PARIS.
I.
By what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a summer life
among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled orchards, turn
into panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato and grim Brutus's
civic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century France--and France
was amiable in spite of the atrocities of White Penitents at Toulouse,
and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and women who dealt in
_lettres-de-cachet_ at Versailles--was revolted by the name of the cruel
patriot who slew his son for the honour of discipline.[201] How came
Rousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to the
height of these unlovely rigours?
The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had been
bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of
law and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had
been accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment
with ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In Paris the
idea of a God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral
conceptions, or else it was fatally entangled with the worst
superstition and not seldom with the vilest cruelties. The idea of
freedom was unknown, and the idea of law was benumbed by abuses and
exceptions. The idea of country was enfeebled in some and displaced in
others by a growing passion for the captivating something styled
citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could have ended his days among
the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never have
come back to him. For it depends on circumstance, which of the chances
that slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused with
us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest of
the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact that
his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their most
violent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not a
Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his native
city. He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live
in France: he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote
his first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of
the Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all.
There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva
has a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that
against the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this
Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism
of the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The
diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At
the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by
the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving
momentous issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was
after all no more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who made
bold to reply, "Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that
perfumes all Europe."[202] We have to remember that it was at all events
as a grain of musk ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It happened
in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but however
bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood, and
Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may perhaps
conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant spectacle
and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous, whose
institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been
inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than
what he had picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedæmon, to give him a turn
for Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy
modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain
than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
circumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to
freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of
him on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever
he exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative
energy, "Never," he says, "did I see the walls of that happy city, I
never went into it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due
to excess of tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image of
freedom elevated my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle
manners, touched me even to tears."[203] His spirit never ceased to
haunt city and lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed
acknowledgment in the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the
republic of Geneva.[204] It was there it had its root. The honour in
which industry was held in Geneva, the democratic phrases that
constituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of the
long battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of its
manners, the simplicity of its pleasures,--all these things awoke in his
memory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More than
that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his
earliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital idea
that there are sacred things and objects of reverence among men. And
hence there came to him, though with many stains and much misdirection,
the most priceless excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.
There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of
reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament,
though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the
second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The
objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally
so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is
as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama
of his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or
illusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the true
opposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analysts
and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning. That
energetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yet
is incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and ear,
of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive absorption
that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance of this
profound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of the
kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in the
presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compass
of words.
The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration
and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had
nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in
contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that
counted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary
curiousness the master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the
panurgic Diderot. There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who
used their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like
D'Holbach. There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating
atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the
weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of
them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by
its generous power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and
philosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt
against their whole system of thought in all its principles. The dissent
between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed
out into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him
first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the
minor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished
from his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should
uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they might
lean without examination and without mistrust: his life in Paris was
thrown among people who lived in the midst of open questions, and
revelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in the
heart and so made things easy for the practical conscience. He sought
tranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and a
theme for endless argument and debate: he found friends who knew no
higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy over
dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutors
in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature,
about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have
done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would make
a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down to the
level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take care
only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all comers.
The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact,
gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of
men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to
Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest
courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the
serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism
as a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The
perfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles the
worse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to
overthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines.
Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world
around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the
sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The
play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant
demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of
soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently,
meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own
sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary
form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We
may be sure that as the two sides of his character--his notions of
serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort--both went in the
same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired
him towards society did not lessen with increased communication, but
naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy.
Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in
1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which
the good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen
one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the
relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated
with his children. We have heard too the new words with which during
these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax
hot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance
on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was
bearing him.
His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of
finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even
the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the
greatest of the farmers general.[205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay,
his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates
of the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by
all the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it
had also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is
always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community
possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their
highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the
Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, with
independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an
essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable
degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances
by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is
demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a
similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving
the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate
it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on
material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering
ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both
serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative
manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness
within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most
distasteful scene that any collected spirit can witness.
Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her
stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in
Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers,
and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know,
were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred
francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the
first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the
second he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting.
His comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it
brought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some
five and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, "the
interlude, which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as
much money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of
meditation and three years of composition."[206] Before the arrival of
this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the
post of cashier in that important department, and Rousseau attended for
some weeks to receive the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy
as usual, and the complexities of accounts were as little congenial to
him as notarial complexities had been three and twenty years previously.
It is, however, one of the characteristics of times of national break-up
not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at
the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as
liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief going on
a short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the
moment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the
watchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted
Rousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him to
be the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of very
painful illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six months
he would be in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of
his temper, and the train of reflections which it would be sure to set
aflame, are to be foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing
with the irksome. Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the little
fragment of days left to him, to the bondage of an office for which he
felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile the austere principles which he
had just adopted in his denunciation of sciences and arts, and his
panegyric on the simplicity of the natural life, with such duties as he
had to perform? And how preach disinterestedness and frugality from amid
the cashboxes of a receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in
independence and poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to
bring all the forces of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of
opinion, and to carry out courageously whatever seemed best to himself,
without suffering the judgment of others to interpose the slightest
embarrassment or hindrance.[207]
With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his
life was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because such
projects harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His design
mastered and took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his
living by copying music, as that was conformable to his taste, within
his capacity, and compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron
did as the world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose the
stoic's way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad.[208] Talk like this
had no effect on a man whom self-indulgence led into a path that others
would only have been forced into by self-denial. Let it be said,
however, that this is a form of self-indulgence of which society is
never likely to see an excess, and meanwhile we may continue to pay it
some respect as assuredly leaning to virtue's side. Rousseau's many
lapses from grace perhaps deserve a certain gentleness of treatment,
after the time when with deliberation and collected effort he set
himself to the hard task of fitting his private life to his public
principles. Anything that heightens the self-respect of the race is good
for us to behold, and it is a permanent source of comfort to all who
thirst after reality in teachers, whether their teaching happens to be
our own or not, to find that the prophet of social equality was not a
fine gentleman, nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the silly
skirts of fashion.
Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made
him rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult
as the application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this
greater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men
value the money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary
reform in truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing
peruke was substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and
white stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular
thought that he would never again need to know the time. One sacrifice
remained to be made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had
been a large stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular
affection, for both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal
cleanliness, as he had for corporeal wholesomeness. He was seasonably
delivered from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without. One
Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerable
quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be the
brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the treasure,
leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of coarser
stuffs.[209]
We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the
beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion
which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary
power which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. "It
takes," wrote Diderot, "right above the clouds; never was such a
success."[210] We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental
sincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him of
his power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and
disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon
himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed
independence. Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world was
worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satirist
does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, but
from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity
of life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy us. "When my
destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society," he wrote in his last
meditation on the course of his own life, "I found nothing there to
give a moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed
me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might have
been within my reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the
disquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt
even amid gleams of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed
myself to be seeking, I should still not have found the happiness for
which my heart was greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing
its object. Thus everything served to detach my affections from society,
even before the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to
it. I reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune,
between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil
tendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without
despising them, but often without much clear knowledge what they
were."[211]
A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is
in strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active
type. The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness
of the commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadily
composed to oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an
art of moral counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim
and emotion like distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the
philosophers with whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was
something foreign to them and outside of their own lives. They studied
human nature for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the
sake of self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not to
enlighten themselves within. When they published a book, its contents
only interested them to the extent of making the world accept it,
without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or false,
provided only that it was not refuted. "For my own part, when I desired
to learn, it was to know things myself, and not at all to teach others.
I always believed that before instructing others it was proper to begin
by knowing enough for one's self; and of all the studies that I have
tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there is hardly one that
I should not have followed equally if I had been alone, and shut up in a
desert island for the rest of my days."[212]
When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the
society which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little
outrageous. But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the
first eminence in the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exile
from the society of Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau
did, and he spoke more bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke
bitterly of it in prose.[213] It was, as has been so often said, a
society dominated by women, from the king's mistress who helped to ruin
France, down to the financier's wife who gave suppers to flashy men of
letters. The eighteenth century salon has been described as having three
stages; the salon of 1730, still retaining some of the stately
domesticity, elegance, dignity of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780,
grave, cold, dry, given to dissertation; and between the two, the salon
of 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality,
glittering wastefulness.[214] Though this division of time must not be
pressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in
literature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of social
unreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the same date
marks the highest point of feminine activity and power.
The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much
light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into
manners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the
word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters,
conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and
warmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of the marriage law
would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must
surely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any one
virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably
letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears,
if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing
very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching,
and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man,
and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts,
their lives remain worth having.
It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time
occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, "It is your
lover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in God; to
one's husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover one
must reserve for one's self some door of escape, and devotional scruples
cut everything short."[215] Or here: "I do not distrust anybody, for
that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no
trouble in this."[216] Or again in the word thrown to a man vaunting the
probity of some one: "What! can a man of intelligence like you accept
the prejudice of _meum_ and _tuum_?"[217] Such speech, however, was
probably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, as
who should go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, without
anything more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peaked
toes. "She was absolutely charming," said one of a new-comer; "she did
not utter one single word that was not a paradox."[218] This was the
passing taste. Human nature is able to keep itself wholesome in
fundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as wise as it
is charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make large
allowances for mere costume and assumed character.
In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is
exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is
most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an
observant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native
folly of men and women--and if his observation be conducted in a
catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in
others--when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements strikes
him as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the
universe. Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculous
result, the provisional and temporary sanity of things, and he
confronted society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked him
how it was that she had not seen him for an age. "Because when I wish to
see you, I wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in the
midst of your society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle of
mincing tripping coxcombs; they do not suit me." We cannot wonder that
on some occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested before a
company of friends, Madame d'Epinay prayed Rousseau to be of them, on
the ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously absurd
questions, which would give gaiety to the affair.[219] As it happened,
the father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he had
devoured two million francs, without either saying or doing a single
good thing. He rewarded the child's performance with the gift of a
superb suit of cherry-coloured velvet, extravagantly trimmed with costly
lace; the peasant from whose sweat and travail the money had been wrung,
went in heavy rags, and his children lived as the beasts of the field.
The poor youth was ill dealt with. "That is very fine," said rude
Duclos, "but remember that a fool in lace is still a fool." Rousseau, in
reply to the child's importunity, was still blunter: "Sir, I am no judge
of finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a little
while ago, but I wish so no longer."[220]
Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection in
later years, says that before the success of the first Discourse,
Rousseau concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness
that was timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance you
perceived mistrust and observant jealousy; there was no freedom in his
manner, and no one ever observed more cautiously the hateful precept to
live with your friends as though they were one day to be your
enemies.[221] Grimm's description is different and more trustworthy.
Until he began to affect singularity, he says, Rousseau had been gallant
and overflowing with artificial compliment, with manners that were
honeyed and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness. All at once he
put on the cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still in spite
of an abrupt and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaborate
fine speeches, and particularly in his relations with women.[222] Of his
abruptness, he tells a most displeasing tale. "One day Rousseau told us
with an air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the opera where he
had been seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, the
Duke of Zweibrücken had approached him with much politeness, saying,
'Will you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes,
if it be very short.' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him
laughingly, 'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there
resides in you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me
represent to you that, for all the severity of your principles, you
should hardly refuse to a sovereign prince the respect due to a
water-carrier, and that if you had met a word of good-will from a
water-carrier with an answer as rough and brutal as that, you would have
had to reproach yourself with a most unseasonable piece of
impertinence.'"[223]
There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at the
flippant tone about him carried him beyond the ordinary bounds of that
polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a
nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. "They mock
the other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of all."
ROUSSEAU: "I forgive them for their credulity, but not for condemning
those who are credulous in some other way." Some one said that in
matters of religion everybody was right, but that everybody should
remain in that in which he had been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: "Not
so, by God, if it is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm."
Then some one contended that religion always did some good, as a kind of
rein to the common people who had no other morality. All the rest cried
out at this in indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that
the common people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being
damned. The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess
calling out, "After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call
our body, so ring and let them bring us the joint." This done, the
servants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed with
such vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the lady who
tells us the story, "I feared they were bent on destroying all religion,
and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate to natural
religion." There was not a whit more sympathy for that than for the
rest. Rousseau declared himself _paullo infirmior_, and clung to the
morality of the gospel as the natural morality which in old times
constituted the whole and only creed. "But what is a God," cried one
impetuous disputant, "who gets angry and is appeased again?" Rousseau
began to murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set
in at his expense, to which came this: "If it is a piece of cowardice to
suffer ill to be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to
suffer ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part,
sirs, I believe in God." "I admit," said the atheistic champion, "that
it is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow to earth and
watching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this notion is, like
many others, very useful in some great heads, such as Trajan, Marcus
Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce heroism, but it is the
germ of all madnesses." ROUSSEAU: "Sirs, I leave the room if you say
another word more," and he was rising to fulfil his threat, when the
entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.[224]
His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up
a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned
daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys,
and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So
terrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame
d'Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of having
destroyed some valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was
much idle and cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her
friend, kept steadfast silence: she challenged his opinion. "What am I
to say?" he answered; "I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and
revolts me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their
injustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions,
that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a
cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim.
What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person
is to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like
him."[225]
Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little
pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand,
whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that "it
is not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent."
Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness.
Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the
letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times,
requiring immediate acknowledgment. "It is not just," at length wrote
the exasperated Rousseau, "that I should be tyrannised over for your
pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either passed
in suffering or it is lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ it
usefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from wasting it in
my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings of
the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master that
I flee from the idle folk of towns,--people as thoroughly wearied as
they are thoroughly wearisome,--who, because they do not know what to do
with their own time, think they have a right to waste that of
others."[226] The more abruptly he treated visitors, persecuting
dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more obstinate
they were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the hours
they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant
irritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for a
morning's work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly
that he could not well subsist on less.[227] He had one chance of a
pension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner.
When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the Muses
Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under
the patronage of M. de la Popelinière. Rameau apostrophised the unlucky
composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was
the work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely
ignorant of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore was
Rousseau's own, and the good was a plagiarism.[228] This repulse did not
daunt the hero. Five or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he
was lying awake in bed, he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude
after the manner of the Italian comic operas. In six days the Village
Soothsayer was sketched, and in three weeks virtually completed. Duclos
procured its rehearsal at the Opera, and after some debate it was
performed before the court at Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian stoic, its
author, went from Paris in a court coach, but his Roman tone deserted
him, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the great world, such
divinity doth hedge even a Lewis XV., and even in a soul of Genevan
temper. The piece was played with great success, and the composer was
informed that he would the next day have the honour of being presented
to the king, who would most probably mark his favour by the bestowal of
a pension.[229] Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He would fain have
greeted the king with some word that should show sensibility to the
royal graciousness, without compromising republican severity, "clothing
some great and useful truth in a fine and deserved compliment." This
moral difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable to
an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king and
courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death. What
would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should be
driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him,
instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious
panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror,
and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born
dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just
proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of
unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice,
which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse into
finer names.
When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke
to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could
never have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the
opinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large.
"He said that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right
to be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed
it to them not to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them
bread.... This was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our
quarrels that followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what
he insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I
ought not to do it."[230]
Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that
we easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to
fling up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry,
some trait is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him
unlike common men, reverent of truth and human dignity. There is a
slight anecdote of this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau.
The day after the representation of his piece, he happened to be taking
his breakfast in some public place. An officer entered, and, proceeding
to describe the performance of the previous day, told at great length
all that had happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, and
gave a circumstantial account of his conversation. In this story, which
was told with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word of
truth, as was clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke with
such intimacy sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes. The effect
on Rousseau was singular enough. "The man was of a certain age; he had
no coxcombical or swaggering air; his expression bespoke a man of merit,
and his cross of St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer. While he
was retailing his untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I
sat on thorns; I tried to think of some means of believing him to have
made a mistake in good faith. At length trembling lest some one should
recognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate without
saying a word; and stooping down as I passed in front of him, I went
out as fast as possible, while the people present discussed his tale. I
perceived in the street that I was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that
if any one had recognised me and called me by name before I got out,
they would have seen in me the shame and embarrassment of a culprit,
simply from a feeling of the pain the poor man would have had to suffer
if his lie had been discovered."[231] One who can feel thus vividly
humiliated by the meanness of another, assuredly has in himself the
wholesome salt of respect for the erectness of his fellows; he has the
rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity in one of them is as a
stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his own moral stature.
There is more deep love of humanity in this than in giving many alms,
and it was not the less deep for being the product of impulse and
sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites.
Another scene in a café is worth referring to, because it shows in the
same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the
fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In
1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he
had written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading
or playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience of
the ways of the world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and
touched by the indulgence of the public, in suffering without any sign
of impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself,
he could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre before
it was over, he entered the famous café de Procope at the other side of
the street, where he found critics as wearied as himself. Here he called
out, "The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; it
wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that very
Rousseau."[232] The relentless student of mental pathology is very
likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and not
on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be
noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of
vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth to
hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.
II.
In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to
revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally
favourable occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he
was growing increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he
moved. On his road he turned aside to visit her who had been more than
even his birth-place to him. He felt the shock known to all who cherish
a vision for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality.
He had not prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only
remember for others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face
that recollection at each new energy makes lovelier with an added
sweetness. "I saw her," he says, "but in what a state, O God, in what
debasement! Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so
brilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was
torn by the sight!" Alas, as has been said with a truth that daily
experience proves to those whom pity and self-knowledge have made most
indulgent, as to those whom pinched maxims have made most
rigorous,--_morality is the nature of things_.[233] We may have a humane
tenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment all
the time that the poor soul must die in a penal settlement. It is partly
a question of time; whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out of
reach of the penalties which the nature of things may appoint, but which
in their fiercest shape are mostly of the loitering kind. Death was
unkind to Madame de Warens, and the unhappy creature lived long enough
to find that morality does mean something after all; that the old hoary
world has not fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good thing,
out of avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence and
order in the relations of men and women as a good thing, out of
cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues is
ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, to
collectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal.
Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress
to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while
he and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had not
forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money
when he had it.[234] She was sunk in indigence, for her pension had long
been forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. While
Rousseau was at Geneva she came to see him. "She lacked money to
complete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her an
hour afterwards by Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her
heart. The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from
her finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as she
kissed the noble hand and bathed it with her tears." In after years he
poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach his
lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have been
haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.[235] Here is the
worst of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if the
sensations happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the
chance goes by, never to return, and then, as memory in the best of
such temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old
sentiment revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appears
not to have seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to
the end, like a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet
mysterious perfume of many-scented night in the silent garden at
Charmettes. She died in a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease,
misery, and neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heights
above Chambéri.[236] Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of another
world that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness;
like a man who should illusorily confound the last glistening of a
wintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming
strength of the summer morning. "If I thought," he said, "that I should
not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the
idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it."[237] To
pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing
gulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a
natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a
moment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been
robbed of its object. Yet would not men be more likely to have a deeper
love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with
aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their
days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promise
ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeed
the end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?
The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followed
by his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was
contemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been
reared. The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm;
he surrendered himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought of
the Parisian world that he had left behind, its frivolity, its
petulance, its disputation over all things in heaven and on the earth,
its profound deadness to all civic activity, quickened his admiration
for the simple, industrious, and independent community from which he
never forgot that he was sprung. But no Catholic could enjoy the rights
of citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is the
same for all Christians, and the substance of dogma only differs,
because people interposed with explanations of what they could not
understand; that therefore it is in each country the business of the
sovereign to fix both the worship and the amount and quality of
unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the citizen's duty to
admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law appointed. "The society
of the Encyclopædists, far from shaking my faith, had confirmed it by my
natural aversion for partisanship and controversy. The reading of the
Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself for
several years, had made me despise the low and childish interpretation
put upon the words of Christ by the people who were least worthy to
understand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards the
essential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass of
trivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it."[238] We
may be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given
course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in a
blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblems
and devices of superlative conviction. In short, he submitted himself
faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his parish; was closely
catechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received from
them a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine in
all points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finally
restored to all his rights as a citizen.[239]
This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense
of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau
himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those
honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had
marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found
again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist,
and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant
than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of
Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic
tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men
as only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all
the several communities of men as members of that great organisation
which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have
gone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that
monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would
never have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an
organism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left
the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from his
fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great
vague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and
reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately
disciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political
freedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, that
energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire and
essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remark
how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like
France: so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionary
schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest dropped
away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part of
his system. In other words, in no country has the power of collective
organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France,
and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to count
for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal and
spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most
confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason
may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.
In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not
leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was
only undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled
him with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual
connection with it which had never been more than superficially parted.
There can be little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva
in 1754 marked a very critical time in the formation of some of the most
memorable of his opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and
smouldering resentment against the irreverence and denial of the
materialistic circle which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What
sort of opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of the
Genevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had
three or four years later than this to suffer a bitter attack from
them, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers which he
gave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was substantially
correct. "Many of them," he wrote, "have ceased to believe in the
divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal points in our
belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors, who contend
that it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full of
goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an
eternity of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pure
Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and
supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shall
propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion here is
almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearly
all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect for
Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that
distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism."[240] And it
would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies.
Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated some of
the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in denying the Trinity,
and so forth,[241] but the time was not then ripe. The general
conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6,
says that though there were not many among the Genevese of the first
form of learning, "yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a
learned education."[242] The pacification of civic troubles in 1738 was
followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and
contentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously
trained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was
at all times a constant communication, both public and private, going on
between Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief
Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth
century between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at
Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a place
in the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenth
century from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which was
the first marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. To
this general movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the
first impulse. The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of an
attempt to pacify the Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism
as was shortly to find its passionate expression in the Savoyard
Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-1737). He
belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his grandfather
had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence of Geneva
against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he visited
Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and
France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of
Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent
exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from
the people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was
much stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in
finding many considerable followers.[243] For example, some three years
or so after his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of _La
Religion Essentielle a l'Homme_, showing that faith in the existence of
a God suffices, and treating with contempt the belief in the
inspiration of the Gospels.[244]
Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and more
active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it be
true or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pure
Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, and
that those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, and
in refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to his
own account almost entirely among the ministers of religion and the
professors of the academy, precisely the sort of persons who would be
most sure to familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations,
with the current religious ideas and the arguments by which they were
opposed or upheld. We may picture the effect on his mind of the
difference in tone and temper in these grave, candid, and careful men,
and the tone of his Parisian friends in discussing the same high themes;
how this difference would strengthen his repugnance, and corroborate his
own inborn spirit of veneration; how he would here feel himself in his
own world. For as wise men have noticed, it is not so much difference of
opinion that stirs resentment in us, at least in great subjects where
the difference is not trivial but profound, as difference in gravity of
humour and manner of moral approach. He returned to Paris (Oct. 1754)
warm with the resolution to give up his concerns there, and in the
spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty and virtue, where
men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolities
of literary dialectic.[245]
The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse on
Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some and
indignation by others.[246] Nobody thought it a compliment, and some
thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purpose
aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now also
signed himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powder
flew over the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain that
Voltaire would make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find in
his native country the tone, the air, the manners which were driving him
from Paris. From that moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to
make head against the disturber, but what could he do alone, timid and
bad talker as he was, against a man arrogant, rich, supported by the
credit of the great, of brilliant eloquence, and already the very idol
of women and young men?[247] Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to
suspect that this was a reason after the event, for no man was ever so
fond as Rousseau, or so clever a master in the art, of covering an
accident in a fine envelope of principle, and, as we shall see, he was
at this time writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive panegyric. In
this case he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did not
return to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand.
Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts whether
his fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as hostile to his love
of living solitarily and after his own fashion as the good people
of Paris.
Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay
wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by
fruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he
exclaimed in delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place
of refuge made for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good
friend had in the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced
by a pretty cottage exactly arranged for his own household. "My poor
bear," she said, "here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it,
'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion
of going from me."[248] Though moved to tears by such kindness,
Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for some
time longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.
In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was
dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage
in the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring
the moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to
mark the limit of his wants.[249] He wrote to her bitterly in reply,
that her proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have
but sorry appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a
friend into a valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed,
if only she would remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for
sale.[250] Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and
then Rousseau hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special
appreciation, and that he meant by the word valet "the degradation into
which the repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. The
independence I seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for winning my
own bread, I take pleasure in it; but I mean not to subject myself to
any other duty, if I can help it. I will never pledge any portion of my
liberty, either for my own subsistence or that of any one else. I intend
to work, but at my own will and pleasure, and even to do nothing, if it
happens to suit me, without any one finding fault except my
stomach."[251] We may call this unamiable, if we please, but in a
frivolous world amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live an
independent life after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of
Rousseau's character ought not to hinder us from admiring his
steadfastness in refusing to sacrifice his existence to the first person
who spoke him civilly. We may wish there had been more of rugged
simplicity in his way of dealing with temptations to sell his birthright
for a mess of pottage; less of mere irritability. But then this
irritability is one side of soft temperament. The soft temperament is
easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance does not stir up true
anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick currents of eager
irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau, quivering from head to
foot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently unlike our plain Johnson,
the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding of the patron is as
worthy of our honour in one instance as in the other. Indeed, resistance
to humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as Rousseau's, in
which deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the naturally
stoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and rises
without effort.
When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the too
friendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madame
d'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him an
entire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom from all sense
of pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copious
torrent of pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle who
met round D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummer
madness, or even a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerful
world for the dismal solitude of woods and fields. "Only the bad man is
alone," wrote Diderot in words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his
memory as long as he lived. The men and women of the eighteenth century
had no comprehension of solitude, the strength which it may impart to
the vigorous, the poetic graces which it may shed about the life of
those who are less than vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, they
dreaded and abhorred, and thought monstrous in the one man who did
comprehend it. They were all of the mind of Socrates when he said to
Phædrus, "Knowledge is what I love, and the men who dwell in the town
are my teachers, not trees and landscape."[252] Sarcasms fell on him
like hail, and the prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does not
share the common tastes of the herd. He would never be able to live
without the incense and the amusements of the town; he would be back in
a fortnight; he would throw up the whole enterprise within three
months.[253] Amid a shower of such words, springing from men's perverse
blindness to the binding propriety of keeping all propositions as to
what is the best way of living in respect of place, hours,
companionship, strictly relative to each individual case, Rousseau
stubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his feet, and sought new
life away from the stridulous hum of men. Perhaps we are better pleased
to think of the unwearied Diderot spending laborious days in factories
and quarries and workshops and forges, while friendly toilers patiently
explained to him the structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, the
processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and all
the other countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which he
afterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificent
repertory of human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement. And it
is yet more elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the great
high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to discharge beneficent
duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin commissionership,
enduring many things and toiling late and early for long years, that the
burden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the land more
assured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only magnanimous
self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with the deep
thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of excessive
personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the social
groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhaps
for some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.
FOOTNOTES:
[201] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 163.
[202] Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.
[203] _Conf._, iv. 248.
[204] _Ib._ ix. 279. Also _Economie Politique_.
[205] Madame de la Popelinière, whose adventures and the misadventures
of her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's
Memoirs.
[206] The passages relating to income during his first residence in
Paris (1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books
vii.-ix. of the _Confessions_. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre
(_Oeuv._, xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the
_Confessions_ (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundred
copies. It may be worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembert
received 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the Encyclopædia.
Sterne received £650 for two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ in 1780.
Walpole's _Letters_, in. 298.
[207] _Conf._, viii. 154-157.
[208] _Ib._ viii. 160.
[209] _Conf._, viii. 160, 161.
[210] _Ib._ viii. 159.
[211] _Réveries_, iii 168.
[212] _Rêveries_, iii. 166.
[213] See the _Epître à Mdme. la Marquise du Châtelet, sur la
Calomnie_.
[214] _La Femme au 18ième siècle_, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40.
[215] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 295.
[216] Quoted in Goncourt's _Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 378.
[217] _Ib._, p. 337.
[218] Mdlle. L'Espinasse's _Letters_, ii. 89.
[219] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, ii. 47, 48.
[220] _Ib._, ii. 55.
[221] _Mém._, Bk. iv. 327.
[222] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 58.
[223] _Ib._, 54.
[224] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated
his atheism afterwards in the _Catéchisme Universel_.
[225] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 443.
[226] _Corr._, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.
[227] Letter to Madame de Créqui, 1752. _Corr._, i. 171.
[228] _Conf_,., vii. 104.
[229] The _Devin du Village_ was played at Fontainebleau on October
18, 1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour
took a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to
her, _Corr._, i. 178.
[230] _Conf._, viii. 190.
[231] _Conf._, viii. 183.
[232] _Conf._, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in
Strasburg, in 1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its
representation. _Oeuv. et Corr. Inéd._, p. 434.
[233] Madame de Staël insisted that her father said this, and Necker
insisted that it was his daughter's.
[234] _Corr._, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.
[235] _Conf._, viii. 208-210.
[236] She died on July 30, 1762, aged "about sixty-three years."
Arthur Young, visiting Chambéri in 1789, with some trouble procured
the certificate of her death, which may be found in his _Travels_, i.
272. See a letter of M. de Conzié to Rousseau, in M.
Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445.
[237] _Conf._, xii. 233.
[238] _Conf._, viii. 210.
[239] Gaberel's _Rousseau et les Genevois_, p. 62. _Conf._, viii. 212.
[240] The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church
and Academy of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to
examine these allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound,
reported (Feb. 10, 1758) with mild indignation, that they were
unfounded, and that the flock was untainted by unseasonable use of its
mind. See on this Rousseau's _Lettres écrites de la Montagne_, ii.
231.
[241] See Picot's _Hist. de Genève_, ii. 415.
[242] _Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc., in
1685-86._ By G. Burnet, p. 9.
[243] J.A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776,
including among much besides that no longer interests men, an _Oratio
de Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia_ (vol. iii. 437), not at all in
the vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, _De
Legibus Naturalibus_, in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbes
and assails the doctrine of Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its
definition to [Greek: to pros heauton] in its narrowest sense. He
appears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini,
his father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of the treaty
or contract between God and man, in a piece entitled _Foedus Naturæ a
primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris imputatam_
(1675).
[244] Gaberel's _Eglise de Genève_, iii. 188.
[245] _Corr._, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).
[246] _Conf._, viii. 215, 216. _Corr._, i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28,
1754).
[247] _Conf._, viii. 218.
[248] _Conf._, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the
accuracy of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (_Mém._, ii.
115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he
had never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believe
that the expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to
him describing it could only have been written to one who had not seen
it, and though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance,
the documents in them are substantially authentic, and this letter is
shown to be so by Rousseau's reply to it.
[249] _Mém._, ii. 116.
[250] _Corr._ (1755), i. 242.
[251] _Corr._, i. 245.
[252] _Phædrus_, 230.
[253] _Conf._, viii. 221, etc.