not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New
Heloïsa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with
vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the
history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the
parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It
filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task.
It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure
inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic
arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed
nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for
mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity,
self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was
the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to
cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was
the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of
Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the
Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education
that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to
that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.
Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and
pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the
Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left;
and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which
the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to
state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the
account truly would be to write the history of the first French
Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with
Emilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted the
children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior
spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of
revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science.
It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampère, La Place, Cuvier,
Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]
In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the
extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we
have already spoken.[328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau
of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of
the "divine Emilius," and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his
inspirer and his master.[329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless,
and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic
enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into
German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an
incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in
being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown into
company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause
of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.[330] Pestalozzi
(1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful
of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his
principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension
and more intelligent exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the
Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806),
one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that
among previous works to which he owes a debt, "first and last he names
Rousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no
previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the
actual," and so forth.[331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a
Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, such
as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The
worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degree
of intelligence.[332]
In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and
must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation
was called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives
one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is
not very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to
come, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations
on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted
more attention. Reference has already been made to Paley.[333] Adam
Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has
many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.[334] Kames's
Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in
references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often
to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude
notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was
probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic
lines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set him
free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor
should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as
Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps
more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in
our literature of politics, and in its composition the author was
avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the
materialistic school.
In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that
democratic tendency in education, which political and other
circumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and
Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process
concerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has often
been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, Fénelon, busy themselves about
the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the
world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of
circumstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century this
monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same
general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly.
Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man
as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the
infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural
cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such
a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope
of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had
every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor
self-sufficing.
Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it
contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we
may be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's
profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing
of the natural man in things temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent
document which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the
expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of
nature--a document most hyperbolically counted by some French
enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of
sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[273] _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, ii. 276, 278.
[274] _Lettres à mon Fils_ (1758), and _Les Conversations d'Emilie_
(1783).
[275] _Lettres Péruviennes._
[276] _Oeuv._, ii. 785-794.
[277] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 65.
[278] _Emile_, I. 27.
[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman
society of the second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus
to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting the
solicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with
the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men
discussed in the schools the educational theories of Rousseau's
Emilius. (_La Relig. Romaine_, ii. 202.)
[280] See also his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for
girls, V. 27.
[281] _Emile_, I. 93, etc.
[282] _Emile_, II. 141.
[283] _Emile_, II. 156-160.
[284] _Emile_, III. 338-345.
[285] III. 358, etc.
[286] _Emile_, II. 263-267.
[287] _Levana_, ch. iii. § 54.
[288] _Emile_, II. 163.
[289] The Ninth Promenade (_Rêveries_, 309).
[290] _Emile_, I. 23.
[291] II. 109.
[292] II. 111.
[293] _Emile_, II. 113-117.
[294] II. 121.
[295] II. 143.
[296] _Emile_, III. 382.
[297] II. 227.
[298] IV. 10.
[299] _Emile_, III. 394.
[300] V. 199.
[301] The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in
_Candide_.
[302] _Emile_, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage, as
far as it goes, is that in the _Confessions_ (xi. 136):--"The
disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of
the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual
dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or
three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of
hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general
discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the
obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better
judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most
capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this
prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter
elsewhere."
[303] _Emile_, V. 220.
[304] IV. 85.
[305] _Emile_, IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply to
Lavoisier's request that his life might be spared from the guillotine
for a fortnight, in order that he might complete some experiments,
that the Republic has no need of chemists.
[306] IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784
to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes in
words that seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:--"I am
convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without
government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the
former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as
powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence
of governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves
and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe."
Tucker's _Life of Jefferson_, i. 255.
[307] Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the _Essay
on Indifference_ he often appeals to him as the vindicator of the
religious sentiment (_e.g._ i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837). The
same influence is seen still more markedly in the _Words of a
Believer_ (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a kind
of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in the
first days (_e.g._ § xix. "Tous naissent égaux," etc., § xxi., etc.)
The _Book of the People_ is thoroughly Rousseauite.
[308] _Emile_, IV. 105.
[309] _Emile_, IV. 63.
[310] _Emile_, IV. 273.
[311] _Emile_, IV. 83.
[312] _Emile_, II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudent
observations on the folly of teaching geography to little children.
[313] _Emile_, IV. 68.
[314] V. 231, etc.
[315] _Emile_, IV. 71.
[316] _Emile_, IV. 73.
[317] IV. 77.
[318] _Emile_, V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.
[319] _Emile_, V. 78.
[320] V. 122.
[321] V. 129, 130.
[322] Well did Jean Paul say, "If we regard all life as an educational
institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all
the nations he has seen than by his nurse."--_Levana._
[323] _Tableau des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain._ _Oeuv._, vi. pp. 264,
523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]
[324] _Emile et Sophie_, i.
[325] For an account of some of these, see Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iii.
211, 252, 347, etc. Also _Corr. Inéd._, p. 143.
[326] For the early date at which Rousseau's power began to meet
recognition, see D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.
[327] _Louis xv. et xvi._, p. 226.
[328] See above, vol. ii. p. 193.
[329] Hettner, III. iii., 2, p. 27, _s.v._ Herder.
[330] The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's name is
most commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. "It is
supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already
marked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides this
development, the features of a man's countenance form themselves
insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual
wearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affections
mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when
they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it."
IV. 49, 50.
[331] Author's Preface, x.
[332] See an excellent page in M. Joret's _Herder_, 322.
[333] See above, vol. ii. p. 191.
[334] _E.g._ pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.
[335] _E.g._ Bk. I. § 5, p. 279. § 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion
concerning the female sex).
[336] Vv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, _n._)
that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist
as "an Orpheus and omnipotent in song," coincides with Rousseau's
comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to "the divine Orpheus singing the
first hymn" (_Emile_, IV. 205).
CHAPTER V.
THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
The band of dogmatic atheists who met round D'Holbach's
dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not an
ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a
generation with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace,
not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christian
dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of
this kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold which
Christianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, and
of the durableness of those conditions in human character, to which
some belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of good
attributes brings solace and nourishment. A movement like that of
Christianity does not pass through a group of societies, and then
leave no trace behind. It springs from many other sources besides that
of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream of its influence
must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has been
confined to the least informed portions of a community. The
Encyclopædists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken
ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on
the one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were
both of them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a
host of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic
machine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole;
that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and
that to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objective
truth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth and the
reason which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as
active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may
become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianity
had given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, which
was not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark a
permanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature.
There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreading
modification than any which the French atheists could effect, before
all debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, its
elevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanently
preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less
questionable to the understanding.
Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There
must be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional,
scientific, and material. And, above all, there must be the slow
steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all the
elements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief that
has disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new.
Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which
Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's
profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was
in many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the
application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important
group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under
the circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive
in association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of
articles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions
which were at that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of
Rousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of the
corresponding religious reaction in England, because the former never
acquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latter
did, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable
of its developments. In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective
character of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of
any great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom the
sublimation of individualism. But in itself it was a far less
retrogressive, as well as a far less powerful, movement. It kept fewer
of those dogmas which gradual change of intellectual climate had
reduced to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some of
its own, which a still further extension of the same change is
assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless,
along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never
willingly let die.
The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course
to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in
early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the
active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe,
reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which
the Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric
which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with
its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and
practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious
imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental
direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain
distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of
histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact that
these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature,
will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity
associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in
their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods
of which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves with
something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised
deities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while
intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and
diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to
keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly
expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.
Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much
precision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a
doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the
practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties
of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without
qualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in with
the eighteenth century. It would be impossible to name any century
since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be
found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a
supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a
special revelation.[337] A præter-christian deism, or the principle of
natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of
a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea
of a definite lawgiver? The very scholastic disputations themselves,
by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning
faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not
always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could
have sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle of
every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that
the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever there
is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin to
reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners
might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their
work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into
eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free
thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged
and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed
bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at
strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in
many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of
Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling
which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of
man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards
the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the
moral timidity of a dark and stricken age had once sought shade from
the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting.
The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within
the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years
to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those
limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent
judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation,
gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the records
themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one
shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the
sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of
England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent
in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile
shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of
dissolution.
All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found
in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a
more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and
not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference
to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with
reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were
one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the
middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies
uncorrected by science always exert over certain temperaments, had
been full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away
with a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the
immortal _De Imitatione_, in whom the special qualities of Christian
doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout
aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was not
the deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism
on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formal
acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or
else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had
travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked
strength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the latter
case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction
of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined
to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not
governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment,
and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of
property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral
foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for a
purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis
of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the
alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of
spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.
The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his
profession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this.
Though the Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round
with rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the
evidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of the
universe, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but of
emotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith that
touches the hearts of many men must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did
not believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it with
majestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which he
believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third
side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation with
force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poor
description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life
than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off
into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment
suffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a
theological definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough
to give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet
luminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifying
consciousness of freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a number
of affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness by
multitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperament
for knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the human
soul,--for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of
heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a creed, and
so has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow of
contemplative transport. It is impossible to set about disproving it,
for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness of
logomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is traced
upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are only
content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You cannot
demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks the
Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the
best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being
who moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the
name of God.
"To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I
have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary
consequence flowing from them. But I do not know any the better for
this the being to whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from
my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more I
confound myself. I have full assurance that he exists, and that he
exists by himself. I recognise my own being as subordinate to his and
all the things that are known to me as being absolutely in the same
case. I perceive God everywhere in his works; I feel him in myself; I
see him universally around me. But when I fain would seek where he is,
what he is, of what substance, he glides away from me, and my troubled
soul discerns nothing."[339]
"In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite
essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me.
The less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say
to him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate
ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to my
veritable source and fount. The worthiest use of my reason is to make
itself as naught before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it is
the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awful
majesty of thy greatness."[340]
Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like
fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent
Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the
orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden
refutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour to
listen to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a
region towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, but
from which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazen
barriers. It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was
the restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one must turn to such
a book as Helvétius's, which was supposed to reveal the whole inner
machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece of
mechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism,
receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it is
placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It was this
free and energetic inner life of the individual which the Savoyard
Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre of
that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in a
universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in
whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the
advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by
turning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the
Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse
upon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding.[341] There
is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseau
chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading
projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days,
ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding
defect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to
quicken. And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.
Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather?
Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting,
imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break
of a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed
between fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alps
crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long level
shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with a
thousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas.[342] This
was the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and
hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of
peace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound.
Rousseau's sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it
did not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the
diviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which
such a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, the
mysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful and
impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach more
than a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours of
tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, to
bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to
invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I have
grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye."
The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own
conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence
too profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires
as to the special relations of that order to himself. "I penetrate all
my faculties," he said, "with the divine essence of the author of the
world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts,
but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he
should change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles?
Could I, who must love above all else the order established by his
wisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such order
troubled for my sake? Nor do I ask of him the power of doing
righteousness; why ask for what he has given me? Has he not bestowed
on me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom
to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I will
it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what he
seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish
something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil."[343]
We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and the
manliness which it would engender in the character that were strong
enough to practise it. But a divinity who has conceded no right of
petition is still further away from our lives than the divinities of
more popular creeds.
Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and
complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the
religious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first
clothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth
miss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is
this? Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a
hidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that the
most touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts of
human life. Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinary
men, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it did
not enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this shows
that his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion of
insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so many
cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitously
adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner craving
and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the
wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic
theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him
whether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though he
concludes more graciously with the hope that in another state the
wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than
his own.[344] But the divine pitifulness which we owe to
Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished by
those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is
without sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some
formula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left and
constituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the bad
man who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of
circumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the frank
sense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequate
explanation of the foundations of moral responsibility.
Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had
at any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of
the gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme
Being upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from
the guilt that brings misery,--that is at the moment when conduct
begins to follow the preponderant motives or the will,--did thus
effectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of our
sympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment.
Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventy
years, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who has
left us there, with no other solace than that he is good and just and
all-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if he
would. This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to impose
upon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men,
thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had then
under the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them. The
faith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, though
just as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying a
spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by the human
intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father's
excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and
gratitude and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for
the God whom they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love
for their brethren whom they had seen.
The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one of
reverential scepticism. "The holiness of the gospel," he said, "is an
argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry
to find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all
their pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here the
tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, what
purity, in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what
loftiness in his maxims! Assuredly there was something more than human
in such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death. If the
life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death
of Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that the history of the
gospels is invented at pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion of
invention; and the facts about Socrates are less attested than the
facts about Christ.[345] Yet with all that, this same gospel abounds
in things incredible, which are repugnant to reason, and which it is
impossible for any sensible man to conceive or admit. What are we to
do in the midst of all these contradictions? To be ever modest and
circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can neither reject
nor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the great being
who alone knows the truth."[346]
"I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions,
which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by
public worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve God
fittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart.
God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to
him. In other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time
infects even the gravest things, when we do them too often. Since
acquiring my new principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am
overwhelmed by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by
the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little what
pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, I
collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required
by the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to
annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who art
thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'"[347]
A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful
solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to
true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be
mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon
books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the
second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but
that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to
virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has
ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian,
Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with
such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.[348] It was turning
an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of
theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon
acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the
dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant,
but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry and
comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such
momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the
competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.
"Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardly
shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time
and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of
years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what
to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in
what faith he ought to have lived." The superiority of the sceptical
parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of the
Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the
biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of
assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all
serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern,
while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support
of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense
happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged
objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His
objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion
that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its
lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and
repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.
Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans of
every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to
disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very
instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was
satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he
knew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here and
hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these
truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the
Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New
Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the
Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the
heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in
the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any
man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either
reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing
on its efficacy or conclusiveness.
Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because
it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and
binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can
neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be
able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote,
to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The
temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil
rising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to be
imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding
as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those
instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of
its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to
associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long
brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an
assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake,
because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness
of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in
knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the
religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the
region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the
hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the
hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by
which generation after generation has added some small piece to the
temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete
sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or
beautiful character,--those who have an eye for all this may indeed
have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion,
but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude,
and sovereign pitifulness.
And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly
chills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit in
new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the
experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds,
brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations
with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life,
and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent
tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage
spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for
all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man
with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no
mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger
participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation
with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest
and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because
the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty,
practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and
paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith
in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many
possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men
in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by
manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that
govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how
much our destiny is shaped by the generation of the dead who have
prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the
direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the
future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to
the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who
are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in
the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a
positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening
of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it.
Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most
scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment
expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious
a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous
mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with
the eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation," he
wrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his
persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man
reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man
tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here
that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason
has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity
adorns with all purest delights."[349]
This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress at
the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have
marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days,
when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the
eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism.
But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous
natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the
dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards
good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is
lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out
by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry
indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard
Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to
contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond
contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these
fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and
still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,--that imperial
conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in
all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do
you ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from
youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain
cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which
he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have
become the ruling harmony of his days.
FOOTNOTES:
[337] See Hallam's _Literature of Europe_, Pt. I. ch. ii. § 64. Again
(for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. § 53. See also for mention of
a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary, _s.v._
Viret.
[338] See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.
[339] _Emile_, IV. 163.
[340] IV. 183-185.
[341] M. Henri Martin's _Hist. de France_, xvi. 101, where there is an
interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a
successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence into
scientific form.
[342] _Emile_, IV. 135.
[343] _Emile_, IV. 204.
[344] _Emile_, IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758.
_Corr._, ii. 9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls of
the wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that being and
feeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter he
asks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar,
"of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him."
[345] A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with the
Christ of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15,
1769 (_Corr._, vi. 59, 60), to M----, accompanied by a violent
denigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of
the time.
[346] _Emile_, IV. 241, 242.
[347] _Emile_, IV. 243.
[348] IV. 210-236.
[349] Condorcet's _Progrès de l'Esprit Humain_ (1794). _Oeuv._, vi.
276.
CHAPTER VI.
ENGLAND.[350]
There is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques,
which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial
artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up
for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere,
which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the
statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very
incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of
the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard
struggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep
furrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half
penetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have
sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been
with his own passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the
eye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat
which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and
weakness, and leaves only eternal desolation and the misery that is
formless. Our English artist has produced a vision from that prose
Inferno which is made so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of
will. Those who have seen the picture may easily understand how
largely the character of the original must have been pregnant with
harassing confusion and distress.
Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told
the story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, and
declared his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in
England. There had been an exchange of cordial letters,[351] and then
the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining longer
in Neuchâtel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe
establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau's
appearance in Paris had created the keenest excitement. "People may
talk of ancient Greece as they please," wrote Hume from Paris, "but no
nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much
engaged their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are
quite eclipsed by him." Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared very
homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of
Morocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards
him. His very dog had a name and reputation in the world.[352]
Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence
created, but whether this was so or not, he was very impatient to be
away from it as soon as possible.
In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January
1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that
lasted twelve hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was
extremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upon
deck, taking no harm, though the seamen were almost frozen to
death.[353] They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the
people of London showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange
personage whom Hume had brought among them, as the people of Paris had
done. A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects to the
Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the playhouse showed more curiosity
when the stranger came in than when the king and queen entered. Their
majesties were as interested as their subjects, and could scarcely
keep their eyes off the author of Emilius. George III., then in the
heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a foreigner of genius
seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway's
suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should have a pension
settled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made member of
Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that "he
entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide his
understanding, but vanity."[354] Hume, on the contrary, thought the
best things of his client; "He has an excellent warm heart, and in
conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like
inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have some share in his
affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited
and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is also to
appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better
calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in
it." "He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The
philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to
Calais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all my
life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of
our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not
the case with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because
they think he over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable
that the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is by
far the most devout."[355]
What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may
perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing
upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a
special occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour
came, Rousseau declared that he could not leave his dog behind him.
"The first person," he said, "who opens the door, Sultan will run into
the streets in search of me and will be lost." Hume told him to lock
Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was
done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his
master turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in
that condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that
Mr. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for
him, that the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that
without a better reason than Sultan's impatience it would be
ridiculous to disappoint them. Thus, a little by reason, but more by
force, he was carried off.[356] Such a story, whatever else we may
think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching
simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep
his dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too
private in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation
with which he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.
There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to
leave London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with
the friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced London
to be as much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals.
He spent a few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought
about fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then
somewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know,
greatly attracted him. Finally arrangements were made by Hume with Mr.
Davenport for installing him in a house belonging to the latter, at
Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of Derbyshire.[357] Hither
Rousseau proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport
was a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this
solitary house, was very willing that Rousseau should take up his
abode there without payment. This, however, was what Rousseau's
independence could not brook, and he insisted that his entertainer
should receive thirty pounds a year for the board of himself and
Theresa.[358] So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate,
knowing no word of the language of the people about him, with no
companionship but Theresa's, and with nothing to do but walk when the
weather was fair, play the harpsicord when it rained, and brood over
the incidents which had occurred to him since he had left Switzerland
six months before. The first fruits of this unfortunate leisure were a
bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most famous and far-resounding of
all the quarrels of illustrious men, but one about which very little
needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all significance
that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The incubation of
his grievances began immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but two
months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.[359]
The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an
accursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners;
and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render
his life miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was
established were the following:--
(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a letter nominally
addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical
strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of
Voltaire.[360] Then he suspected D'Alembert. It was really the
composition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris. Now Hume was the
friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to
him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of some
papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest amusement at
Rousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, while
feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English
public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a
forgery, nor did he break with its wicked author.[361] (2) When
Rousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable
man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew the
latter to be Rousseau's enemy.[362] (3) Hume lived in London with the
son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the
foes of Jean Jacques.[363] (4) When Rousseau first came to London, his
reception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecution
from so many governments. England was proud of being his place of
refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration.
Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone changed, the
newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau
was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had much
influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the
protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.[364] (5)
Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from
making friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau's
letters, and the like.[365] (6) A violent satirical letter against
Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions which
could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night after
their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room with
Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night in
the course of his dreams, _Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau_, with
extreme vehemence--which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone
of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later
event proved to have been full of malign significance.[366] (8)
Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister
and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude,
though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was
seized with remorse, fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and,
suffocated with sobs and bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents,
_No, no, David Hume is no traitor_, with many protests of affection.
The phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with politeness, stroked
him gently on the back, and repeated several times in a tranquil
voice, _Quoi, mon cher monsieur! Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon
cher monsieur!_[367] (9) Although for many weeks Rousseau had kept a
firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer letters that plainly called
for answer, and marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways,
yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what must necessarily
have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if nothing
had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of
perfidy?
Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of
grievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table
with him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving
executed of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in
another engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was
made as ugly as a bear.[368]
It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these
charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is
astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume
was a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man
whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the
indictment about which there could be the least doubt, was the
possibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small
pleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had a
hand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although the
letter constituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensible
man have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who,
like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could be
shown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition or
the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon one towards whom he
was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that he
showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted
to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume sets
this doubt at rest. "I cannot be precise as to the time of my writing
the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the letter
while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reason
why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you often
proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a
man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him."[369]
With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us,
as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do
not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering
into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in
France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume
perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly
lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for
everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he
never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's
agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity,
and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his
consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked
about and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all for
Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at great
pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the
grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused
the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still
ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's mind,
supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept
private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the
removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like
these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is abundantly
shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as
Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters
both to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the
one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence
to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with
gravity is irrational.
If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can
be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination
would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a
sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what
he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He
reproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used
nine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly
words he had once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in
their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the
philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation
which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned
him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the
advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one
of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of
the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was
chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was the
spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various
expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It may
be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of
letters always does. The governing committee of a literary,
philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any
man can have.
Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the
most hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection.
Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had
suffered with firm silence petulant charges against which the
consciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer.
That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much in
the world, and which saves men from waste of themselves and others in
pitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped
humane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards
Rousseau said, "England, of which they paint such fine pictures in
France, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks,
was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all that
passed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable to
those of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to have
done no more than published our private quarrels?"[370] An ampler
contrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, but
there is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however,
reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that he
is sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regret
it.[371] And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had
returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent
in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to
protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how
sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically
serviceable.[372]
Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in
Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by
succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of
his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously wrote to the
newspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George
followed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn
formalities sent the documents to the British Museum. There was
silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunate
person who had done all the mischief printed not a word.
The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks
invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is
that he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really
tells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from a
warranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia.
Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes and
living frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and went
to live in the country. The same facile explanation covered his
quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him
mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and
temperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, the
pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by
conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to
take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for
democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That
Rousseau's conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental
soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy,
teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like
monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which
prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only
means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it
extended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and
obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential
facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the
symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual
constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.
Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This
predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth
of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile
sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal
instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his
temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a
rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and
faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many
forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have
gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the
vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came
to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the
uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a
marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and
practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation
of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion,
by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's
Princess warn the hapless Tasso:--
Dieser Pfad
Verleitet uns, durch einsames Gebüsch,
Durch stille Thäler fortzuwandern; mehr
Und mehr verwöhnt sich das Gemüth und strebt
Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,
In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,
So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.
Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and
this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of
bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about
himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion
about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of
tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it.
The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the
sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was
settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of
the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had
long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but
by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his
intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was
not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.
"He has only _felt_ during the whole course of his life," wrote Hume
sympathetically; "and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch
beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more
acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was
stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in
that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements."[374]
A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of
intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state,
general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of
unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent
enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all
or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced into
finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a
misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered
emotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's
nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the
breach may not, and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along
the whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about
Hume's sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite
manifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the
intelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of an
inherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily for
the man's history had never been counteracted either by a strenuous
education, or by the wholesome urgencies of life.
We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there
was entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or
inexplicable rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an
order that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with their
foundations down in physical temperament; the facts which made
Rousseau's name renowned and his influence a great force, along with
those which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself.
The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectation
of happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark
both of his character and his work. The exaltation of emotion over
intelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the same
exaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, at
length passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The tendency of the
dominant side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a fact
of daily observation. The ruin which the excess of strong religious
imagination works in natures without the quality of energetic
objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary,
Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were
equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with
Rousseau's delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters
among men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the important
thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain
specially marked tendencies of the sufferer's sanity.
The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies
led him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is
probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally
read. He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during
the autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to the
public was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers.
To write memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time,
but like all else, it became in Rousseau's hand something more
far-reaching and sincere than a passing fashion. Other people wrote
polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic
decorations. Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmost
depths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him either
ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing that
could attract much sympathy or much admiration. Though, as has been
pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies of
date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts
of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two
of the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental
reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet
when all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness
of what remains is made more evident with every addition to our
materials for testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's
life are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proved
delinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as
essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is
consistent with the general empire of sensation over untrained
intelligence.[375] As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard
to see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism.
And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to the
surface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less vicious
and debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with a
troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itself
perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two of
the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, and
are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some vices
whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright atrocities,
and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier
impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he
confesses to a horrible assassination. This morbid form of
self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which
clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation. And there is
not much of it. Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, and
the egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustine
or of Cardan.
These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise
the popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of
a greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly
always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau,
from the time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their
least agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the
expression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of
the essential goodness of nature and the importance of understanding
nature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses and
Emilius. "I would fain show to my fellows," he began, "a man in all
the truth of nature," and he cannot be charged with any failure to
keep his word. He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe
whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to
the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all,
considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and
pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and
peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified
assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who
would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense
subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to
come to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to
the glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any
case, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological
facts no less than the others. These are the first thing, and the
second, and the third also.
The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No
monk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous
self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when
the course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with
objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination.
The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of
composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would
never know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication
of his life and character against the infamies with which Hume and
others were supposed to be industriously blackening them. While he was
writing this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the
modes of English provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two
of the great people in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and
social correspondence with them. He was greatly pleased by a
compliment that was paid to him by the government, apparently through
the interest of General Conway. The duty that had been paid upon
certain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from Switzerland was recouped by
the treasury,[376] and the arrangements for the annual pension of one
hundred pounds were concluded and accepted by him, after he had duly
satisfied himself that Hume was not the indirect author of the
benefaction.[377] The weather was the worst possible, but whenever it
allowed him to go out of doors, he found delight in climbing the
heights around him in search of curious mosses; for he had now come to
think the discovery of a single new plant a hundred times more useful
than to have the whole human race listening to your sermons for half a
century.[378] "This indolent and contemplative life that you do not
approve," he wrote to the elder Mirabeau, "and for which I pretend to
make no excuses, becomes every day more delicious to me: to wander
alone among the trees and rocks that surround my dwelling; to muse or
rather to extravagate at my ease, and as you say to stand gaping in
the air; when my brain gets too hot, to calm it by dissecting some
moss or fern; in short, to surrender myself without restraint to my
phantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all under my own
control,--all that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I can
imagine nothing superior in this world for a man of my age and in my
condition."[379]
This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. The
excitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble
quarrels with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned with
greater force than before. He believed that the whole English nation
was in a plot against him, that all his letters were opened before
reaching London and before leaving it, that all his movements were
closely watched, and that he was surrounded by unseen guards to
prevent any attempt at escape.[380] At length these delusions got such
complete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror he fled away
from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him. Nothing
was heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a letter
from him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conduct
throughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him the
highest honour. He confesses himself "quite moved to read poor
Rousseau's mournful epistle." "You shall see his letter," he writes to
Hume, "the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity give
a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private
concerns, that it would not be right in me to do it."[381] This is
the generosity which makes Hume's impatience and that of his
mischievous advisers in Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite
as ill to Mr. Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received at
least equal services from him.[382] The good man at once sent a
servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau had
again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hours
of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and
good-humoured. He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had
written a long letter to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a
guard, at Rousseau's own expense, to escort him in safety out of the
kingdom where enemies were plotting against his life.[383] He was next
heard of at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General
Conway, setting forth his delusion in full form.[384] He is the victim
of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave the island,
lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to which he has
been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres that will
arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he warns
them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without
creating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, he
gives his word of honour that he will not publish a line of the
memoirs he has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has
suffered in England. "I see my last hour approaching," he concluded;
"I am determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish
or be free; there is no longer any other alternative." On the same
evening on which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn
creature took boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to
have recovered his composure and a right mind.
FOOTNOTES:
[350] Jan. 1766--May 1767.
[351] Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. _Corr._, iii.
[352] Burton, ii. 299.
[353] The materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau's
_Correspondence_ (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's letters to
various persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton's _Life of
Hume_. Everybody who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr.
Burton for the ample documents which he has provided. Yet one cannot
but regret the satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, and
which is not always felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295)
that Rousseau invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume's
correcting the proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story may
be true or not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantially
from Lord Marischal; see letter from Lord M. to J.J.R., in
Streckeisen, ii. 67. Again, such an expression as Rousseau's
"_occasional_ attention to small matters" (p. 321) only shows that the
writer has not read Rousseau's letters, which are indeed not worth
reading, except by those who wish to have a right to speak about
Rousseau's character. The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between
Hume and Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I have
turned over, really shed no light on the matter, though they added
much heat. For the journey, see _Corr._, iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304.
[354] _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly._ The same passage
contains some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.
[355] Burton, 304, 309, 310.
[356] _Ib._ ii. 309, _n._
[357] Mr. Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters at
Wootton, in his _Visits to Remarkable Places_. One or two aged
peasants had some confused memory of "old Ross-hall." For Rousseau's
own description, see his letters to Mdme. de Luze, May 10, 1766.
_Corr._, iv. 326.
[358] Burton, 313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid this;
at any rate when he fled, he left between thirty and forty pounds in
Mr. Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367. Rousseau's
accurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely unimpeachable.
[359] _Corr._ iv. 312. April 9, 1766.
[360] Here is a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm:--"My
dear Jean Jacques--You have renounced Geneva, your native place. You
have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled in
your writings; France has issued a warrant against you; so do you come
to me. I admire your talents; I am amused by your dreamings, though
let me tell you they absorb you too much and for too long. You must at
length be sober and happy; you have caused enough talk about yourself
by oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really great man.
Prove to your enemies that you can now and then have common sense.
That will annoy them and do you no harm. My states offer you a
peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if you
will let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon
upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting
your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I
am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and what
will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I will
cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in being
persecuted. Your good friend, FREDERICK."
[361] _Corr._, iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.
[362] _Ib._ 395.
[363] _Ib._ 389, etc.
[364] _Ib._ 384.
[365] _Ib._ 343, 344, 387, etc.
[366] _Corr._, iv. 346.
[367] _Ib._ 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the rupture
overt, shows the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on this
occasion as he may have seemed. "I hope," he writes, "you have not so
bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion; I
assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a
plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more
affecting." Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenth
century could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient
saying, that men without tears are worth little.
[368] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.
[369] Walpole's _Letters_, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other
letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. A
corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter
until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame
de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and _n._ 2.
[370] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.
[371] To Adam Smith. Burton, 380.
[372] Burton, 381.
[373] A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity to
certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may have
contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies,
though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance were
remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mental
state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of
insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.
[374] Burton, ii. 314.
[375] For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly
trustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions were
written, see the 4th of the _Rêveries_.
[376] Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. _Corr._, v. 98:
also 118.
[377] _Ib._ v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.
[378] _Corr._, v. 37.
[379] _Corr._, v. 88.
[380] See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767.
_Corr._, v. 140-147.
[381] Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.
[382] J.J.R. to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. _Corr._,
v. 66, 152.
[383] Burton, 369, 375.
[384] _Corr._, v. 153.
CHAPTER VII.
THE END.
Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one
long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of
mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of
Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire
of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau
were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is
less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in
him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many
other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions
of philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of
temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral
formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be,
with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without
native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken
up the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases of
perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a
Fénelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.
Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked
tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its
formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in
private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race.
Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in
Rousseau's books: "I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it
strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of
truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the
moment." He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time at
great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic
than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with
Hume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the
sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in the
midst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities. He concludes
with a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes,
with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseau
to take up his residence in whichever of them may please him
best.[385]
Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and
Mirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of
the parliament of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But
the Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, "bore letters as
a plum-tree bears plums," and wrote to his guest with strange
humoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew
his Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himself
against excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to take
society more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth should
lead him to do. "No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-picture,
nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaseless
flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own fault
for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary the
scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and
considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of
it all."[386] Enormous manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility
were not in the least degree either soothing or interesting to
Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touch
his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener. Two humorists are
seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau insisted
that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books. Rousseau
answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it. "I do
not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always been
painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other
people, and at present I cannot do so at all."[387] Though they
continued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four
weeks at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of
Conti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrous
fashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away at
the time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refuge
at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors. Here he installed
Rousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet
curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.
Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the
second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental
confusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the
gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume,
and that he was watched day and night with a view to his
destruction.[388] He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save
a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the
pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interest
he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense.
He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could
employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in
arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare
seed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more the
same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled from Wootton. He
meant apparently to go to Chambéri, drawn by the deep magnetic force
of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his way
thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that he
had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was
undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper
authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for
that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how
eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof
demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they
might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed
to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of
droning wretchedness.[389] Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he
spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at
Monquin on adjoining uplands.[390] The estrangement from Theresa, of
which enough has been said already,[391] was added to his other
torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done
since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the
Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us
to be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his
face eastwards, and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the
islands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely, not only
designed, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton. All was no
more than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the
weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself to
isolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully to
count the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessed
to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man's
mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of their
fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moral
solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace.
Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, either
finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who
will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain
down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible
for him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a
condition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure
itself.
In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight
years longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of
order into his outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and
distrust, half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his
mind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to
vindicate his memory from the defamation that was to be launched in a
dark torrent upon the world at the moment of his death, could not
possibly have been written by a man in his right mind. Yet the best of
the Musings, which were written still nearer the end, are masterpieces
in the style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth, the
seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow gravity of tone
which is so rare in literature, because the deep absorption of spirit
which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to us
with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other pieces--a
mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow of sundown
among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in the
French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the
august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely
melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which
yet had imaginative visions of beatitude.
* * * * *
It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste and
obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently
fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits--a Schiller, a
Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many
hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to
follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient
friends, and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade
of copying music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until
half-past seven; munched his breakfast, arranging on paper during the
process such plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon; then he
returned to his work, dined at half-past twelve, and went forth to
take coffee at some public place. He would not return from his walk
until nightfall, and he retired at half-past ten. The pavements of
Paris were hateful to him because they tore his feet, and, said he,
with deeply significant antithesis, "I am not afraid of death, but I
dread pain." He always found his way as fast as possible to one of the
suburbs, and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Valérien
in the sunset. "Atheists," he said calumniously, "do not love the
country; they like the environs of Paris, where you have all the
pleasures of the city, good cheer, books, pretty women; but if you
take these things away, then they die of weariness." The note of every
bird held him attentive, and filled his mind with delicious images. A
graceful story is told of two swallows who made a nest in Rousseau's
sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. "I was no more than a
doorkeeper for them," he said, "for I kept opening the window for them
every moment. They used to fly with a great stir round my head, until
I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention between these
swallows and me."
In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal _Paul
and Virginia_ (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote
to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe,
counting among other delights that of seeing two summers in one
year.[392] Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desire
to make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should think
of that as one of his chief pleasures. To this we owe the following
pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's hand:--
In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to
take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a
house in the Rue Plâtrière, nearly opposite to the Hôtel de
la Poste. We mounted to the fourth story. We knocked, and
Madame Rousseau opened the door. "Come in, gentlemen," she
said, "you will find my husband." We passed through a very
small antechamber, where the household utensils were neatly
arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was
seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music.
He rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed
his work, at the same time taking a part in conversation. He
was thin and of middle height. One shoulder struck me as
rather higher than the other ... otherwise he was very well
proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on his
cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and
lofty brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling
from the nostrils to the extremity of the lips, and marking
a physiognomy, in his case expressed great sensibility and
something even painful. One observed in his face three or
four of the characteristics of melancholy--the deep receding
eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound
sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic
gaiety in a thousand little creases at the corners of the
eyes, of which the orbits entirely disappeared when he
laughed.... Near him was a spinette on which from time to
time he tried an air. Two little beds of blue and white
striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of
his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and
park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an
engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor. His
wife was sitting mending linen; a canary sang in a cage hung
from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on to the sills
of the windows, which on the side of the street were open;
while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and
pots filled with such plants as it pleases nature to sow.
There was in the whole effect of his little establishment an
air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity, which was
delightful.
A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. "He wore a round wig,
well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full
suit of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat."
He expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and ice
were the only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to
have brought some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day he
rashly sent Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a polite
letter of thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one of
harsh protest against the ignominy of receiving presents which could
not be returned, and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose between
taking his coffee back or never seeing his new friend again. A fair
bargain was ultimately arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange for
his coffee some curious root or other, and a book on ichthyology.
Immediately afterwards he went to dine with his sage. He arrived at
eleven in the forenoon, and they conversed until half-past twelve.
Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and
as he put it on the table, asked whether we should have
enough, or if I was fond of drinking. "How many are there of
us," said I. "Three," he said; "you, my wife, and myself."
"Well," I went on, "when I drink wine and am alone, I drink
a good half-bottle, and I drink a trifle more when I am with
friends." "In that case," he answered, "we shall not have
enough; I must go down into the cellar." He brought up a
second bottle. His wife served two dishes, one of small
tarts, and another which was covered. He said, showing me
the first, "That is your dish and the other is mine." "I
don't eat much pastry," I said, "but I hope to be allowed to
taste what you have got." "Oh, they are both common," he
replied; "but most people don't care for this. 'Tis a Swiss
dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and
chestnuts." It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had
slices of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after
which his wife served the coffee.