Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she

belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves

fortitude, self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a

certain point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the

New Heloïsa could be said to have any moral intention, it is here

where women learn from the example of Julie's energetic return to

duty, the possibility and the satisfaction of bending character back

to comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from a moral point of

view, the reader may wish that Julie had been less of a preacher, as

well as less of a sinner. And even as sinner, she would have been more

readily forgiven if she had been less deliberate. A maiden who

sacrifices her virtue in order that the visible consequences may force

her parents to consent to a marriage, is too strategical to be

perfectly touching. As was said by the cleverest, though not the

greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau,

when one has renounced the charms of virtue, it is at least well to

have all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow.[46] In

spite of this, however, Julie struck the imagination of the time, and

struck it in a way that was thoroughly wholesome. The type taught men

some respect for the dignity of women, and it taught women a firmer

respect for themselves. It is useless, even if it be possible, to

present an example too lofty for the comprehension of an age. At this

moment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling France

with impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine that

France had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie had almost the

halo of saintliness.

We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess of

preaching, the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It was

said pungently enough by the wits of the time.[47] Nothing that could

be said on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760

and the Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such a

pitch that they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseau

had drunk, they would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece of

his handwriting, and vow that no woman of true sensibility could

hesitate to consecrate her life to him, if she were only certain to be

rewarded by his attachment.[48] The booksellers were unable to meet

the demand. The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume,

and the volume could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes

shared the excitement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and

bourgeois.[49] Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball,

who took the book up for half an hour until the time should come for

starting; they read until midnight, and when informed that the

carriage waited, answered not a word, and when reminded by and by that

it was two o'clock, still read on, and then at four, having ordered

the horses to be taken out of the carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and

passed the remainder of the night in reading. In Germany the effect

was just as astonishing. Kant only once in his life failed to take his

afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the witchery

of the New Heloïsa. Gallantry was succeeded by passion, expansion,

exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm is

dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with better hopes for

character. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first step towards

kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and more

fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the

character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in

subjective broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled to

the straight path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for

others, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy

of others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The

women who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of

whimpering introspection. The danger lay in the mischievous

intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to this effusion.

The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many

ways, marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the

most perilous of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind,

constituted as it is, to march forward a space further to the light,

without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The

great effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New

Heloïsa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. One

beautiful character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach the

culture of emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness

and moderation, as that "Great thoughts come from the heart." But he

came too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no

mark. Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs when men are

beginning to feel the urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove with

more powerful efforts, in the midst of all his herculean labours for

the acquisition and ordering of knowledge, in the same direction

towards the great outer world of nature, and towards the great inner

world of nature in the human breast. His criticisms on the paintings

of each year, mediocre as the paintings were, are admirable even now

for their richness and freshness. If Diderot had been endowed with

emotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of understanding and of

purpose, the student of the eighteenth century would probably have

been spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a way along

the sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau. But Rousseau

had what Diderot lacked--sustained ecstatic moods, and fervid trances;

his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so glistening, his

voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration. His words

are the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had lived

in Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French

instead of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that he

raised feeling, now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme place

which it was to occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equal

alliance with understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he

placed emotion as its substitute. And he made this evil doctrine come

from the lips of a fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and

fascinated imagination. Voltaire laughed at the _baisers âcres_ of

Madame de Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis of

Ximénès had crushed the wretched romance.[50] But Madame de Wolmar was

so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her

own charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a

direction that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain.

It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of the

story takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable.

Saint Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his return

to Europe he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows his

past history perfectly well, to pay them a visit. They all meet with

leapings on the neck and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar

preserving an open, serene, and smiling air. He takes his young friend

to a chamber, which is to be reserved for him and for him only. In a

few days he takes an opportunity of visiting some distant property,

leaving his wife and Saint Preux together, with the sublime of

magnanimity. At the same time he confides to Claire his intention of

entrusting to Saint Preux the education of his children. All goes

perfectly well, and the household presents a picture of contentment,

prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused happiness,

which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even now

extremely charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured by a

source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, "so sage, so reasonable, so far

from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human

passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and

in the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of

his heart the frightful peace of the wicked."[51] He is an atheist.

Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her chambers,

spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading the

pages of the good Fénelon.[52] "I fear," she writes to Saint Preux,

"that you do not gain all you might from religion in the conduct of

your life, and that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the

Christian. You believe prayers to be of scanty service. That is not,

you know, the doctrine of Saint Paul, nor what our Church professes.

We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill.

And whence should light and force come, if not from him who is their

very well-spring?... Let us be humble, to be sage; let us see our

weakness, and we shall be strong."[53] This was the opening of the

deistical reaction; it was thus, associated with everything that

struck imagination and moved the sentiment of his readers, that

Rousseau brought back those sophistical conclusions which Pascal had

drawn from premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervating

displacement of reason by celestial contemplation, which Fénelon had

once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous example. He was

justified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was nothing in

the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be found in

the letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for that

more famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the attractions

of an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a harmony of

circumstance that touched softer fibres.

For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a scene

of disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family.

A modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness

against the character of Wolmar,--supposed, we may notice in passing,

to be partially drawn from D'Holbach,--a man performing so long an

experiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a

surgeon engaged in vivisection.[54] It was, however, much less

difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so

unwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil that

was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful,

frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.[55] It may

be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in

her room, suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamber

of the hapless Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther

(1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, if

Saint Preux had not gone to see Julie take cream and cakes with her

children and her female servants. And perhaps the other and nobler

Charlotte of the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ (1809) would not have detained

us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie

had not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the

cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and

colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand

birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and Juan Fernandez.

There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightness

in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to those

who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New

Heloïsa.[56] Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far above

such pieces in Goethe's two famous romances. They have a clearness

and spontaneous freshness which are not among the bountiful gifts of

Goethe. There are other admirable landscapes in the New Heloïsa,

though not too many of them, and the minute and careful way in which

Rousseau made their features real to himself, is accidentally shown in

his urgent prayer for exactitude in the engraving of the striking

scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their old

love for one another.[57] "I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with

the Heloïsa before me," said Byron, "and am struck to a degree I

cannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and

the beauty of their reality."[58] They were memories made true by long

dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenes

ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which the

tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave

suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain

pines, the waters of the lake, "the populous solitude of bees and

birds," as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And

they were always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or

folly of the hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manichæan towards

nature. To him she was all good and bounteous. The demon forces that

so fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible. These were the

compositions that presently inspired the landscapes of _Paul and

Virginia_ (1788), of _Atala_ and _René_ (1801), and of _Obermann_

(1804), as well as those punier imitators who resemble their masters

as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms of David. They

were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling for nature, and not

the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated description of the

literary pastoral.[59]

This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn

between Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired.

The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, that

the union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetry

of nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau.[60] It only shows that

the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second

part of the New Heloïsa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion

to the _matinée à l'anglaise_ certainly proves that he had at any rate

forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth

in French literature.[61] The tendency to read Rousseau only in the

Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which are

constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record. Rousseau

assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done

into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation and

domestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in

his Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found

it in a household that was more, and not less, systematically

disciplined than those of the common society around him. The paradise

in which his Julie moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and

no less than an establishment of the best kind of the rural

middle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No most

sentimental savage could have found it endurable, or could himself

without profound transformation of his manners have been endured in

it. The New Heloïsa ends by exalting respectability, and putting the

spirit of insurrection to shame. Self-control, not revolt, is its last

word.

This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from Sénancour,

Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph of will, while their

reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will,

the little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common

rules. Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of

Madame de Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was marked

out with precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived

that the men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants,

except at their repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a

nurse, found their pastime in rambles with their mistress and her

children, and lived mainly with them. The men were amused by games for

which their master made regulated provision, now for summer, now for

winter, offering prizes of a useful kind for prowess and adroitness.

Often on a Sunday night all the household met in an ample chamber,

and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux inquired whether

this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Julie

wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe duties,

that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms, it

must always be at the cost of the essential.[62] The servants were

taken from the country, never from the town. They entered the

household young, were gradually trained, and never went away except to

establish themselves.

The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian,

that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters

nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations

of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and

servants will be more and more removed from the possession of such

qualities, and their relations further distant from such order and

friendliness, if writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness

of a domesticity that is at present only possible in a few rare cases,

or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of

character, that are the results of our present system. Undoubtedly it

is much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal

felicity, than for the rest of us to realise it. It was his function

to press ideals of sweeter life on his contemporaries, and they may be

counted fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this function

with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly persuasion. His scornful

diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and the

essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both

excellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a new

humaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking the

decrepitude of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among

the great farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions of

domestic service marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished

from the mere pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim of

the common people to an equal consideration, as equally useful and

equally capable of virtue and vice; and it implies the essential

priority of social over political reform.

The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table partakes of the

general plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous. The senses are

gratified without daintiness. The food is common, but excellent of its

kind. The service is simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere show, all

that depends on vulgar opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whose

value comes of their rarity, and whose names you must know before

finding any goodness in them, are banished without recall. Even in

such delicacies as they permit themselves, our friends abstain every

day from certain things which are reserved for feasts on special

occasions, and which are thus made more delightful without being more

costly. What do you suppose these delicacies are? Rare game, or fish

from the sea, or dainties from abroad? Better than all that; some

delicious vegetable of the district, one of the savoury things that

grow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar way,

some cheese from our mountains. The service is modest and rustic, but

clean and smiling. Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you

die of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your only

dessert, here take the place of honest dishes. Here people have not

the art of nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know how

to add grace to good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, to

drink merrily without losing reason, to sit long at table without

weariness, and always to rise from it without disgust.[63]

One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of those

middle exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich the

shopkeeper but impoverish his customers. Not one of these exchanges is

made without loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weaken

even a man of fortune. Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the

convenience of each party to the bargain serves as profit for both.

Thus the wool is sent to the factories, from which they receive cloth

in exchange; wine, oil, and bread are produced in the house; the

butcher pays himself in live cattle; the grocer receives grain in

return for his goods; the wages of the labourers and the

house-servants are derived from the produce of the land which they

render valuable.[64] It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest,

to carry to its highest point this confusion of what is so

fascinating in a book with what is practicable in society.

The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may

strike the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very

slow, just as people complain of the same things in Goethe's

_Wahlverwandtschaften_. Such complaint only proves inability, which is

or is not justifiable, to seize the spirit of the writer. The

expatiation was long and the movement slow, because Rousseau was full

of his thoughts; they were a deep and glowing part of himself, and did

not merely skim swiftly and lightly through his mind. Anybody who

takes the trouble may find out the difference between this expression

of long mental brooding, and a merely elaborated diction.[65] The

length is an essential part of the matter. The whole work is the

reflection of a series of slow inner processes, the many careful

weavings of a lonely and miserable man's dreams. And Julie expressed

the spirit and the joy of these dreams when she wrote, "People are

only happy before they are happy. Man, so eager and so feeble, made to

desire all and obtain little, has received from heaven a consoling

force which brings all that he desires close to him, which subjects it

to his imagination, which makes it sensible and present before him,

which delivers it over to him. The land of chimera is the only one in

this world that is worth dwelling in, and such is the nothingness of

the human lot, that except the being who exists in and by himself,

there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist."[66]

Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his public

with the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is the

restoration of marriage in the New Heloïsa to a rank among high and

honourable obligations, and its representation as the best support of

an equable life of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion.

Rousseau even invested it with the mysterious dignity as of some

natural sacrament. "This chaste knot of nature is subject neither to

the sovereign power nor to paternal authority," he cried, "but only to

the authority of the common Father." And he pointed his remark by a

bitter allusion to a celebrated case in which a great house had

prevailed on the courts to annul the marriage of an elder son with a

young actress, though her character was excellent, and though she had

befriended him when he was abandoned by everybody else.[67] This was

one of the countless democratic thrusts in the book. In the case of

its heroine, however, the author associated the sanctity of marriage

not only with equality but with religion. We may imagine the spleen

with which the philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and

their light esteem of marriage bonds, read Julie's eloquent account of

her emotions at the moment of her union with Wolmar. "I seemed to

behold the organ of Providence and to hear the voice of God, as the

minister gravely pronounced the words of the holy service. The purity,

the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so vividly set forth in the

words of scripture; its chaste and sublime duties, so important to the

happiness, order, and peace of the human race, so sweet to fulfil even

for their own sake--all this made such an impression on me that I

seemed to feel within my breast a sudden revolution. An unknown power

seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of my affections, and to

restore them to accordance with the law of duty and of nature. The

eternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now reads to the

depth of my heart."[68] She has all the well-known fervour of the

proselyte, and never wearies of extolling the peace of the wedded

state. Love is no essential to its perfection. "Worth, virtue, a

certain accord not so much in condition and age as in character and

temper, are enough between husband and wife; and this does not prevent

the growth from such a union of a very tender attachment, which is

none the less sweet for not being exactly love, and is all the more

lasting."[69] Years after, when Saint Preux has returned and is

settled in the household, she even tries to persuade him to imitate

her example, and find contentment in marriage with her cousin. The

earnestness with which she presses the point, the very sensible but

not very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of celibacy,

and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry, had

complaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the

fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.

Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people are

weary of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly

set in some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to

read; they assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood,

and the rest passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched by

Julie, and were no more capable of criticising her than Julie was

capable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her passion for

him. When we say that Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we

mean is that his book and its chief personage awoke emotion to

self-consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an impulse in

favour of social order, and then very calamitously at the same moment

divorced it from the fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcing

it from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason.

Apart from the general tendency of the New Heloïsa in numberless

indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the

presentation of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty,

self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct protest of singular

eloquence and gravity. Julie's father is deeply revolted at the bare

notion of marrying his daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his

vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of an

English nobleman. This is perhaps an infelicitous piece of

prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea of

England in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-hearted

freedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of very

straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his

mind as to the significance of birth. "My friend has nobility," cried

Lord Edward, "not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but graven

in his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own part,

by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but that

of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If you

know the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened,

the best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, I

don't care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it is

true, the slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of

the people, but their leaders. We hold the balance true between

people, and monarch. Our first duty is towards the nation, our second

towards him who governs; it is not his will but his right that we

consider.... We suffer no one in the land to say _God and my sword_,

nor more than this, _God and my right_."[70] All this was only

putting Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people

read the romance who were not likely to read the graver book. And

there was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number of

political propositions about government, and their transformation into

dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that

does not correspond with inequalities of worth.

There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of

other parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place

that they hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his

contempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank,

and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions of

humble rank. Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise

both those who have departed from it, and those who would depart from

it if they could. So Julie does her best to make the lot of the

peasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helping

them to change it for another. She teaches them to respect their

natural condition in respecting themselves. Her prime maxim is to

discourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuade

the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the true

pleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption of

towns.[71] Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he had

seen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral

visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the

publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers

the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible

rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his

rural scenes. "Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they

receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness,

clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins--these things offer a mournful

spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of

the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed."[72]

Yet there is no hint in the New Heloïsa of the socialism which Morelly

and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these desperate

horrors. Property, in every page of the New Heloïsa, is held in full

respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; the

servant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness;

disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and

more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality and

effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement

denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one

hand and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social

state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save

those which are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the

sober, cheerful, prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of

the reality of the field life of France,--this was the element that

filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.

Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about

that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering

brutes, and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many

traits in Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might

endear her even to our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house was

near a great high-road, and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one

of these was allowed to go empty away. And Julie had as many excellent

reasons to give for her charity, as if she had been one of the

philosophers of whom she thought so surpassingly ill. If you look at

mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling whose end

is to nourish feelings of humanity and brotherly love? From the point

of view of talent, why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar who

stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes me shed tears

over imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars is burdensome

to the state, of how many other professions that people encourage, may

you not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to whom I give

alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In short,

whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to the

beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering

humanity or to its image.[73] Nothing could be more admirably

illustrative of the author's confidence that the first thing for us to

do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shall

be added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necker,--a sort of

Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of this

doctrine on the great stage of affairs,--was hailed to power to ward

off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral

sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources

was driven away as an economist and a philosopher.

At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the

triumph of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the

dreams in which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved

by the fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he

filled the most generous of her children. No wide movement, we may be

sure, is thoroughly understood until we have mastered both its

material and its ideal sides. Materially, Rousseau's work was

inevitably fraught with confusion because in this sphere not to be

scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects to their true causes,

is to be without any security that the causes with which we try to

deal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman statesman who

had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying the

economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing

capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But the

moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching that may have no bearing

on economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to

be corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the

contrary direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, the

processes are very complex. In measuring a man's influence within it

we have to balance. Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent in

leading men and women to desire simple lives, and a more harmonious

social order. Was this eminent benefit more than counterbalanced by

the eminent disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectual

direction? By commending irrational retrogression from active use of

the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?

To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproach

want of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness

and effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to

sentimental but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence that

formed the opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe a

place in the temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man

who has kindled in his generation a brighter flame of moral

enthusiasm, and a more eager care for the realisation of good and

virtuous ideals.

III.

The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and the

persecution which befell its author in consequence, recalls us to the

distinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, and

carries us away from light into the thick darkness of political

intrigue, obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at once

tyrannical and decrepit. It is almost impossible for us to realise the

existence in the same society of such boundless license of thought,

and such unscrupulous restraint upon its expression. Not one of

Rousseau's three chief works, for instance, was printed in France. The

whole trade in books was a sort of contraband, and was carried on with

the stealth, subterfuge, daring, and knavery that are demanded in

contraband dealings. An author or a bookseller was forced to be as

careful as a kidnapper of coolies or the captain of a slaver would be

in our own time. He had to steer clear of the court, of the

parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of the king

and the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all of

that organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times and

places where they raise their masked heads,--the bishops and

ecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot produced his

comedy to please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760).

Madame de Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg,

instigated and protected him, for Diderot had offended her.[74]

Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite

detected a reference to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had

relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the

Bastile.[75] Diderot was thrown for three months into Vincennes, where

we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind

(1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious doctrine,

really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress by

hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on

scientific experiment was of no value.[76]

The New Heloïsa could not openly circulate in France so long as it

contained the words, "I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner

than the mistress of a king." The last word was altered to "prince,"

and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Conti

and Madame de Boufflers.[77] No work of merit could appear without

more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of slavish

mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental grudge

of people who had influence in high quarters.[78]

If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the

eighteenth century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality

was reduced to an equally low level in dealing not only with the

police, but with their own accomplices, the book-writers. They excused

themselves from paying proper sums to authors, on the ground that they

were robbed of the profits that would enable them to pay such sums, by

the piracy of their brethren in trade. But then they all pirated the

works of one another. The whole commerce was a mass of fraud and

chicane, and every prominent author passed his life between two fires.

He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than robbery and

piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On the

other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity,

alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration.

As we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their

struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving

and ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish

that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of

them had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in

connection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity,

self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of human

emancipation and progress. Happily the mutual hate of the Christian

factions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to

their mutual love, prevented a common union for burning the

philosophers as well as their books. All torments short of this they

endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without any

hope of being rewarded after their death, as truly good men must

always be capable of doing.

Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it

in even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing press

of France, and when we are counting up the contributions of

Protestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember

the indispensable services rendered by the freedom of the press in

Holland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth

century, as well as the shelter that it gave to the French thinkers in

the seventeenth, including Descartes, the greatest of them all. The

monstrous tediousness of printing a book at Amsterdam or the Hague,

the delay, loss, and confusion in receiving and transmitting the

proofs, and the subterranean character of the entire process,

including the circulation of the book after it was once fairly

printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more impetuous

temper. He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer, to

sell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript had then

to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam. Rousseau wrote it out in very

small characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care

of the chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of

Vaud. In passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the

officials. They tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that

they were handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had

ever meddled with. It was not until the chaplain claimed it in the

name of ambassadorial privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to go

on its way to the press.[79] Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not

only in the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, how

resolutely and carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of the

country in which he lived. The French government was anxious enough on

all grounds to secure for France the production of the books of which

France was the great consumer, but the severity of its censorship

prevented this.[80] The introduction of the books, when printed, was

tolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly have

endured to be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature. By a

greater inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once found

admission into the country, was also connived at. Thus M. de

Malesherbes, out of friendship for Rousseau, wished to have an edition

of the New Heloïsa printed in France, and sold for the benefit of the

author. That he should have done so is a curious illustration of the

low morality engendered by a repressive system imperfectly carried

out. For Rousseau had sold the book to Rey. Rey had treated with a

French bookseller in the usual way, that is, had sent him half the

edition printed, the bookseller paying either in cash or other books

for all the copies he received. Therefore to print an independent

edition in Paris was to injure, not Rey the foreigner, but the French

bookseller who stood practically in Rey's place. It was setting two

French booksellers to ruin one another. Rousseau emphatically declined

to receive any profit from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes,

you sold to Rey a right which you had not got, the right of sole

proprietorship, excluding the competition of a pirated reprint. Then,

answered Rousseau, if the right which I sold happens to prove less

than I thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of my

mistake, I owe to Rey compensation for any loss that he may

suffer.[81]

The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of reason was shown on

numerous occasions. As director of the book trade he was really the

censor of the literature of the time.[82] The story of his service to

Diderot is well known--how he warned Diderot that the police were

about to visit his house and overhaul his papers, and how when Diderot

despaired of being able to put them out of sight in his narrow

quarters, Malesherbes said, "Then send them all to me," and took care

of them until the storm was overpast. The proofs of the New Heloïsa

came through his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in

the affairs relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrusted

the whole matter to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confident

that, in acting through persons of such authority and position, he

should be protected against any unwitting illegality. Instead of being

sent to Rey, the manuscript was sold to a bookseller in Paris for six

thousand francs.[83] A long time elapsed before any proofs reached the

author, and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed in

France as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes was in some sort

the director of the enterprise, the author felt no alarm. Duclos came

to visit him one day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the Savoyard

Vicar's Profession of Faith. "What, citizen," he cried, "and that is

part of a book that they are printing at Paris! Be kind enough not to

tell any one that you read this to me."[84] Still Rousseau remained

secure. Then the printing came to a standstill, and he could not find

out the reason, because Malesherbes was away, and the printer did not

take the trouble to answer his letters. "My natural tendency," he

says, and as the rest of his life only too abundantly proved, "is to

be afraid of darkness; mystery always disturbs me, it is utterly

antipathetic to my character, which is open even to the pitch of

imprudence. The aspect of the most hideous monster would alarm me

little, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a figure in a

white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life."[85] So he at

once fancied that by some means the Jesuits had got possession of his

book, and knowing him to be at death's door, designed to keep the

Emilius back until he was actually dead, when they would publish a

truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.[86] He wrote

letter upon letter to the printer, to Malesherbes, to Madame de

Luxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did not come exactly when

he expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If he dropped his

conviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his book and the

defilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a similar

design upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were acquitted,

then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to remember

that all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant pain,

and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes threw

off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in their

stead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mild

climate and among a gentle people he should peacefully end his

days.[87] At other times he was fond of supposing M. de Luxembourg

not a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire living

in some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of books,

but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with the

squire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to the

happiness of theirs.[88] Alas, in spite of all his precautions, he had

unwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs. He and his book

were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a persecution set

in, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by giving his

reason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never recovered.

Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits.

That formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to

recognise her power and position,--a manly policy, as creditable to

their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made

them powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had

taken in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had

always been their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with

which corporations of lawyers always regard corporations of

ecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which

had been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion

of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of the

parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which the

system of confessional tickets was at this time being carried out.

Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of all

retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; and

was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At last

he gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercial

bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of

their fall, and nothing could save them. "I only know one man," said

Grimm, "in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in

fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe,

and this man is M. Rousseau." The parliaments went to work with

alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they

were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no

allies of the one even when destroying the other.

Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of

innovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp

of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the

school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their

number, like Voltaire or Helvétius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762.

On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be

burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For

Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he

courageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all his

works,[89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty in

identifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged

irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.[90]

The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general

demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least

likely to defend Rousseau.[91] The author was charged with saying not

only that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that the

Christian religion does not exist--paradox too flagrant even for the

writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced either

that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the name of the

author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared no worse,

but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of

letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.

The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was

creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but

he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in God

was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.[92] On the 8th

of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in

the fields. "Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night in

my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried

to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My

ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it

continuously through at least five or six times in this way. That

night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading,

and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of

Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The story

affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when

all at once I was roused by lights and noises."[93]

It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste

to carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the

proposed decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be

sure that if he were seized and examined, her own share and that of

Malesherbes in the production of the condemned book would be made

public, and their position uncomfortably compromised. It was to their

interest that he should avoid arrest by flight, and they had no

difficulty in persuading him to fall in with their plans. After a

tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sight

for seventeen years, and many embraces from the greater ladies of the

castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched on the first stage

of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to be driven from

place to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and

religious doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own

diseased imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home

of weariness and torment.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Conf._, x. 62.

[2] _Conf._, x.

[3] _Ib._ x. 70.

[4] Louis François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776), was

great-grandson of the brother of the Great Condé. He performed

creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession (in Piedmont

1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as director of

the secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was to make

Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia primarily,

and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate opposition to the

court, protesting against the destruction of the _parlements_ (1771),

and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally he had

the honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his deathbed.

See Martin's _Hist. de France_, xv. and xvi.

[5] _Conf._, 97. _Corr._, v. 215.

[6] _Corr._, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760.

[7] _Conf._, x. 98.

[8] The reader will distinguish this correspondent of Rousseau's,

_Comtesse_ de Boufflers-Rouveret (1727-18--), from the _Duchesse_ de

Boufflers, which was the title of Rousseau's Maréchale de Luxembourg

before her second marriage. And also from the _Marquise_ de Boufflers,

said to be the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at Lunéville, and

the mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the intimate of

Voltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage to

Napoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII.). See Jal's

_Dict. Critique_, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present

Comtesse de Boufflers (_Nouveaux Lundis_, iv. 163). She is the Madame

de Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his Temple

chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable manner

(Boswell's _Life_, ch. li. p. 467). Also much talked of in H.

Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768.

[9] Streckeisen, ii. 32.

[10] _Conf._, x. 71.

[11] For instance, _Corr._ ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.

[12] Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc.

[13] _Ib._, 29.

[14] _Conf._, x. 99.

[15] _Ib._, x. 57.

[16] _Ib._, xi. 119.

[17] _Corr._, ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761.

[18] _Ib._, ii. 102, 176, etc.

[19] _Conf._, x. 60.

[20] _Corr._, ii. 12.

[21] As M. St. Marc Girardin has put it: "There are in all Rousseau's

discussions two things to be carefully distinguished from one another;

the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the controversy.

The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions are full of

good sense." _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Aug. 1852, p. 501.

[22] _Corr._, ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.

[23] _Ib._, 1766. _Oeuv._, lxxv. 364.

[24] _Corr._, ii. 32. (1758.)

[25] _Corr._, ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779.

[26] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 102.

[27] 4th Letter, p. 375.

[28] _Mém._, ii. 299.

[29] _Corr._, ii. 98. July 10, 1759.

[30] _Corr._, ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759.

[31] _Ib._, ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761.

[32] _Ib._, ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761.

[33] _Ib._, ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.

[34] _Nouv. Hél._, III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed essays on

"Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul" were published in

London:--"With Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison

contained in these Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, Two

Letters on Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa." In the preface the reader

is told that these "two very masterly letters have been much

celebrated." See Hume's _Essays_, by Green and Grose, i. 69, 70.

[35] _Corr._, iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763.

[36] _Corr._, ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761.

[37] P. 294. Jan. 11, 1762.

[38] Madame Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife of a man

in the financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as much of her

fortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775. After that

she resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de Franqueville.

Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, _Causeries_, ii. 63.

[39] _Corr._, ii. 214. _Conf._, ix. 289.

[40] English translations of Rousseau's works appeared very speedily

after the originals. A second edition of the Heloïsa was called for as

early as May 1761. See _Corr._ ii. 223. A German translation of the

Heloïsa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six duodecimos.

[41] For instance, _Corr._, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762.

[42] Choderlos de La Clos: 1741-1803.

[43] Journal, iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857.)

[44] _Nouv. Hél._, III. xiv. 48.

[45] _E.g._ Letters, 40-46.

[46] Madame de Staël (1765-1817), in her _Lettres sur les écrits et le

caractère de J.J. Rousseau_, written when she was twenty, and her

first work of any pretensions. _Oeuv._, i. 41. Ed. 1820.

[47] Nowhere more pungently than in a little piece of some half-dozen

pages, headed, _Prédiction tirée d'un vieux Manuscrit_, the form of

which is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about French

music, _Le petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda_, though it seems to me to

be superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few verses from the

supposed prophecy of the man who should come--and of what he should

do. "Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et plusieurs croiront en lui.

Et il leur dira: Vous êtes des scélérats et des fripons, vos femmes

sont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens vivre parmi vous. Et il

ajoutera tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le pays où je suis né, et

je n'habiterai jamais le pays où je suis né.... Et il dira aussi qu'il

est impossible d'avoir des moeurs, et de lire des Romans, et il fera

un Roman; et dans son Roman le vice sera en action et la vertu en

paroles, et ses personages seront forcenés d'amour et de philosophie.

Et dans son Roman on apprendra l'art de suborner philosophiquement une

jeune fille. Et l'Ecolière perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et elle

fera avec son maître des sottises et des maximes.... Et le bel Ami

étant dans un Bateau seul avec sa Maîtresse voudra le jetter dans

l'eau et se précipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de la

Philosophie et de la Vertu," and so on, humorously enough in its way.

[48] See passages in Goncourt's _La Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 380.

[49] Musset-Pathay, II. 361. See Madame Roland's _Mém._, i. 207.

[50] _Corr._, March 3, and March 19, 1761. The criticisms of Ximénès,

a thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were entirely literary,

and were directed against the too strained and highly coloured quality

of the phrases--"baisers âcres"--among them.

[51] _Nouv. Hél._, V. v. 115.

[52] VI. vii.

[53] VI. vi.

[54] Michelet's _Louis XV. et Louis XVI._, p. 58.

[55] See Hettner's _Literaturgeschichte_, II. 486.

[56] IV. xi.

[57] IV. xvii. See vol. iii. 423.

[58] In 1816. Moore's _Life_, iii. 247; also 285. And the note to the

stanzas in the Third Canto,--a note curious for a slight admixture of

transcendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron, who, sentimental though

he was, usually rejoiced in a truly Voltairean common sense.

[59] "The present fashion in France, of passing some time in the

country, is new; at this time of the year, and for many weeks past,

Paris is, comparatively speaking, empty. Everybody who has a country

seat is at it, and such as have none visit others who have. This

remarkable revolution in the French manners is certainly one of the

best customs they have taken from England; and its introduction was

effected the easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's

writings. Mankind are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, when

living, was hunted from country to country, to seek an asylum, with as

much venom as if he had been a mad dog; thanks to the vile spirit of

bigotry, which has not received its death wound. Women of the first

fashion in France are now ashamed of not nursing their own children;

and stays are universally proscribed from the bodies of the poor

infants, which were for so many ages torture to them, as they are

still in Spain. The country residence may not have effects equally

obvious; but they will be no less sure in the end, and in all respects

beneficial to every class in the state." Arthur Young's _Travels_, i.

72.

[60] _Causeries_, xi. 195.

[61] _Nouv. Hél._, V. iii. "You remember Rousseau's description of an

English morning: such are the mornings I spend with these good

people."--Cowper to Joseph Hill, Oct. 25, 1765. _Works_, iii. 269. In

a letter to William Unwin (Sept. 21, 1779), speaking of his being

engaged in mending windows, he says, "Rousseau would have been charmed

to have seen me so occupied, and would have exclaimed with rapture

that he had found the Emilius who, he supposed, had subsisted only in

his own idea." For a description illustrative of the likeness between

Rousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see letter to Newton

(Sept. 18, 1784, v. 78), and compare it with the description of Les

Charmettes, making proper allowance for the colour of prose.

[62] IV. x. 260.

[63] V. ii. 37.

[64] V. ii. 47-52.

[65] Rousseau considered that the Fourth and Sixth parts of the New

Heloïsa were masterpieces of diction. _Conf._ ix. 334.

[66] VI. viii.. 298. _Conf._, xi. 106.

[67] The La Bédoyère case, which began in 1745. See Barbier, iv. 54,

59, etc.

[68] III. xviii. 84.

[69] III. xx. 116. In the letter to Christopher de Beaumont (p. 102),

he fires a double shot against the philosophers on the one hand, and

the church on the other; exalting continence and purity, of which the

philosophers in their reaction against asceticism thought lightly, and

exalting marriage over the celibate state, which the churchmen

associated with mysterious sanctity.

[70] I. lxii.

[71] V. ii.

[72] V. vii. 141.

[73] V. ii. 31-33.

[74] For the Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviii. 58.

[75] Morellet's _Mém._, i. 89-93. Rousseau, _Conf._, x. 85, etc. This

_Vision_ is also in the style of Grimm's _Pétit Prophète_, like the

piece referred to in a previous note, vol. ii. p. 31.

[76] Madame de Vandeul's _Mém. sur Diderot_, p. 27. Rousseau, _Conf._,

vii. 130.

[77] _Nouv. Hél._, V. xiii. 194. _Conf._, x. 43.

[78] The reader will find a fuller mention of the French book trade in

my _Diderot_, ch. vi.

[79] _Conf._, xi. 127.

[80] See a letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, Nov. 5, 1760. _Corr._,

ii. 157.

[81] _Corr._, ii. 157.

[82] C.G. de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721--guillotined, 1794),

son of the chancellor, and one of the best instructed and most

enlightened men of the century--a Turgot of the second rank--was

Directeur de la Librairie from 1750-1763. The process was this: a book

was submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's report

the director gave or refused permission to print, or required

alterations. Even after these formalities were complied with, the book

was liable to a decree of the royal council, a decree of the

parliament, or else a _lettre-de-cachet_ might send the author to the

Bastile. See Barbier, vii. 126.

After Lord Shelburne saw Malesherbes, he said, "I have seen for the

first time in my life what I never thought could exist--a man whose

soul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet who is full of life

and ardour." Mdlle. Lespinasse's _Lettres_, 90.

[83] See note, p. 132.

[84] _Conf._, xi. 134.

[85] _Conf._, xi. 139.

[86] _Ib._, xi. 139. _Corr._, ii. 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761, etc.

[87] _Conf._, xi. 150.

[88] Fourth Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377.

[89] With one trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the Opera of

Omphale (1752): _Écrits sur la Musique_, p. 337.

[90] See Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857). A

succinct contemporary account of the general situation is to be found

in D'Alembert's little book, the _Destruction des Jésuites_.

[91] Grimm, for instance: _Corr. Lit._, iii. 117.

[92] _Corr._, ii. 337. June 7, 1672. _Conf._, xi. 152, 162.

[93] _Conf._, xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in _Judges_,

ch. xix.

CHAPTER II.

PERSECUTION.[94]

Those to whom life consists in the immediate consciousness of

their own direct relations with the people and circumstances that are

in close contact with them, find it hard to follow the moods of a man

to whom such consciousness is the least part of himself, and such

relations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was no sooner in

the post-chaise which was bearing him away towards Switzerland, than

the troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a pale and

distant past, and he returned to a world where was neither parliament,

nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal arrest. He

took up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it, and

again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. His

dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and

before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassioned

version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual fine

sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself

always preserved a certain tenderness for it.[95] The contrast

between this singular quietism and the angry stir that marked

Voltaire's many flights in post-chaises, points like all else to the

profound difference between the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrill

cries under any personal vexation, this calm utterance:--"Though the

consequences of this affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from

which I shall never come up again so long as I live, I bear these

gentlemen no grudge. I am aware that their object was not to do me any

harm, but only to reach ends of their own. I know that towards me they

have neither liking nor hate. I was found in their way, like a pebble

that you thrust aside with the foot without even looking at it. They

ought not to say they have performed their duty, but that they have

done their business."[96] A new note from a persecuted writer.

Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that

he was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing

outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active

resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng

of phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense

of more actual impression. "It is amazing," he wrote, "with what ease

I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the

anticipation of it alarms and confuses me when I see it coming, so

the memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment

after it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself

incessantly in anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a

diversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those which

have gone. I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have suffered in

foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary,

being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and brood

and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I

wish."[97] The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. "I

concern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about

the offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him,

on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he

would do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten

straightway." Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we

may easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he called

his natural ingratitude. Kindness was not much more vividly understood

by him than malice. It was only one form of the troublesome

interposition of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry back

from it to the real world of his dreams. If any man called practical

is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his

chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that

journey through France less than thirty years later might have seen

the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most

righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the

land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of

improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of

toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with

passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought

of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially

foresaw and helped to prepare,[98] while the common politicians, like

Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game--the elemental forces

rising unseen into tempest around them.

He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the

house of an old friend at Yverdun,[99] where native air, the beauty of

the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all

weariness and fatigue.[100] Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincere

feeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates too

closely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroy

him.[101] A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at

Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be

publicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author,

if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June

19).[102] Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free

Government which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have

condemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic

manner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his

part.[103] Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another. His

two books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau was

informed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its way

admonishing him to quit the canton within the space of fifteen

days.[104] This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village in

the principality of Neuchâtel (July 10), then part of the dominions of

the King of Prussia.[105] Rousseau had some antipathy to Frederick,

both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and

because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot

respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had

composed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a

philosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriously

being words of equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also a

passage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which was

commonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians. Still

Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean passions usually only rule

the weak, and have little hold over the strong. He boldly wrote both

to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of the principality,

informing them that he was there, and asking permission to remain in

the only asylum left for him upon the earth.[106] He compared himself

loftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a

vein that must have amused the strong man. "I have said much ill of

you, perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, from

Geneva, from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your

states. Perhaps I was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of

which you are worthy. Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I

seek none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty that I am

in your power, and that I am so of set design. Your majesty will

dispose of me as shall seem good to you."[107] Frederick, though no

admirer of Rousseau or his writings,[108] readily granted the required

permission. He also, says Lord Marischal, "gave me orders to furnish

him his small necessaries if he would accept them; and though that

king's philosophy be very different from that of Jean Jacques, yet he

does not think that a man of an irreproachable life is to be

persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs to build

him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not accept,

nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him."[109] When the

offer of the flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as

delicate terms as possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds

which may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather touching

simplicity.[110] "I have enough to live on for two or three years," he

said, "but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the present

condition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, go

and eat grass and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread from

him."[111] Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of

letters, and one very honourable for the person concerned.[112] And we

recognise its dignity the more when we contrast it with the baseness

of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia while

Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was

sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious

expectation that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia

himself a pension.[113] And Rousseau was a poor man, living among the

poor and in their style. His annual outlay at this time was covered by

the modest sum of sixty louis.[114] What stamps his refusal of

Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only did

not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it.

Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.

Joyfully, replied Rousseau, "but as I cannot subsist without the aid

of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it

might otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for

nothing."[115] In the same year, we may add, when the tremendous

struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote a

second terse epistle to the king, and with this their direct

communication came to an end. "Sire, you are my protector and my

benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to give me

bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that

sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its

work only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for

kings of your stuff, and you are still far from the term; time

presses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom well your heart, O

Frederick! Can you dare to die without having been the greatest of

men? Would that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubtable,

covering his states with multitudes of men to whom he should be a

father; then will J.J. Rousseau, the foe of kings, hasten to die at

the foot of his throne."[116] Frederick, strong as his interest was in

all curious persons who could amuse him, was too busy to answer this,

and Rousseau was not yet recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and

popularity.

Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat

bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between the

gorges of the Jura and the Lake of Neuchâtel, and is famous in our day

for its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley,

with the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of

it, is nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In

winter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the

surrounding hills admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early.

Rousseau's description, accurate and recognisable as it is,[117]

strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of

scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines,

changes of light, soft variations of colour; the landscape lives for

him with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all of

which the swift passing stranger is very cold.

His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other

houses, and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the

home in which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming

cascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble

sort, and here that interest in plants which had always been strong in

him, began to grow into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling

about them, that when in his botanical expeditions he came across a

single flower of its kind, he could never bring himself to pluck it.

His sight, though not good for distant objects, was of the very finest

for things held close; his sense of smell was so acute and subtle

that, according to a good witness, he might have classified plants by

odours, if language furnished as many names as nature supplies

varieties of fragrance.[118] He insisted in all botanising and other

walking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the heat of the

dog-days; he declared that the action of the sun did him good. When

the days began to turn, the summer was straightway at an end for him:

"My imagination," he said, in a phrase which went further through his

life than he supposed, "at once brings winter." He hated rain as much

as he loved sun, so he must once have lost all the mystic fascination

of the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through pale showers, and

now again must have lost the sombre majesty of the pines of his valley

dripping in torn edges of cloud, and all those other sights in

landscape that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense.

One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of

Lord Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendship

which he felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And

the sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the

strange refugee who had come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a

kind of shaggy compassion, as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His

letters, which are numerous enough, abound in expressions of hearty

good-will. These, if we reflect on the genuine worth, veracity,

penetration, and experience of the old man who wrote them, may fairly

be counted the best testimony that remains to the existence of

something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.[119] It is

here no insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and

weather-beaten Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's

rectitude of heart and true sensibility.[120]

He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, who

had joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a true

solicitude and considerateness both for her and for him.[121] It was

his constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacques

should accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trio

of philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry is

shown by the pains he took in settling the route for the journey.[122]

The plan only fell through in consequence of Frederick's cordial

urgency that his friend should end his days with him; he returned to

Prussia and lived at Sans Souci until the close, always retaining

something of his good-will for "his excellent savage," as he called

the author of the Discourses. They had some common antipathies,

including the fundamental one of dislike to society, and especially to

the society of the people of Neuchâtel, the Gascons of Switzerland.

"Rousseau is gay in company," Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, "polite,

and what the French call _aimable_, and gains ground daily in the

opinion of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue to

persecute him, and he is pestered with anonymous letters."[123]

Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand.

Voltaire had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of

Geneva against its too famous citizen,[124] though for a man of less

energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now in the thick of,

might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard he

found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the

unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting

persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a

false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take

his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.[125]

On the whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word, though

not very categorically given,[126] that he had nothing to do with the

action taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequately

explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva,

which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,[127]

and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their

town a man whose democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so

justly dreaded.[128] Moultou, a Genevese minister, in the full tide

of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of Emilius, met Voltaire at

the house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out well, cried the

patriarch; "the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you have done ill to

write what you have written; promise for the future to respect the

religion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and perhaps he

will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or two to

his book." "Never," cried the ardent Moultou; "Jean Jacques never puts

his name to works to disown them after."[129] Voltaire disowned his

own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge

to Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards,

professed an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would

talk of nothing else. "I swear to you," wrote Moultou, "that I could

not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; I

could have sworn that he loved you."[130] And there really was no

acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealing

with "one all fire and fickleness, a child."

Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of

professed unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The

doctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the

lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of

course. In the same spirit of generous emulation, Christopher de

Beaumont, "by the divine compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint

Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost," had

issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful documents in which

bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last century

and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead and

decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually in

proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and an

archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom

in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762)

is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the

mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man,

after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never

showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and

unmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere

self-command, such closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in

reading the matchless banter with which Voltaire assailed his

theological enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we

realise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire had

given us. We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, while

Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre, the

crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, the

Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the Holy

Ghost, is restored from the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes

a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing a man. Voltaire

often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised the

archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed

him as an equal. "Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What

common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And

what is there between me and you?" And he persevered in this distant

lofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We

feel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was

because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of

dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his

character. He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently,

that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rank

and post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and

ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words

heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most

sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that

our passage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be

wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect for

others. All this was actually his mind. And hence the little

difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to his

other antagonists, on a worthy level.

Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which

he had been condemned, and of the persecution which was inflicted on

him by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high

remonstrance. "You accuse me of temerity," he cried; "how have I

earned such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that

with so much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that with

so much respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you,

my lord, how do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you

speak with such scanty justice and so little decency, with so small

respect and so much levity? You call me impious, and of what impiety

can you accuse me--me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to

pay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor of man except to

persuade all men to love one another? The impious are those who

unworthily profane the cause of God by making it serve the passions of

men. The impious are those who, daring to pass for the interpreters of

divinity, and judges between it and man, exact for themselves the

honours that are due to it only. The impious are those who arrogate to

themselves the right of exercising the power of God upon earth, and

insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at their own good

will and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels read in the

church. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears of

indignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shall

render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have

dared to put his house.... My lord, you have publicly insulted me:

you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were a

private person like myself, so that I could cite you before an

equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with my

book, and you with your mandate, assuredly you would be declared

guilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as the

wrong was public. But you belong to a rank that relieves you from the

necessity of being just, and I am nothing. Yet you who profess the

gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you know

what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have done: I have nothing

more to say to you, and I hold my peace."[131]

The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this

is a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his

opinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should

have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the

controversialists of a very controversial time. Some of his strokes in

defence of his first famous assault on civilisation are as hard, as

direct, and as effective as any in the records of polemical

literature. We will give one specimen from the letter to the

Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argument

that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The Savoyard

Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice

of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, and the

questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop

thus:--"But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than

those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?

By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself

known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and

heroes he extols with such assurance? How many generations of men

between him and the historians who have preserved the memory of these

events?" First, says Rousseau in answer, "it is in the order of things

that human circumstances should be attested by human evidence, and

they can be attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and

Sparta existed, because contemporaries assure me that they existed. In

such a case this intermediate communication is indispensable. But why

is it necessary between God and me? Is it simple or natural that God

should have gone in search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?

Second, nobody is obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and

nobody will be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fact

of which we are not witnesses is only established by moral proofs, and

moral proofs have various degrees of strength. Will the divine justice

hurl me into hell for missing the exact point at which a proof becomes

irresistible? If there is in the world an attested story, it is that

of vampires; nothing is wanting for judicial proof,--reports and

certificates from notables, surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But who

believes in vampires, and shall we all be damned for not believing?

Third, _my constant experience and that of all men is stronger in

reference to prodigies than the testimony of some men_."

He then strikes home with a parable. The Abbé Pâris had died in the

odour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went on

at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were

made whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant

of the Rue St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, "My

lord, I know that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean de

Pâris, nor in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to work

upon his tomb in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous

city in the world; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just

seen the saint in person raised from the dead in the spot where his

bones were laid." The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail

of such a circumstance that could strike a beholder. "I am persuaded

that on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating him

who testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, his

confessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from his

speech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when having

no confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion that

he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are a

convulsionary, and have seen Saint Pâris resuscitated. There is

nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many other wonders!" The

man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally by a number of

other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of sound

sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some would send the

man to Bedlam, "but you after a grave reprimand, will be content with

saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of sound

sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not know

how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist.

Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: I

give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to

make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any other

sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even

according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs

which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral

possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order

and purely supernatural."[132]

Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris

was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers

at his gates. "If I had declared for atheism," he says bitterly, "they

would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in

peace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch

over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high

favour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and I

should have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel

would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would

not have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken the

trouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway,

an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if

some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle.

Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment

me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at

me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their

sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their

importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call

to lay me in my very grave with weariness."[133]

He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant

neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known.

It was at Neuchâtel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment

of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The

peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended,

magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick

promulgated his famous bull:--"Let the parsons who make for themselves

a cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and

deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful,

enjoy the plenitude of his mercy."[134] When Rousseau came within the

territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris,

Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that

saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of

the less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not,

without failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect

the public profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight

years before, attended the religious services with regularity. He even

wrote to the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and

protesting the sincerity of his union with the reformed

congregation.[135] The result of this was that the pastor came to tell

him how great an honour he held it to count such a member in his

flock, and how willing he was to admit him without further examination

to partake of the communion.[136] Rousseau went to the ceremony with

eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may respect

his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly more

edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite,

merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury.

In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years

of his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he

calls the inactive chattering of the parlour--people sitting in front

of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the

tongue--he learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow

about with him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the

village, and chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of his

work to young women about to marry, always on the condition that they

should suckle their children when they came to have them. If a little

whimsical, it was a harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter

to think of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of

noblemen making it the business of their lives to run after ribands. A

society clothed in breeches was incensed about the same time by

Rousseau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest, the furred

bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There was nothing very wonderful

in this departure from use. An Armenian tailor used often to visit

some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him, and reflected that

such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the circumstances

of his bodily disorder.[137] Here was a solid practical reason for

what has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain.

Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham had

for coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a

desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do with

Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like

the Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so.

We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it was

so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would be

very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities of

this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of

articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by

reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations

on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of

experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about

unknowable trifles.

During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.

Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by

curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments,

came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending

people to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. "I

had never been free from strangers for six weeks," he writes. "Two

days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days

later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese,

recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill

again, and he has only just gone away."[138] One visitor, writing home

to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage,

describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch us with

surprise:--"Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what true

politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and

cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different

picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and

sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great

mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like

of which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes

an interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him

speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting

grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats and

jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper."[139] He was not so

civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with

a word of most sardonic roughness.[140] But he could also be very

generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an

outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happens

rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment,

nor to exact it."[141] He received hundreds of letters, some seeking

an application of his views on education to a special case, others

craving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he had

been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage of

letters, which after all contained little more than reproaches,

insults, menaces, imbecilities.[142]

Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with

the Prince of Würtemberg, then living near Lausanne.[143] The prince

had a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her

upbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please

to direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to

direct the education of princes or princesses.[144] His undaunted

correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and

faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the

fondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested,

and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and

admonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal,

but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought

he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate

spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his

eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness

in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple and

methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when

Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond

of his wife,--all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves

a place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power which

Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane

education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, close

and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.

But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one,

and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince

sent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless

with their details of the nursery, may well have become a little

tedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.[145]

The famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who

could have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.[146]

People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky

philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends

whose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of

glory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks.

It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and

Boswell in the list of the multitudes with whom he had to do at this

time.[147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just

returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him that

his father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of an

obscure Swiss pastor. He had just "yielded to his fate, sighed as a

lover, and obeyed as a son." "How sorry I am for our poor Mademoiselle

Curchod," writes Moultou to Rousseau; "Gibbon whom she loves, and to

whom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has come

to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old

passion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter that

makes my heart ache." He then entreats Rousseau to use his influence

with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extolling

to him the lady's worth and understanding.[148] "I hope Mr. Gibbon

will not come," replied the sage; "his coldness makes me think ill of

him. I have been looking over his book again [the _Essai sur l'étude

de la littérature_, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is

strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not

think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either."[149] Whether

Gibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had

been said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that

this extraordinary man should have been less precipitate in

condemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger.[150]

Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson "rolling his majestic frame in

his usual manner" on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his

travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord

Marischal, and here his indomitable passion for making the personal

acquaintance of any one who was much talked about, naturally led him

to seek so singular a character as the man who was now at Motiers.

What Rousseau thought of one who was as singular a character as

himself in another direction, we do not know.[151] Lord Marischal

warned Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full

of visionary ideas, even having seen spirits--a serious proof of

unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of

Frederick's court at Berlin. "I only hope," says the sage Scot, of the

Scot who was not sage, "that he may not fall into the hands of people

who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception you

gave him."[152] As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell to

a place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously.

Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this is

the proper place for us very briefly to speak.

The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their

independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which

had begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli

(1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the

government of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said,

"There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and that

is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this

brave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty,

entitle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach them

how to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle will

one day astonish Europe,"[153]--a presentiment that in a sense came

true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on the

little island seven years later than the publication of this passage.

Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August

1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for the

purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and

a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in

the application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no

intention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of

inducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a

history of their exploits.[154] Rousseau, however, did not understand

the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very idea

of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he entered

into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself with

Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year

he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and

opinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would

produce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free and

valorous people.[155] In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he

urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with

results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768),

and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long

day afterwards. "Mind your own affairs," at length cried Johnson

sternly to him, "and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would

empty your head of Corsica."[156] At the end of 1765, the immortal

hero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero at

Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter

in wonderful French. "You will forget all your cares for many an

evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepest

obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has done me

marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had

sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if

you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to

help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they

have acquired with so much heroism--if you have cooled towards these

gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can

say."[157]

Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of

Rousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other

enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus

of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper

found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents

with which we certainly need not concern ourselves.[158] Next, a very

real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new

place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For

France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of

the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese

senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)--an iniquitous

transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to

justice, humanity, reason, and policy.[159] Civilisation would have

been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed

herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the

acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a

state.[160]

The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva

into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his

partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political

rather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest

against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the

quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the

popular and aristocratic parties. This strife, after coming to a

height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification

of 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and the

roots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the

authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had

been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute,

and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular

side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had

condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the

oligarchs who condemned it.

Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved

in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were

engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his

ears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to

fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day.

But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys

with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of

the world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is

wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men about

him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has

measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among the

elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who

is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his

fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and self-sufficience true.

The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long

persecution far surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers

of the time. In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all

due forms his rights of burgess-ship and citizenship in the city and

republic of Geneva.[161] And at length he broke forth against his

Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a long

but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which his

enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If any

one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the

treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities

of his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible

letters. The second part of them may interest the student of political

history by its account of the working of the institutions of the

little republic. We seem to be reading over again the history of a

Greek city; the growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasing

number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfair

proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislative

and administrative function (including especially the judicial) by the

oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic

ends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed by

metabolé or overthrow of the established constitution, ending in

foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens would have treated

any Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just as

sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the Social

Contract that did appear, and for just the same reasons.

Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of

burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal

right, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that

the laws had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed

itself of an equally legal right, its _droit négatif_, and declined to

entertain the representation, without giving any reasons.

Unfortunately for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new

vindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnation

and burning of his manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the

Letters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the

same faggot served for that and for Voltaire's Philosophical

Dictionary (April 1765).[162] It was also burned at the Hague (Jan.

22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that at

Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclopædists and

their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal of

the magistrates in motion.[163] The vanity and egoism of rationalistic

sects can be as fatal to candour, justice, and compassion as the

intolerant pride of the great churches.