VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
Everybody in the full tide of the eighteenth century had something to do
with Voltaire, from serious personages like Frederick the Great and
Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent his verses to be
corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the days of his
unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies with
which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the
struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's
unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two
names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the
century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange
of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably
clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter,
that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their
methods were different, their training different, their points of view
different, and above all these things, their temperaments were different
by a whole heaven's breadth.
A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered
by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The
philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the
happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals
away their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into
the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the
sadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in
tendencies, which is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to
the divergence between them in all the fundamental conditions of
intellectual and moral life, then the variation which divided the
revolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly apart through
unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible
enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in
contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity,
vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say,
Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly
antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling
vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion of
knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of the
felicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophic
raiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless.
Still this can never make us forget that he was in his day and
generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because he awoke one
dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to awake
another set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singular
preeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own,
but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction can
permanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human
mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of
men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter
or a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him
eagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action,
admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly
traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in
himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and was content to
take that instead of the outer world, and as its truest version. He made
his own moods the premisses from which he deduced a system of life for
humanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of
them, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of
the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorption
which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of
emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made
eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He
was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example
of clear-eyed penetration.
This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division,
for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are.
Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its
opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of
intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's
emotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that
carried far into the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the
pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the
more profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than the
other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion
of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If
profundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of subjects,
Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-witted
crusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is that
Rousseau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects of
human life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought
about at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry,
history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religious
superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and duty
and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain attempt
at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his thinking, as we
have already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunity
of seeing still more clearly, it was often as thin and hollow as if he
had belonged to the company of the epigrammatical, who, after all, have
far less of a monopoly of shallow thinking than is often supposed. The
prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of
the rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for
moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity of
human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings of
the human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeed
often be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experience
to be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highest
elements of nobleness of soul.
It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great
power in the century, between the Encyclopædic party and the Church. He
recognised a something in men, which the Encyclopædists treated as a
chimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their
own purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the
rational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a
word he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire
and his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a
puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually and
morally unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion in
France. Nor is this all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeble
controversialists put up from time to time by the Jesuits and other
ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective champion of religion,
and the only power who could make head against the triumphant onslaught
of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian dogmas and mysteries, and,
throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which all
religions have their root and their power, he breathed new life into
them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and he
beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly
repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but to
root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This immense
achievement accomplished,--the great framework of a faith in God and
immortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, it
was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once
more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited
paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad for
the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better
opportunity of considering presently.
We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious
reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the
school who believed that men are better employed in thinking as
accurately, and knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those
difficult processes are possible, than in wearying themselves in futile
search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.
* * * * *
Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with
his usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against the
human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the
design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk
on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I
feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in
search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am
condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is
going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has
made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with
being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near
your native place, where you ought to be too." After an extremely
inadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay,[331] he
concludes:--"I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to
set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me
the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau replied to all
this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually
at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the
arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of
returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms as
these:--"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude
of my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have
profited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them.
Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your
instruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue and
freedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls."[333]
Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate
pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century,
his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word
had been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had
figured the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life
by refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the
optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man
(1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination,
already sombred by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged
around him, was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a
world where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures
in the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried,
can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free and
benevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax
of misery and injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so,
why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate and
inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We ask
in vain what we are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We are
tormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and
with whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a
disheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature,
how frightful is the present!
Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the first
sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the
polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more
than a quarter of a century such influence in Europe.[335] It is a
little odd that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of
this stock, should have broken so energetically away from it, and that
he should have done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling in
him for reality and actual circumstance.
Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with
prosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life
and pronounce that all is evil and vanity. "Voltaire in seeming always
to believe in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since
his pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all
his pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is
especially revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort,
and who from the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his
fellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the
serious calamities from which he is himself free."[336]
As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so
quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from
calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe,
and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch
the fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method
of the supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a more
execrable emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous.
Voltaire is more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and
far-spreading lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all
the world's fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly
as if the Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his own
prosperity keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouth
when he heard of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he had
moved heaven and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong. It
was his impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung from
him this desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did not
touch him in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for the
surpassing energy and sincerity of his feeling for them.
Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those
of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden
wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement
of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her
fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest
of Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine
government of our world. For him at any rate life was then warm and the
day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly.
It was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him
religious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a
sovereign element of comfort. "Pope's poem," he says, "softens my
misfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my
pains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope and
Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a
necessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. You
cry, Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created
thee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end to
them, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy existence, except
to suffer and to perish."[337] Rousseau then proceeds to argue the
matter, but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said
before, and said far more effectively. He begins, however, originally
enough by a triumphant reference to his own great theme of the
superiority of the natural over the civil state. Moral evil is our own
work, the result of our liberty; so are most of our physical evils,
except death, and that is mostly an evil only from the preparations that
we make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected the
twenty thousand houses, all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbon
had been dispersed over the face of the country, as wild tribes are,
they would have fled at the first shock, and they would have been seen
the next day twenty leagues away, as gay as if nothing had happened. And
how many of them perished in the attempt to rescue clothes or papers or
money? Is it not true that the person of a man is now, thanks to
civilisation, the least part of himself, and is hardly worth saving
after loss of the rest? Again, there are some events which lose much of
their horror when we look at them closely. A premature death is not
always a real evil and may be a relative good; of the people crushed to
death under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt thus escaped still worse
calamities. And is it worse to be killed swiftly than to await death in
prolonged anguish?[338]
The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part.
Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to its
Creator than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of the
universe which produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking and
feeling beings, ought to be dearer to him than any one of them, and he
may, notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness,
sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the preservation
of the whole. "That the dead body of a man should feed worms or wolves
or plants is not, I admit, a compensation for the death of such a man;
but if in the system of this universe, it is necessary for the
preservation of the human race that there should be a circulation of
substance between men, animals, vegetables, then the particular mishap
of an individual contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten by
worms; but my children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my body
enriches the earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do,
by the order of nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the Decii,
and a thousand others, did of their own free will for a small part of
men." (p. 305.)
All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept it as
true doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation easier by
explaining the nature of evil, it does not touch the point of Voltaire's
outburst, which is that evil exists, and exists in shapes which it is a
mere mockery to associate with the omnipotence of a benevolent
controller of the world's forces. According to Rousseau, if we go to the
root of what he means, there is no such thing as evil, though much that
to our narrow and impatient sight has the look of it. This may be true
if we use that fatal word in an arbitrary and unreal sense, for the
avoidable, the consequent without antecedent, or antecedent without
consequent. If we consent to talk in this way, and only are careful to
define terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning, it is hardly
deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and whatever is is
indeed right and best, because no better is within our reach. Voltaire,
however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed that at any rate
relatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain, suffering, waste,
whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with stern immutable
law or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable reality: from our
point of view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at every calamity and
every iniquity that all is well in the best of possible worlds, and to
sing hymns of praise and glory to the goodness and mercy of a being of
supreme might, who planted us in this evil state and keeps us in it.
Voltaire's is no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy at
all, but a passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison with
a cut and dried system like this of Rousseau's, which rests on a mocking
juggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of hand
of one definition for another.
Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that the
matter is beyond the light of reason, and that, "if the theist only
founds his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still less
precision only founds his on the alternative possibilities." The
objections on both sides are insoluble, because they turn on things of
which men can have no veritable idea; "yet I believe in God as strongly
as I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing are
the last things in the world that depend on me." So be it. But why take
the trouble to argue in favour of one side of an avowedly insoluble
question? It was precisely because he felt that the objections on both
sides cannot be answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that
he faced the horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake
without a glimpse of consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstrance
only amounted to this, that he could not furnish one with any
consolation out of the armoury of reason, that he himself found this
consolation, but in a way that did not at all depend upon his own effort
or will, and was therefore as incommunicable as the advantage of having
a large appetite or being six feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes
accustomed to this way of dealing with subjects of discussion. We see
him using his reason as adroitly as he knows how for three-fourths of
the debate, and then he suddenly flings himself back with a triumphant
kind of weariness into the buoyant waters of emotion and sentiment. "You
sir, who are a poet," once said Madame d'Epinay to Saint Lambert, "will
agree with me that the existence of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and
of sovereign intelligence, is at any rate the germ of the finest
enthusiasm."[339] To take this position and cleave to it may be very
well, but why spoil its dignity and repose by an unmeaning and
superfluous flourish of the weapons of the reasoner?
With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true question
is not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good that
the universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable in
its constitution. Then within a dozen lines he admits that there can be
no direct proof either way; we must content ourselves with settling it
by means of inference from the perfections of God. Of course, it is
clear that in the first place what Rousseau calls the true question
consists of two quite distinct questions. Is the universe in its present
ordering on the whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentient
creatures? Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second,
this way of putting it does not in the least advance the case against
Voltaire, who insisted that no fine phrases ought to hide from us the
dreadful power and crushing reality of evil and the desolate plight in
which we are left. This is no exhaustive thought, but a deep cry of
anguish at the dark lot of men, and of just indignation against the
philosophy which to creatures asking for bread gave the brightly
polished stone of sentimental theism. Rousseau urged that Voltaire
robbed men of their only solace. What Voltaire really did urge was that
the solace derived from the attribution of humanity and justice to the
Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical account of evil, rests on too
narrow a base either to cover the facts, or to be a true solace to any
man who thinks and observes. He ought to have gone on, if it had only
been possible in those times, to persuade his readers that there is no
solace attainable, except that of an energetic fortitude, and that we do
best to go into life not in a softly lined silken robe, but with a sharp
sword and armour thrice tempered. As between himself and Rousseau, he
saw much the more keenly of the two, and this was because he approached
the matter from the side of the facts, while the latter approached it
from the side of his own mental comfort and the preconceptions
involved in it.
The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, where
Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from the
philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of
civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that
everybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims
that everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion
in accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of
accord with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other
religion but the code itself.
Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of
nonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there
any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau
chose to think that _Candide_ (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340]
He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire,
for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose
appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient
than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country
fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was
four years later, and by that time the alienation which had no
definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had
become complete. "I hate you, in fact," he concluded, "since you have so
willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you,
if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full
towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to
your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you
which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine."[341] We
know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved
with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence
would have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau
occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.[342]
On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant
to be unkind. "Voltaire's first impulse," he said, "is to be good; it is
reflection that makes him bad."[343] Tronchin had said in the same way
that Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is
always trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of
the time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to
him. It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau
more than the doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his
eyes sarcasm was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It says
something for the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment,
that he should have had the patience to discern some of the fundamental
merit of the most remorseless and effective mocker that ever made
superstition look mean, and its doctors ridiculous.
II.
Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack upon
another great Encyclopædist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert on
Stage Plays. "There," Rousseau said afterwards, "is my favourite book,
my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the first
inspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life."[344] Voltaire,
who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to himself and
to his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before all else,
the author of _Zaïre_ and _Mahomet_, rather than of _Candide_ and the
_Philosophical Dictionary_. D'Alembert was Voltaire's staunchest
henchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for the Encyclopædia to
gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him when he composed it, he
took occasion to regret that the austerity of the tradition of the city
deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre. This suggestion had
its origin partly in a desire to promote something that would please the
eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a
neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatre
of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity
of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an
example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see
actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an
object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt
by citizens.[345]
The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by
the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as
ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the
time would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the
persecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the
war between the priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the
cause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama an
effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from
their natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual
manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical
inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage
performers. While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those
who furnished them as much diversion in private as in public, the church
refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress
wished to marry, they were obliged to renounce the stage, and the
Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge.[346] The
atrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case of
players as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen
illustrious instances, from Molière and Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.
Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old
prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against
its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical.
Jeremy Collier in his _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of
the English Stage_ (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once
famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack
on certain specific qualities of the plays of his time--their indecency
of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism
of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by
the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not
applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a
good word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's
loftier denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended
to the whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school
of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and
purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and
therefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers. He appeals
to the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried,
_Woe unto you that laugh_.[347] There is a fine austerity about
Bossuet's energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness,
and so severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation
or two later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.
Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be
an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not
conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant
menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought
and idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position is
this: that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in
itself, while it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit
of frequenting the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the
actors, the cost in money, the waste in time, and all the other
accessory conditions, apart from the morality of the matter represented,
are bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every circumstance.
Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in relation to
the social condition and habits of Geneva.[348] The first part of the
discussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite pleas for
the morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to pity through
terror, that comedy corrects men while amusing them, that both make
virtue attractive and vice hateful.[349] Rousseau insists with abundance
of acutely chosen illustration that the pity that is awaked by tragedy
is a fleeting emotion which subsides when the curtain falls; that comedy
as often as not amuses men at the expense of old age, uncouth virtue,
paternal carefulness, and other objects which we should be taught rather
to revere than to ridicule; and that both tragedy and comedy, instead of
making vice hateful, constantly win our sympathy for it. Is not the
French stage, he asks, as much the triumph of great villains, like
Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?
This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the most
interesting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course a
characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethical
and high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseau
seems from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments
which might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do
not hold of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the old
criticism which attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to
each piece, as its lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. In
repudiating this Rousseau was certainly right.[350] Both the assailants
and the defenders of the stage, however, commit the double error, first
of supposing that the drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon
down to the last triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching
the discussion in too high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage
play in the modern era, where grave sentiment clothes itself in other
forms, were substantially anything more serious than an evening's
amusement. Apart from this, and in so far as the discussion is confined
to the highest dramatic expression, the true answer to Rousseau is now a
very plain one. The drama does not work in the sphere of direct
morality, though like everything else in the world it has a moral or
immoral aspect. It is an art of ideal presentation, not concerned with
the inculcation of immediate practical lessons, but producing a stir in
all our sympathetic emotions, quickening the imagination, and so
communicating a wider life to the character of the spectator. This is
what the drama in the hands of a worthy master does; it is just what
noble composition in music does, and there is no more directly
moralising effect in the one than in the other. You must trust to the
sum of other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus quickened
into channels of right action. Rousseau, like most other
controversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on the
assumption that the special object of the attack is the single
influencing element and the one decisive instrument in making men had or
good. What he says about the drama would only be true if the public went
to the play all day long, and were accessible to no other moral force
whatever, modifying and counteracting such lessons as they might learn
at the theatre. He failed here as in the wider controversy on the
sciences and arts, to consider the particular subject of discussion in
relation to the whole of the general medium in which character moves,
and by whose manifold action and reaction it is incessantly affected and
variously shaped.
So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the matter
which he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of introducing
the drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the qualities in the
Genevese citizen which would protect him against the evil influence of
the stage, though it is his anxiety for the preservation of these very
qualities that gives all its fire to his eloquence. If the citizen
really was what Rousseau insisted that he was, then his virtues would
surely neutralise the evil of the drama; if not, the drama would do him
no harm. We need not examine the considerations in which Rousseau
pointed out the special reasons against introducing a theatre into his
native town. It would draw the artisans away from their work, cause
wasteful expenditure of money in amusements, break up the harmless and
inexpensive little clubs of men and the social gatherings of women. The
town was not populous enough to support a theatre, therefore the
government would have to provide one, and this would mean increased
taxation. All this was the secondary and merely colourable support by
argumentation, of a position that had been reached and was really held
by sentiment. Rousseau hated the introduction of French plays in the
same way that Cato hated the introduction of fine talkers from Greece.
It was an innovation, and so habitual was it with Rousseau to look on
all movement in the direction of what the French writers called taste
and cultivation as depraving, that he cannot help taking for granted
that any change in manners associated with taste must necessarily be a
change for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was essentially a
supplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of its
principles to a practical case. It was part of his general reactionary
protest against philosophers, poets, men of letters, and all their
works, without particular apprehension on the side of the drama. Hence
its reasoning is much less interesting than its panegyric on the
simplicity, robust courage, and manliness of the Genevese, and its
invective against the effeminacy and frivolity of the Parisian. One of
the most significant episodes in the discussion is the lengthy criticism
on the immortal Misanthrope of Molière. Rousseau admits it for the
masterpiece of the comic muse, though with characteristic perversity he
insists that the hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropic
at all, because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself,
instead of at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that Molière
makes Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in order to win the
applause of the pit. It is for the character of Philinte, however, that
Rousseau reserves all his spleen. He takes care to describe him in terms
which exactly hit Rousseau's own conception of his philosophic enemies,
who find all going well because they have no interest in anything going
better; who are content with everybody, because they do not care for
anybody; who round a full table maintain that it is not true that the
people are hungry. As criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis.
D'Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the great
comedy, but finding himself seized with the critic's besetting
impertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the
becoming reflection--"But I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons to
Molière."[351]
The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable occasion of
painting two pictures in violent contrast, each as over-coloured as the
other by his mixed conceptions of the Plutarchian antique and imaginary
pastoral. We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living of
comedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and
cheerful festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of
Geneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some
woman assembles a number of men who are more like women than their
entertainers. We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic,
boxing, wrestling, running, in generous emulation, and on the other the
coxcombs of cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room, "rising up,
sitting down, incessantly going and coming to the fire-place, to the
window, taking up a screen and putting it down again a hundred times,
turning over books, flitting from picture to picture, turning and
pirouetting about the room, while the idol stretched motionless on a
couch all the time is only alive in her tongue and eyes" (p. 161). If
the rough patriots of the Lake are less polished in speech, they are all
the weightier in reason; they do not escape by a pleasantry or a
compliment; each feeling himself attacked by all the forces of his
adversary, he is obliged to employ all his own to defend himself, and
this is how a mind acquires strength and precision. There may be here
and there a licentious phrase, but there is no ground for alarm in that.
It is not the least rude who are always the most pure, and even a rather
clownish speech is better than that artificial style in which the two
sexes seduce one another, and familiarise themselves decently with vice.
'Tis true our Swiss drinks too much, but after all let us not calumniate
even vice; as a rule drinkers are cordial and frank, good, upright,
just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk. Wherever people have most
abhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have most reason to fear lest
its indiscretion should betray intrigue and treachery. In Switzerland it
is almost thought well of, while at Naples they hold it in horror; but
at bottom which is the more to be dreaded, the intemperance of the Swiss
or the reserve of the Italian? It is hardly surprising to learn that the
people of Geneva were as little gratified by this well-meant panegyric
on their jollity as they had been by another writer's friendly eulogy on
their Socinianism.[352]
The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours by the
pictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find it more
difficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities and simple
pastimes which in the Letter to D'Alembert the patriot holds up to the
admiration of his countrymen and the envy of foreigners. The writer is
in Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with a something from Charmettes.
Never before was there so attractive a combination of martial austerity
with the grace of the idyll. And the interest of these pictures is much
more than literary; it is historic also. They were the original version
of those great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of
fraternity during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have
amused the cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy
aspiration. The fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise had
then all fled, and the common people under Rousseauite leaders were
doing the best they could to realise on the banks of the Seine the
imaginary joymaking and simple fellowship which had been first dreamed
of for the banks of Lake Leman, and commended with an eloquence that
struck new chords in minds satiated or untouched by the brilliance of
mere literature. There was no real state of things in Geneva
corresponding to the gracious picture which Rousseau so generously
painted, and some of the citizens complained that his account of their
social joys was as little deserved as his ingenious vindication of their
hearty feeling for barrel or bottle was little founded.[353]
The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese for
whom it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater nation
that lay sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin. Nowhere else
among the writers who are the glory of France at this time, is any
serious eulogy of patriotism. Rousseau glows with it, and though he
always speaks in connection with Geneva, yet there is in his words a
generous breadth and fire which gave them an irresistible
contagiousness. There are many passages of this fine persuasive force in
the Letter to D'Alembert; perhaps this, referring to the citizens of
Geneva who had gone elsewhere in search of fortune, is as good as
another. Do you think that the opening of a theatre, he asks, will bring
them back to their mother city? No; "each of them must feel that he can
never find anywhere else what he has left behind in his own land; an
invincible charm must call him back to the spot that he ought never to
have quitted; the recollection of their first exercises, their first
pleasures, their first sights, must remain deeply graven in their
hearts; the soft impressions made in the days of their youth must abide
and grow stronger with advancing years, while a thousand others wax dim;
in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all their cheerless
magnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the depth of the
wanderer's soul, Ah, where are the games and holidays of my youth? Where
is the concord of the townsmen, where the public brotherhood? Where is
pure joy and true mirth? Where are peace, freedom, equity? Let us hasten
to seek all these. With the heart of a Genevese, with a city as smiling,
a landscape as full of delight, a government as just, with pleasures so
true and so pure, and all that is needed to be able to relish them, how
is it that we do not all adore our birth-land? It was thus in old times
that by modest feasts and homely games her citizens were called back by
that Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for us;
thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very bosom
of luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after his coarse
pastimes and exhausting exercises" (p. 211).[354]
Any reference to this powerfully written, though most sophistical
piece, would be imperfect which should omit its slightly virulent
onslaught upon women and the passion which women inspire. The modern
drama, he said, being too feeble to rise to high themes, has fallen back
on love; and on this hint he proceeds to a censure of love as a poetic
theme, and a bitter estimate of women as companions for men, which might
have pleased Calvin or Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquence
which showed men the superior delights of the state of nature, now shows
the superior fitness of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a
sympathetic reader tremble at the want of modesty, purity, and decency,
in the part which women are allowed to take by the infatuated men of a
modern community.
All this, again, is directed against "that philosophy of a day, which is
born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry of
nature and the unanimous voice of the human race" (p. 131). The same
intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notions
of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and other
unlighted spots in the human mind, had perceived that the subjection of
women to a secondary place belonged to the same category, and could not
any more successfully be defended by reason. Instead of raging against
women for their boldness, their frivolousness, and the rest, as our
passionate sentimentalist did, the opposite school insisted that all
these evils were due to the folly of treating women with gallantry
instead of respect, and to the blindness of refusing an equally vigorous
and masculine education to those who must be the closest companions of
educated man. This was the view forced upon the most rational observers
of a society where women were so powerful, and so absolutely unfit by
want of intellectual training for the right use of social power.
D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible pleading in
his reply to Rousseau,[355] and some thirty-two years later, when all
questions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the same
line of argument so as to make it cover the claims of women to all the
rights of citizenship.[356] From the nature of the case, however, it is
impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter in
dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and who
supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack when
he declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race. We may
remember that the author of this philippic against love was at the very
moment brooding over the New Heloïsa, and was fresh from strange
transports at the feet of the Julie whom we know.
The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism from
the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the
church? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against their country ought
to be hung. The little flock are falling to devouring one another. This
arch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have been
guided by his brethren of the Encyclopædia, takes it into his head to
make a band of his own. He writes against the stage, after writing a bad
play of his own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub,
and instals himself therein to bark at his friends.[357] D'Alembert was
more tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little flock
should do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them. Jean
Jacques, he said, "is a madman who is very clever, and who is only
clever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor
to insult him."
Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a
proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. "I once," he said,
"possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no longer, and
wish for him no longer." To this he added in a footnote a passage from
Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword on a friend
there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words
to him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the
betrayal of a secret--these things banish friendship beyond return. This
was the end of his personal connection with the men whom he always
contemptuously called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream
divided into two; the rationalist and the emotional schools became
visibly antipathetic, and the voice of the epoch was no longer single or
undistracted.
FOOTNOTES:
[331] See above p. 149.
[332] Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755.
[333] _Corr._, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755.
[334] _La Loi Naturelle._
[335] In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An
Examination of Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote a
pamphlet to show that Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. See
Mr. Pattison's _Introduction to Pope's Essay on Man_, p. 12. Sime's
_Lessing_, i. 128.
[336] _Conf._ ix. 276.
[337] _Corr._, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756.
[338] Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely; _Soirées_, iv.
[339] Madame d'Epinay, _Mém._, i. 380.
[340] _Conf._, ix. 277. Also _Corr._, iii. 326. March 11, 1764.
Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage, is
given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and is
interesting to people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctor
who saw him closely.
[341] _Corr._, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also _Conf._, x. 91.
[342] Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's
letters are--ii. 170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as "that
trumpet of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul," and so
forth; iii. 29 (Oct. 30, 1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious
intrigues against him in Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that
if there is to be any reconciliation, Voltaire must make first
advances; iii. 280 (Dec., 1763), described a trick played by Voltaire;
iv. 40 (Jan. 31, 1765) 64; _Corr._, v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying to
Voltaire's calumnious account of his early life; note on this subject
giving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150 (May 31, 1765); the _Lettre à
D'Almbert_, p. 193, etc.
[343] Bernardin St. Pierre, xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx,
_Mes Rapports avec J.J.R._, (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also _Corr._,
iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 28, 1766, and p. 356.
[344] Dusaulx, p. 102.
[345] This part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau's
preface, and the whole is given at the end of the volume in M.
Auguis's edition, p. 409.
[346] Goncourt, _Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 256. Grimm, _Corr. Lit._,
vi. 248.
[347] _Maximes sur la Comédie_, §15, etc. They were written in reply
to a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit father.
[348] The letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. pp.
1-89, II. pp. 90-145, III. pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseau
in saying that tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking of
the famous passage in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's _Poetics_, he
was guilty of a shocking mistranslation.
[349] Some of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides the
well-known passages in the _Republic_, the _Laws_, iv. 719, and still
more directly, _Gorgias_, 502.
[350] Yet D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245)
repeats the old saws, as that in _Catilina_ we learn the lesson of the
harm which may be done to the human race by the abuse of great
talents, and so forth.
[351] _Lettre à M. J.J. Rousseau_, p. 258.
[352] D'Alembert's _Lettre à J.J. Rousseau_, p. 277. Rousseau has a
passage to the same effect, that false people are always sober, in the
_Nouv. Hél., _Pt. I. xxiii. 123.
[353] Tronchin, for instance, in a letter to Rousseau, in M.
Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 325.
[354] A troop of comedians had been allowed to play for a short time
in Geneva, with many protests, during the mediation of 1738. In 1766,
eight years after Rousseau's letter, the government gave permission
for the establishment of a theatre in the town. It was burnt down in
1768, and Voltaire spitefully hinted that the catastrophe was the
result of design, instigated by Rousseau (_Corr._ v. 299, April 26,
1768). The theatre was not re-erected until 1783, when the oligarchic
party regained the ascendancy and brought back with them the drama,
which the democrats in their reign would not permit.
[355] _Lettre à J.J. Rousseau_, pp. 265-271.
[356] _Oeuv._, x. 121.
[357] To Thieriot, Sept. 17, 1758. To D'Alembert, Oct. 20, 1761. _Ib._
March 19, 1761.
END OF VOL. I.
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
* * * * *
ROUSSEAU
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. II.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905
_All rights reserved_
_First printed in this form 1886_
_Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
CHAPTER I.
MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOÏSA.
Conditions preceding the composition of the New Heloïsa 1
The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg 2
Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances 4
Peaceful life at Montmorency 9
Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau 12
His want of gratitude for commonplace service 13
Bad health, and thoughts of suicide 16
Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville 17
Relation of the New Heloïsa to Rousseau's general doctrine 20
Action of the first part of the story 25
Contrasted with contemporary literature 25
And with contemporary manners 27
Criticism of the language and principal actors 28, 29
Popularity of the New Heloïsa 31
Its reactionary intellectual direction 33
Action of the second part 35, 36
Its influence on Goethe and others 38
Distinction between Rousseau and his school 40
Singular pictures of domesticity 42
Sumptuary details 44
The slowness of movement in the work justified 46
Exaltation of marriage 47
Equalitarian tendencies 49
Not inconsistent with social quietism 51
Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment
54
Circumstances of the publication of the New Heloïsa 55
Nature of the trade in books 57
Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius 61
Rousseau's suspicions 62
The great struggle of the moment 64
Proscription of Emilius 67
Flight of the author 67
CHAPTER II.
PERSECUTION.
Rousseau's journey from Switzerland 69
Absence of vindictiveness 70
Arrival at Yverdun 72
Repairs to Motiers 73
Relations with Frederick the Great 74
Life at Motiers 77
Lord Marischal 79
Voltaire 81
Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris 83
Its dialectic 86
The ministers of Neuchâtel 90
Rousseau's singular costume 92
His throng of visitors 93
Lewis, prince of Würtemberg 95
Gibbon 96
Boswell 98
Corsican affairs 99
The feud at Geneva 102
Rousseau renounces his citizenship 105
The Letters from the Mountain 106
Political side 107
Consequent persecution at Motiers 107
Flight to the isle of St. Peter 108
The fifth of the _Rêveries_ 109
Proscription by the government of Berne 116
Rousseau's singular request 116
His renewed flight 117
Persuaded to seek shelter in England 118
CHAPTER III.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility 119
Abandonment of the position of the Discourses 121
Doubtful idea of equality 121
The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method 124
Yet it has glimpses of relativity 127
Influence of Greek examples 129
And of Geneva 131
Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just 132
Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory 135
Why the Social Contract made fanatics 137
Verbal quality of its propositions 138
The doctrine of public safety 143
The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples 144
Its early phases 144
Its history in the sixteenth century 146
Hooker and Grotius 148
Locke 149
Hobbes 151
Central propositions of the Social Contract--
1. Origin of society in compact 154
Different conception held by the Physiocrats 156
2. Sovereignty of the body thus constituted 158
Difference from Hobbes and Locke 159
The root of socialism 160
Republican phraseology 161
3. Attributes of sovereignty 162
4. The law-making power 163
A contemporary illustration 164
Hints of confederation 166
5. Forms of government 168
Criticism on the common division 169
Rousseau's preference for elective aristocracy 172
6. Attitude of the state to religion 173
Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction 176
Its effect at the French Revolution 179
Its futility 180
Another method of approaching the philosophy of government--
Origin of society not a compact 183
The true reason of the submission of a minority to a majority 184
Rousseau fails to touch actual problems 186
The doctrine of resistance, for instance 188
Historical illustrations 190
Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany 193
Socialist deductions from it 194
CHAPTER IV.
EMILIUS.
Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time 197
Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of
naturalism 199
I.--Locke, on education 202
Difference between him and Rousseau 204
Exhortations to mothers 205
Importance of infantile habits 208
Rousseau's protest against reasoning with children 209
Criticised 209
The opposite theory 210
The idea of property 212
Artificially contrived incidents 214
Rousseau's omission of the principle of authority 215
Connected with his neglect of the faculty of sympathy 219
II.--Rousseau's ideal of living 221
The training that follows from it 222
The duty of knowing a craft 223
Social conception involved in this moral conception 226
III.--Three aims before the instructor 229
Rousseau's omission of training for the social conscience 230
No contemplation of society as a whole 232
Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius 233
The sphere and definition of the social conscience 235
IV.--The study of history 237
Rousseau's notions upon the subject 239
V.--Ideals of life for women 241
Rousseau's repudiation of his own principles 242
His oriental and obscurantist position 243
Arising from his want of faith in improvement 244
His reactionary tendencies in this region eventually
neutralised 248
VI.--Sum of the merits of Emilius 249
Its influence in France and Germany 251
In England 252
CHAPTER V.
THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists 256
The good side of the religious reaction 258
Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence 259
Earlier forms of deism 260
The deism of the Savoyard Vicar 264
The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity 265
A divinity for fair weather 268
Religious self-denial 269
The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission 270
His position towards Christianity 272
Its effectiveness as a solvent 273
Weakness of the subjective test 276
The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
conviction 276
The true satisfaction of the religious emotion 277
CHAPTER VI.
ENGLAND.
Rousseau's English portrait 281
His reception in Paris 282
And in London 283
Hume's account of him 284
Settlement at Wootton 286
The quarrel with Hume 287
Detail of the charges against Hume 287-291
Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick 291
Baselessness of the whole delusion 292
Hume's conduct in the quarrel 293
The war of pamphlets 295
Common theory of Rousseau's madness 296
Preparatory conditions 297
Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence 299
The Confessions 301
His life at Wootton 306
Flight from Derbyshire 306
And from England 308
CHAPTER VII.
THE END.
The elder Mirabeau 309
Shelters Rousseau at Fleury 311
Rousseau at Trye 312
In Dauphiny 314
Return to Paris 314
The _Rêveries_ 315
Life in Paris 316
Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him 317
An Easter excursion 320
Rousseau's unsociality 322
Poland and Spain 324
Withdrawal to Ermenonville 326
His death 326
ROUSSEAU.
CHAPTER I.
MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOÏSA.
The many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden in
such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period of
stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the
indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is
one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of
stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher
parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what
is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious
complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of
1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed
not only the New Heloïsa, which is the monument of his fall, but the
Social Contract, which was the most influential, and Emilius, which
was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the productions of
the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor
light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true
that no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the
age of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years,
however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength and
incommunicable savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better
ordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart to
literature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that
comes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.
The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Heloïsa
was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was
published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later.
Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at
peace with most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his
antipathy to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more
real and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them,
transformed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.
The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest
people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal
of France, and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was
capable of having. The Maréchale de Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one
of the most beautiful, and continued to be one of the most brilliant
leaders of the last aristocratic generation that was destined to sport
on the slopes of the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal
and homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating,
unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect
sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient
apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated
when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a constant
guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in France.
The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with him, or
to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in
conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do
with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New
Heloïsa aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon the
maréchale, and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, the
sin, the repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the
wisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones
which enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the rest
of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
enchanted.[1] This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the
uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as
maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess as it was in
presences less imposing.
One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a man
bears himself in his relations with those of greater social
consideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with
a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whose
name was _Duc_. When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed his
dog's name to _Turc_.[2] Again, one day in a transport of tenderness
he embraced the old marshal--the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times a
day, for the age was effusive--"Ah, monsieur le maréchal, I used to
hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more, since
you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have
themselves adored."[3] On another occasion he happened to be playing
at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
cottage.[4] In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, he
insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with
respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too
much not to beat you at chess always."[5] A few days after, the
vanquished prince sent him a present of game which Rousseau duly
accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote to
Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he loved
the prince's conversation better than his gifts.[6] He admits that
this was an ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game "from a
prince of the blood who throws such good feeling into the present, is
not so much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his
independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
know his place."[7] Considering the extreme virulence with which
Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind from his
friends, one may perhaps find some inconsistency in this condemnation
of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on all other
occasions. If the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is
allowed to modify the quality of the donation, that is hardly a
defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame de
Boufflers,[8] the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet more
intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judicious warning
when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a charge of
affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue and
so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus would have accepted such
marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their
disinterestedness and frugality."[9] Perhaps there is a flutter of
self-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, in
the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at the
castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who was
his neighbour and his friend.[10] On the whole, however, and so far as
we know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily with these high
people. His letters to them are for the most part marked by
self-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now and again he
makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his
independence with something too much of protestation.[11] Their
relations with him are a curious sign of the interest which the
members of the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing
the destruction both of them and their world. The Maréchale de
Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the
place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of
Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs
at a few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess of
Boufflers, in sending him the money, insists that he is to count her
his warmest friend.[12] When his dog dies, the countess writes to
sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to
replace it.[13] And when persecution and trouble and infinite
confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their own
comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the
unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities
which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men, and
made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men and
women away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as
with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted
company. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And the
lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive
by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was one of the most distinguished
spirits of her time. Her friendship for him was such, that his
sensuous vanity made Rousseau against all reason or probability
confound it with a warmer form of emotion, and he plumes himself in a
manner most displeasing on the victory which he won over his own
feelings on the occasion.[14] As a matter of fact he had no feelings
to conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him
any ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he
afterwards believed.
There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency,
which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted
him, if his natural irritation had not been made intense and
irresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publication
of Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present friends. The
simplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, as
he thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they
were officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just cast
off.[15] Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons
whose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his
old literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with
him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers,
indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko.[16] That Rousseau was
thoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary
jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others of a
meanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself. The
resounding success which followed the New Heloïsa and Emilius put an
end to these apprehensions. It raised him to a pedestal in popular
esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That very
success unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last
chance of ending his days in full reasonableness.
Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and
peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the
letters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west
winds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who
live with nature.[17] At the end of his garden was a summer-house, and
here even on wintry days he sat composing or copying. It was not music
only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts
of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg and
other ladies for some moderate fee.[18] Sometimes he moved from his
own lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends had
induced him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was
of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in
the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every kind,
with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I
composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what
eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy
air! What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with
my Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have
sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known
weariness." And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many
different circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where
if fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and
lasting happiness.[19]
Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as
he craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to
him a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he
sent away exceeding sorrowful. "The first lesson I should give you
would be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for
the contemplative life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be
condemned at any age, but especially so at yours. Man is not made to
meditate, but to act. Labour therefore in the condition of life in
which you have been placed by your family and by providence: that is
the first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow. If residence
at Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to you
irreconcilable with virtue, do better still, and return to your own
province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace your
honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties that
virtue imposes on you."[20] This intermixture of sound sense with
unutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far the
perversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in the
most exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediate
practical maxims from his theoretical principles of social
philosophy.[21]
Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as
to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes
inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful
persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some
district of France. Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of
Eliphaz the Temanite. Our brethren must surely have given some pretext
for the evil treatment to which they were subjected. One who is a
Christian must learn to suffer, and every man's conduct ought to
conform to his doctrine. Our brethren, moreover, ought to remember
that the word of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws set
up by the prince. The writer cannot venture to run any risk by
interceding in favour of our brethren with the government. "Every one
has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the public harsh
but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness, tolerance, so
far as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the world has not
listened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I produce
no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action, but a
vice."[22] The worst of the worthy sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is
that they are such cowards: a man groans over a wrong, he holds his
tongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about it.[23] If
Voltaire could not write like Fénelon, at least he could never talk
like Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about his
mission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and
the spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression
one would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas and
of Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism.
Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than
this. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a
correspondent for judging the rich too harshly. "You do not bear in
mind that having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants
which we are without, then to bring them down to the condition of the
poor, would be to make them more miserable than the poor. We should be
just towards all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah,
if we had the virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them,
we should soon forget that such people were in the world. One word
more. To have any right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be
prudent and thrifty, so as to have no need of riches."[24] In the
observance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his life
absolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to make
his independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minute
financial probity. This firm limitation of his material desires was
one cause of his habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept
presents, though no doubt another cause was the stubborn and
ungracious egoism which made him resent every obligation.
It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibility
and softness of his character where women were concerned--it was not
quite without exception--that he did not fly into a fit of rage over
their gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but in
gentler key. "What could I do with four pullets?" he wrote to a lady
who had presented them to him. "I began by sending two of them to
people to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the difference
there is between a present and a testimony of friendship. The first
will never find in me anything but a thankless heart; the second....
Ah, if you had only given me news of yourself without sending me
anything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me;
instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is
to forget all about them; let us say no more."[25] Rude and repellent
as this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness
about it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to
exhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he
was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of
friendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. He
ostentatiously refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to a
woman whom he always treated with so much consideration as the
Maréchale de Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is a
false virtue,[26] and though he did not go so far as to make gratitude
the subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he always
implied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He confessed
to Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he was
ungrateful by nature.[27] To Madame d'Epinay he once went still
further, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those who had
used him well.[28] Undoubtedly he was right so far as this, that
gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a benefactor is no
merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from that fact
stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere piece
of egoism in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a
testimony of good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little
too hard, as well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient
evil names because he is unable to respond to the good feeling.
Rousseau protested against a conception of friendship which makes of
what ought to be disinterested helpfulness a title to everlasting
tribute. His way of expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it
was not without an element of uprightness and veracity. As in his
greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hid
wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of
common form. "I am well pleased," he said to a friend, "both with thee
and thy letters, except the end, where thou say'st thou art more mine
than thine own. For there thou liest, and it is not worth while to
take the trouble to _thee_ and _thou_ a man as thine intimate, only to
tell him untruths."[29] Chesterfield was for people with much
self-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet
than Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for
a man.
Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take
the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and
ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one
fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and
virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all mistresses are that. You
have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress in
Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a promise of
marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue to
love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is no
avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic; but
I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives
anything to the fidelity of the man who signs."[30]
We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly
excuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now
as always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him
distraught. "My sufferings are not very excruciating just now," he
wrote on a later occasion, "but they are incessant, and I am not out
of pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I
feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but
if anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,"
and so on.[31] This prolonged physical anguish, which was made more
intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a
surgical instrument,[32] sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude away
as to make him think of suicide.[33] In Lord Edward's famous letter on
suicide in the New Heloïsa, while denying in forcible terms the right
of ending one's days merely to escape from intolerable mental
distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow
incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse
for a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being
before dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his
release from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no
longer.[34] The thought was often present to him in this form.
Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very
deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked
upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's
exception.[35] It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarations
like these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respect
to the controversy on the manner of Rousseau's death, they pronounce
him incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherished
principles as anything like self-destruction would have been.
As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and
sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of
romance shone in incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris,
absorbed in the New Heloïsa, like all the women of the time,
identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel that
none could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claiming
their identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal.
"You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you;
I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only her
cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was." The unfortunate Saint
Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in the
intervals of surgery. "You do not know that the Saint Preux to whom
you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and that
the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions
of a very different kind."[36] He figures rather uncouthly, but the
unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was.
Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of a
masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letters
were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a
reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the
neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt
of mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought,"
he said brutally.[37] The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite
obliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius. This
was too much for the imaginary Claire. "I have given myself three good
blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to
open between you," she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable.
The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's
life. She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote
in defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable
of all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Heloïsa
inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour
pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse.
She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766,
when he was on his way through Paris to England. The second time, in
1772, she visited him without mentioning her name, and he did not
recognise her; she brought him some music to copy, and went away
unknown. She made another attempt, announcing herself: he gave her a
frosty welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come no more.
With a strange fidelity she bore him no grudge, but cherished his
memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the day of her death. He
was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think kindly of
the idolatress.[38] Worshippers are ever dearer to us than their
graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched women in this
way, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.
II.
As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate
what is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in
suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and
particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external
conditions under which a book like the New Heloïsa is produced, from
the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions
their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction
rather than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when
we insist on fixing our eyes on a few of the minutiæ of construction,
instead of patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable
meanings; when we stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition,
instead of advancing to the central elements of the writer's
character.
These incidents in the case of the New Heloïsa we know; the sensuous
communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency,
the long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion
for the too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these
impressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within.
An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, his
own character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses,
ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready,
into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And
this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his
interpretation of the situation. Much of the interest of the New
Heloïsa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of
which the author himself was probably unconscious, of the general
doctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound in
writings of graver pretension. Rousseau generally spoke of his romance
in phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness. It
was in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than the
weakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it was
not so deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and musing air
which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for
the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by
the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner
of the Emilius.
Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present
to his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly
described as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the
supposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil
institutions and social use might allow. In this survey, however
incoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes was the
very last that was likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was
with this that he began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the
general ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief that
society has done to human nature at large. The romance treated one set
of emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches the
whole emotional sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the field
was accompanied by a total revolution in the method. Polemic was
abandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, if
not in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation;
instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing of
persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is, it is true, a
monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value,
but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the
time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their
minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently
translated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The
important thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is
present, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far
more subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste would
have led us to expect. It is true, also, that Rousseau declared his
intention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually
became Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the two
great opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teaching
them the lesson of reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is
possible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the other
that it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel.[39]
This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau's mind while he
was writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed for
the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which he
was always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very pale
kind. It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had
so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided over
the composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it. In the
first part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly
not visible, and in the second part neither of the two contending
factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other.
Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian
dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the
wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.
French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Heloïsa in France
except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly few
in this generation read it in our own country.[40] The action is very
slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental
fiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and
a too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy
into the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's father
forbade all hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy
pair lost the self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the
pit that lies so ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step,
for Julie had with her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a
dutiful character. Her lover was hurried away from the country by the
generous solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest,
tenderest, and best of men. Julie, left undisturbed by her lover's
presence, stricken with affliction at the death of a sweet and
affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities of a father whom
she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his will had
brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron from
some northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of
calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent,
orderly, above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, from
which he was only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did
more than argue; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship of
Admiral Anson, then just starting for his famous voyage round the
world. And this marks the end of the first episode.
Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls,
and maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposing
that they could be instructed by romances. It was like setting fire to
the house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps play.[41] As he
admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from
those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may
not prudently be put into the hands of the young,--a puerile and
contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art,
by excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most
powerful of human passions. There is not a single composition of the
first rank outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that could
undergo the test. The most useful standard for measuring the
significance of a book in this respect is found in the manners of the
time, and the prevailing tone of contemporary literature. In trying to
appreciate the meaning of the New Heloïsa and its popularity, it is
well to think of it as a delineation of love, in connection not only
with such a book as the Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but with
a story like Duclos's, which all ladies both read and were not in the
least ashamed to acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, such
an abomination as Diderot's first stories; or a story like Laclos's,
which came a generation later, and with its infinite briskness and
devilry carried the tradition of artistic impurity to as vigorous a
manifestation as it is capable of reaching.[42] To a generation whose
literature is as pure as the best English, American, and German
literature is in the present day, the New Heloïsa might without doubt
be corrupting. To the people who read Crébillon and the Pucelle, it
was without doubt elevating.
The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners. Without
looking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau's own
history, we see how deep the depravity had become. Madame d'Epinay's
gallant sat at table with the husband, and the husband was perfectly
aware of the relations between them. M. d'Epinay had notorious
relations with two public women, and was not ashamed to refer to them
in the presence of his wife, and even to seek her sympathy on an
occasion when one of them was in some trouble. Not only this, but
husband and lover used to pursue their debaucheries in the town
together in jovial comradeship. An opera dancer presided at the table
of a patrician abbé in his country house, and he passed weeks in her
house in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on one occasion, "'tis
true the king has a mistress, but who has not?--except the Duke of
Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Geneviève, and is thoroughly
despised in consequence, and rightly."[43] Reeking disorder such as
all this illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of
the fair lake seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtue
was lost in that simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by
circumstances of mental pain and far circling distress, which banished
the sin into a secondary place; and what remained to strike the
imagination of the time were delightful pictures of fast union between
two enchanting women, of the patience and compassionateness of a grave
mother, of the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend.
Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossness
could make a small collection of such defilements from the New Heloïsa
without any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character, and so they
came out in his work. Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of this
kind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in the
Confessions. They were not noticed at that day, when people's ears did
not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.
A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was
actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that
produced it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that
if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist
might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and
scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression would
have followed. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloïsa.
A long story told in letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible
and intolerable to us. We find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put
far greater vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rousseau
did, though he was not any less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions
as Rousseau does not. Rousseau was absolutely without humour; that
belongs to the keenly observant natures, and to those who love men in
the concrete, not only humanity in the abstract. The pleasantries of
Julie's cousin, for instance, are heavy and misplaced. Thus the whole
book is in one key, without the dramatic changes of Richardson, too
few even as those are. And who now can endure that antique fashion of
apostrophising men and women, hot with passion and eager with all
active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as if their
passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable embodiment of
fine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint Preux
being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie
dying, murmurs passionately, "What shall I now see in the same place
of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my
soul, in this same object who both caused and shared my transports!
the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!"[44] This
rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more realistic
taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of shedding
tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a
generation that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility,
without realising for the honour of its ancestors the physiological
truth of the power of the will over the secretions.
The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are
accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New
Heloïsa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full,
highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charm
in the source and original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no
widest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make
endurable. Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance
of fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets
turn graciously on the lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at
the feet of his mistress. Even Werther, stricken creature as he was,
yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be the
instrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares. Saint
Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation,
or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion. The slave
of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification. With
some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path to
happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes first like a
pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like a
pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.
Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in
comparison. Werther, again, at least represents a principle of
rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and he
retains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful. His
despair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed social
ambition.[45] He feels the world about him. His French prototype, on
the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of a
sensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own fevered
pulsation.