformation had acquired the position of
burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus planted a colony
of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with a new doctrine and
newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of character and
manners. People declared they could recognise in the men of Geneva
neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss
gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in government,
a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries, which marked
them with a stamp unlike that of any other community.[2] Towards the
close of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and rudeness
was sensibly modified under the influence of the great neighbouring
monarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the rapid
decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use. The movement had not gone
far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners and
spirit of his country their special quality and individual note.
The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful,
and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden
name, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most
touching and pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit
beginning of a life preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. "I cost my
mother her life," he wrote, "and my birth was the first of my woes."[3]
Destiny thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousness
awakens to the forces that have been set to work in our personality,
launching us into the universe with country, forefathers, and physical
predispositions, all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was born
dying, and though he survived this first crisis by the affectionate care
of one of his father's sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and
disordered.
Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having
unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some
wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately
cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid
sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of
his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a
reversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was an
underlying tendency of this kind. "Under a phlegmatic and cool air,"
wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the inflammatory
effects of the drama, "the Genevese hide an ardent and sensitive
character, that is more easily moved than controlled."[4] And some of
the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be
taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac
Rousseau's restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious
sense of personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not
common in Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the
prosperity of her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in
modified form to the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly
affected by it. Before he was seven years old he had learnt from his
father to indulge a passion for the reading of romances. The child and
the man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to one
another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in imaginary situations,
until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a sense of the
conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry out in confusion
that he was the more childish of the two.
The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the
young brain. "I had no idea of real things," he said, "though all the
sentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me by
conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking
me one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess,
but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper,
and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither
reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus
these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that
follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening
that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the
objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity.
In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques
and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of
history and biography. The romances had been the possession of the
mother; the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her
father. Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History
of the Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau
than the admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father during
the hours of work, and read over again to himself during all hours,
those stories of free and indomitable souls which are so proper to
kindle the glow of generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of
his life; he read him in the late days when he had almost ceased to
read, and he always declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to
whom he had never gone without profit."[6] "I think I see my father now,"
he wrote when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, "living by the
work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I
see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the
tools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receiving
instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little
fruit."[7] This did little to implant the needed impressions of the
actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessive
degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the
imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the
strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the
age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the
personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him
with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to
heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of
Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a
hot chafing-dish.[8]
Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away
into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen
for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he
commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years
were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the
side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying
curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy
about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented
interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. The
impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to
the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair.
The constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he
cherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, which
places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which most
of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentariness
of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I have no
pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion and
diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still
often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his
aunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes.[10]
This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in
the course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that
he saw unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had
kinsfolk in the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather
than give way, in circumstances which compromised his personal honour
and the free justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and
his son was sent to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722),
under the care of a minister, "there to learn along with Latin all the
medley of sorry stuff with which, under the name of education, they
accompany Latin."[11] Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of his
intellectual instruction here, but he marks his two years' sojourn under
the roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in that fateful
acquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more important than
literary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the tree of nascent
experience, men usually keep strict silence. Rousseau is the only person
that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole world as a part of his own
biography the ignoble circumstances of the birth of sensuality in
boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while he told of the
playmate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, which
waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find
the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean grip
is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fume
of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive a
part, that most of the spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it is
here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the firmament of the
spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high matters of will
and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind, and hurry to
the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innate
healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legend
of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, prevents
us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer
forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous,
if it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it
needs hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from
calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this
lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the
region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided
and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept
crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all
this. When the great art of life has been more systematically conceived
in the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold,
ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining those
pathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously studied, as
distinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worth
registering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to be
silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do
best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are
allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves
of temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience,
unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of
things, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to
which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul.[12]
The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the
knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and
existent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken the
teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not
even the most terrible punishment could wring from him an untrue
confession of guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence
of falsehood, which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no
credit, but in a furious and invincible resentment against the violent
pressure that was unjustly put upon him. "Picture a character, timid and
docile in ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its
passions; a child always governed by the voice of reason, always treated
with equity, gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of
injustice, and who for the first time experiences an injustice so
terrible, from the very people whom he most cherishes and respects! What
a confusion of ideas, what disorder of sentiments, what revolution in
heart, in brain, in every part of his moral and intellectual being!" He
had not learnt, any more than other children, either to put himself in
the place of his elders, or to consider the strength of the apparent
case against him. All that he felt was the rigour of a frightful
chastisement for an offence of which he was innocent. And the
association of ideas was permanent. "This first sentiment of violence
and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my soul, that all the
ideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me; and this
sentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has taken such
consistency, and become so disengaged from all personal interest, that
my heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful action, just
as much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read of the
cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of some
villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard such
wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed.... This
movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the profound
recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too fast
bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously."[13]
To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all
this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a
tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest impressions
may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which
remoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once
had. This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that
injustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the
imaginary world of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal
from the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another
overtakes all men. "Here," he says, "was the term of the serenity of my
childish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and
I feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my
infancy here comes to an end.... Even the country lost in our eyes that
charm of sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed
sombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its
beauties from our sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our
plants, our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the earth,
shouting for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown."
Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the
whole course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate
description by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of
a constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of
reaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many
unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come
into contact with the sharp tooth of outer circumstance. Indeed, a man
must be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally
obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and
cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a
repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the urgent
demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal
relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective
temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these
penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud and
collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims,
without taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of
self-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and
depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any
of these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or
oppression is the going out of a divine light.
Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three
years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning
something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he
showed special inclination.[14] It was a question whether he was to be
made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his
after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of
the three; "for I thought it a fine thing," he says, "to preach." The
uncle was a man of pleasure, and as often happens in such
circumstances, his love of pleasure had the effect of turning his wife
into a pietist. Their son was Rousseau's constant comrade. "Our
friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together,
the simplest amusements were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows
and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather,
in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative
spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed
by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an
Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and
composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an
elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe
energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in
the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. These
ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly
for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school
was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this
is an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails
to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life
should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of
irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek
dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.
And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier
schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
Genevese youth in after years. "In my time," he says admiringly,
"children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to
keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty,
combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;
they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned
home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you
will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their
country and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day
of our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out
children at thirty."[15]
Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own
words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life
unhappily did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable
balance of impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used
to spend the day at Pâquis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his
aunts, and who carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day I
was in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their
brightness pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and
I was moving them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth
cylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a
half-quarter turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two
longest fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear
the nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the
wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of
consternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought me to cease
my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I was
touched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the pond, where he
helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. He
entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I promised him that I would
not, and Ï kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew the
origin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and for
more than two months was unable to use my hand. But I persisted that a
large stone had fallen and crushed my fingers."[16]
The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of
sensibility in its concluding words. "I was playing at ball at Plain
Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over
the game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a
stroke so well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed
my brains out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation like
that of this poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had
killed me. He threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms,
while his tears poured down his cheeks, and he uttered shrill cries. I
returned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of
confused emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he
tried to stop the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our two
handkerchiefs were not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's; she
had a small garden hard by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of
me in this condition; she kept strength enough to dress my wound, and
after bathing it well, she applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy,
an excellent remedy much used in our country. Her tears and those of her
son, went to my very heart, so that I looked upon them for a long while
as my mother and my brother."[17]
If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and
easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women lie
floundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the
field of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the
discipline of this primitive goodness. For character in a state of
society is not a tree that grows into uprightness by the law of its own
strength, though an adorable instance here and there of rectitude and
moral loveliness that seem intuitive may sometimes tempt us into a
moment's belief in a contrary doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious
problem was never solved; there was no deliberate preparation of his
impulses, prepossessions, notions; no foresight on the part of elders,
and no gradual acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in the
fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid zone
of our relations with other people. It was one of the most elementary of
Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that it is their
education by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant capacity for
virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems never to
have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than the fact that he
himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed to follow
without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own temperament.
Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the experiment to
complete itself within these very rudimentary conditions.
Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a
religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was
possessed also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three
aunts were all in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at
Bossey, "although Churchman and preacher," was still a sincere believer
and nearly as good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so
hearty, so discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from being
wearied by the sermon, never came away without being touched inwardly
and stirred to make virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion
was rather more tiresome, because she made a business of it.[18] It
would be a distinct error to suppose that all this counted for nothing,
for let us remember that we are now engaged with the youth of the one
great religious writer of France in the eighteenth century. When after
many years Rousseau's character hardened, the influences which had
surrounded his boyhood came out in their full force and the historian of
opinion soon notices in his spirit and work a something which had no
counterpart in the spirit and work of men who had been trained in Jesuit
colleges. At the first outset, however, every trace of religious
sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was left unprotected
against the shocks of the world and the flesh.
At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, but
that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and
insufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all
countries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was
ignominiously dismissed by his master[19] for dulness and inaptitude;
his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He
was next apprenticed to an engraver,[20] a rough and violent man, who
seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction.
The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of
torpedo the whole being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure
sensations and among those ideas which are nearest to sensations. There
were no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau's universe. "The vilest
tastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my simple
amusements, without even leaving the least idea behind. I must, in spite
of the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate."
The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritable
sense, as the process, on its negative side, of counteracting the
inborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two
degrees, of the constitution in which the reflective part is weak. There
are the men who live on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certain
fulness of blood and active energy of muscle. There are others who do so
passively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The former by
their sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world where
reflection is a first condition, still go far. The latter succumb, and
as reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such a
world bring them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surrounded
with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery. Rousseau had none of this
energy which makes oppression bracing. For a time he sank.
It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into
exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life
led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are
despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He
told lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He
cunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of
using his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in
idle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult
moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain
ugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds
themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more
considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create
a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is
actually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice
brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness,
untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices.
The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering
kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain
sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which
Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the
web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to
full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the
education of home and family, and they presage definitely what is to
come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown for this short
space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn from their
fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a little
dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence
which is not oblivion.
After a time the character of Jean Jacques was absolutely broken down.
He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his
master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were
terrible to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an
overmastering physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to
an end. He was now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades
into sports for which he had little inclination, though he admits that
once engaged in them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond
the others. Such pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and
on two occasions Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His
master when he presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting
as we may imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a
second sin in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always
does. "Half a league from the town," says Rousseau, "I hear the retreat
sounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top
of my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beats
violently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and call
out with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpost
sentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched those
terrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable lot which
that moment was opening for me."[21]
In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon,
we underestimate the unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as
this in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this will
is inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to the
fulfilment of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this,
wrote the unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in the
bosom of my religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, a
mild and peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformity
of work which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I should
have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good
friend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my
condition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life
obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully
in the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have
been regretted as long as any memory of me was left."[22]
As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need
seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who
declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity,
and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of
aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most
respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out
of this or that kingdom, of which in truth their own composition
finally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a
mother's womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen,
which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the
eighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into
a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are some
commandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unable
to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them
so much grace that they are able to observe them.
If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day
and its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire
delight. The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of
romance were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their
realisation. He roamed for two or three days among the villages in the
neighbourhood of Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in the
cottages of friendly peasants. Before long his wanderings brought him to
the end of the territory of the little republic. Here he found himself
in the domain of Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the
traditional foes of the freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came
to the village of Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon
recalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feud
had come to take new forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale the
city walls, the descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenth
century were now intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the souls
of the descendants of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this time
a systematic struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and the
ministers of Geneva, the former using every effort to procure the
conversion of any Protestant on whom they could lay hands.[23] As it
happened, the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this
good work.[24] He made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of the
heresies of Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him
some dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the
nature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for
the entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much. "I was too
good a guest," writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, "to
be a good theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent,
was such a triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushed
to oppose so capital a host."[25] So it was agreed that he should be put
in a way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept
Rousseau's assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid
complaisance. He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices
to which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he
argues, "flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is
oftener a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a man
receives us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that we
give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for
good." He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like
the coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends,
without permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more
than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow some austere
reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his
friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all
dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to
believe; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man
to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his
worldly interests. All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain
of remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to
impress us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his
entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months back.
This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary element
of a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthy
consciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something,
though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading.
The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the
burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and
counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose
minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21,
1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage,
whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He
expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant
of days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a
person not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing
air, a fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the
letters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was
decided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to a
monastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the true
Church. At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faith
and the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem of
shelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elated
with vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades the
great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom he
had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which he
was about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in all
possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement which
hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemed
the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined
rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams,
bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade,
voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a
charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward
without knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval
as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life.
It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive
sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.
The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth
found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary
monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who
pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and
Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being
supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly
forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion
was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the
parties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into the
circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mischievous
zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow
and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them
was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought up
in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost
this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with
which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not
bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his
present destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the
holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit."
"The sophism which destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent
pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that
exaggerates our condemnation, "is that of most men, who complain of lack
of strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is only
through our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could be
always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous. But
inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on without
resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the
hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we
could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards
only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink
into the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But
in spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee
too weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to
avoid falling into it.'"[28] So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as
happens to the pious soul "too hot for certainties in this our life,"
to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible, but
simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter.[29] The boy
was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to good
use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the great
Reformation controversy which he had picked up at M. Lambercier's. He
was careful not to carry things too far, and exactly nine days after his
admission into the Hospice, he "abjured the errors of the sect."[30] Two
days after that he was publicly received into the kindly bosom of the
true Church with all solemnity, to the high edification of the devout of
Turin, who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributions
to the extent of twenty francs in small money.
With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of the
Catechumens thrust him out of their doors into the broad world. The
youth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself at
night sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege of
resting in the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, her
husband, her five or six children, and various other lodgers. This rough
awakening produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which,
beneath all fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy
with the homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a
carter, and was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent
Rousseau from recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch
readiness to befriend. He passed his days in wandering about the streets
of Turin, seeing the wonders of a capital, and expecting some adventure
that should raise him to unknown heights. He went regularly to mass,
watched the pomp of the court, and counted upon stirring a passion in
the breast of a princess. À more important circumstance was the effect
of the mass in awakening in his own breast his latent passion for music;
a passion so strong that the poorest instrument, if it were only in
tune, never failed to give him the liveliest pleasure. The king of
Sardinia was believed to have the best performers in Europe; less than
that was enough to quicken the musical susceptibility which is perhaps
an invariable element in the most completely sensuous natures.
When the end of the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, he
tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on
him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and
grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her
client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not
magical.[31] Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural
fury of an Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any
other cause than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.
The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of
princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey
or footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he
passed three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here
was marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful
discussion. When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured
ribbon was missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his
possession. They asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that it
had been given to him by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house.
In her presence and before the whole household he repeated his false
story, and clung to it with a bitter effrontery that we may well call
diabolic, remembering how the nervous terror of punishment and exposure
sinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, really
denotes in the young an excruciating physical struggle, often so keen
that the victim clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity
and cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined
sensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and at
this epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded his
apprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towards
degeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was the
slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness. "Never," he
says, in his account of this hateful action, "was wickedness further
from me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it
is contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was the
cause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blame
from myself on to the first object that presented itself. When I saw her
appear my heart was torn, but the presence of so many people was too
strong for my remorse. I feared punishment very little; I only feared
disgrace, but I feared that more than death, more than crime, more than
anything in the world. I would fain have buried myself in the depths of
the earth; invincible shame prevailed over all, shame alone caused my
effrontery, and the more criminal I became, the more intrepid was I made
by the fright of confessing it. I could see nothing but the horror of
being recognised and declared publicly to my face a thief, liar, and
traducer."[32] When he says that he feared punishment little, his
analysis of his mind is most likely wrong, for nothing is clearer than
that a dread of punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strong
feeling with him at this time. However that may have been, the same
over-excited imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led him
into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties. It led him
to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen Marion in
consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful thought
haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights he
thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime that
seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.[33]
Thus the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain
of his gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side of
his history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness.
Rousseau expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would
serve as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of
another soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. We
may, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible
consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but
were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful
spirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the
whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we
who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at
further length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy
who happened to grow up into a man of genius.[34]
After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or
cellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue,
Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese
person of quality. This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him
with a certain unusual considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt
the narrative. His son condescended to teach the youth Latin, and
Rousseau presumed to entertain a passion for one of the daughters of the
house, to whom he paid silent homage in the odd shape of attending to
her wants at table with special solicitude. In this situation he had, or
at least he supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimate
advancement. But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure of
stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his youth was the archtype of
the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited him,[35] and as almost
any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness of
imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of
Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects,
the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly
into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination again
went over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the
streams, began to absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious
satisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how
far more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age
and taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay
other than as it might please them. "It would be madness to sacrifice
such a piece of good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow,
difficult, doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one day
be realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of
true pleasure and freedom in youth."[36]
On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he
was dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their
homeward wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what
they should eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy
fountain; they hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by
this wonder they should receive all that they might need. Their hopes
were not fulfilled. The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse
them from their reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and
to their secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked,
vagrancy was thus undisguised. They made their way by some means or
other across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was
undisturbed by any thought of a future. "To understand my delirium at
this moment," Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker
parts of his history than fits of vagrancy, "it is necessary to know to
what a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest
things, and with what force it plunges into the imagination of the
object that attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque,
the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea,
and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it."[37] It
was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all
through his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant
sensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an
ardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of
firm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous and
diseased love of self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen
interest for the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of
dreams that were made to look like sanity by the close and specious
connection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisses
happened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:--this was the
type of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards the autumn
of 1729, reached Annecy, penniless and ragged, throwing himself once
more on the charity of the patroness who had given him shelter eighteen
months before. Few figures in the world at that time were less likely to
conciliate the favour or excite the interest of an observer, who had not
studied the hidden convolutions of human character deeply enough to know
that a boy of eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet
have it in him to say things one day which may help to plunge a world
into conflagration.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Here is the line:--
Didier Rousseau. | Jean | ----------------------- | | David. Noah. | |
Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean François. | | | -------------- | |
| JEAN JACQUES. Jean. Theodore.
(_Musset-Pathay_, ii. 283.)
[2] Picot's _Hist. de Genève_, iii. 114.
[3] _Conf._, i. 7.
[4] _Lettre à D'Alembert_, p. 187. Also _Nouv. Hél._, VI. v. 239.
[5] _Conf._, i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 356.
[6] _Rêveries_, iv. p. 189. "My master and counsellor, Plutarch," he
says, when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. _Corr._, i.
265.
[7] Dedication of the _Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité_, p. 201.
(June, 1754.)
[8] _Conf._, i. 1.
[9] _Ib_, i. 12.
[10] The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to
her (Madame Gonceru)--one in 1754 (_Corr._, i. 204), another as late
as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (_Oeuvr. et Corr. Inéd._, 392).
[11] _Conf._, i. 17-32.
[12] See also _Conf._, i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, _n._ 2.
[13] _Conf._, i. 27-31.
[14] _Conf._, i. 38-47.
[15] _Lettre à D'Alembert_(1758), 178, 179.
[16] _Rêveries_, iv. 211, 212.
[17] _Conf._ 212, 213.
[18] _Conf._, ii. 102, 103.
[19] M. Masseron.
[20] M. Ducommun.
[21] _Conf._, i. 69.
[22] _Conf._, i. 72.
[23] J. Gaberel's _Histoire de l'Église de Genève_ (Geneva, 1853-62),
vol. iii. p. 285.
[24] There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to
the effect that the Sieur de Pontverre "is attracting many young men
from this town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought
to be warned." (Gaberel, iii. 224.)
[25] _Conf._, ii. 76.
[26] _Conf._, ii. 77.
[27] _Conf._, ii. 90-97.
[28] _Conf._, ii. 107
[29] See _Émile_, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a
Calvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without
resource, "changed his religion to get bread."
[30] In the _Confessions_ (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the
period a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism
(Gaberel's _Hist. de l'Église de Genève_, iii. 224), which has been
recently published, shows that this is untrue: "Jean Jacques Rousseau,
de Genève (Calviniste), entré à l'hospice à l'âge de 16 ans, le 12
avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du même
mois lui fut administré le saint baptême, ayant pour parrain le sieur
André Ferrero et pour marraine Françoise Christine Rora (ou Rovea)."
A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up "for two
months," but this is not true even on his own showing.
[31] Madame Basile. _Conf._, ii. 121-135.
[32] _Conf._ ii. ad finem.
[33] _Conf._, ii. 144.
[34] Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7)
makes the object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no
evidence in the matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself.
[35] Bacle, by name.
[36] _Conf._, iii. 168.
[37] _Conf._, iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situation
is given in _Émile_, Bk. iv. 125.