When the service of the public ceases to be the principal concern of
the citizens, and they would rather discharge it by their purses
than their persons, the State is already far on the way to ruin.
When they should march to fight, they pay troops to fight for them
and stay at home; when they should go to council, they send deputies
and remain away; thus, in consequence of their indolence and wealth,
they in the end employ soldiers to enslave their country, and
representatives to sell it. So soon as a citizen says, What are
State Affairs to me? the State may be given up for lost.
--_Rousseau_
[Illustration]
Who is the great man?
Listen, and I will tell you: He is great who feeds other minds. He is
great who inspires others to think for themselves. He is great who
tells you the things you already know, but which you did not know you
knew until he told you. He is great who shocks you, irritates you,
affronts you, so that you are jostled out of your wonted ways, pulled
out of your mental ruts, lifted out of the mire of the commonplace.
That writer is great whom you alternately love and hate. That writer
is great whom you can not forget.
Certainly, yes, the man in his private life may be proud, irritable,
rude, crude, coarse, faulty, absurd, ignorant, immoral--grant it all,
and yes be great. He is not great on account of these things, but in
spite of them. The seeming inconsistencies and inequalities of his
nature may contribute to his strength, as the mountains and valleys,
the rocks and woods, make up the picturesqueness of the landscape.
He is great to whom writers, poets, painters, philosophers, preachers,
and scientists go, each to fill his own little tin cup, dipper,
calabash, vase, stein, pitcher, amphora, bucket, tub, barrel or cask.
These men may hate him, refute him, despise him, reject him, insult
him, as they probably will if they are much indebted to him; yet if he
stirs the molecules in their minds to a point where they create
caloric, he has benefited them and therefore he is a great man.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was a great man. We are still reading him--still
talking about him--still trying to clap label upon him--still hunting
for a pigeonhole in which to place him.
If a man were wholly crude, rude, ignorant and coarse, and if he did
nothing but shock and irritate us, we would quickly cast him aside.
But in addition to shocking us the great man fascinates us by his
insight, his subtlety, his imagination, his sympathy, his tenderness,
his love. Behind the act he sees the cause, and so he excuses and
forgives. Knowing the present he is able to forecast the future, for
he, of all men, knows that effect follows cause. He does what we dare
not and says what we would like to if we had the mind. So in one sense
the man is our vicarious self--"I am that man." His very faultiness
brings him near. His blunders make him to us akin.
* * * * *
To answer the arguments of Jean Jacques by references to his private
life were easy and obvious. He did not apologize for his life, and
perhaps we would do well to follow his example.
The fact that with his own hands he carried five of his offspring to
foundling asylums as they came into the world does not alter or change
the fact that he was also the author of "Emile," in which book, let it
be remembered, the idea of substituting natural for pedantic methods
in the training and developing of the physical, mental and moral
faculties of the growing child first found expression.
The book furnished Froebel with the fund of ideas for his experiments
with children which resulted in the Kindergarten, an institution that
has profoundly influenced the educational methods of every
enlightened country in the world.
Without a doubt this man who abandoned his own children became one of
the great instructors of the age.
But a fair understanding of the situation demands that we should
realize that things for which we blame him most occured before he was
thirty-eight years old. And the writings of his that really
influenced humanity were not written until after he was thirty-eight.
To confound the reasoning of the mature man, by pointing to what he
did at twenty-two, is, I submit, irrelevant, immaterial, inconsequent,
unrelated and uncalled for. When a critic has nothing to say of a
man's work, but calls attention to the errors of the author's youth,
he is running short of material.
That Rousseau revised his mode of living and reformed his reasoning in
his later years, viewing his early life with bitter regret, should be
put forward to his credit and not be used for his condemnation. The
facts, however, are all that his harshest critics state. But fact and
truth are often totally different things. Untruth enters when we
reason wrongly from our facts.
We have been told by both the friends and the enemies of Rousseau that
to him the French Revolution traces a direct lineage. For this his
friends give him credit, and his enemies blame. The truth is, that
revolutions are things that require long time and many factors to
evolve. A revolution is the culmination of a long train of evils.
Rousseau saw the evils and called attention to them, but he did not
exactly cause them--bless me! His little love-affairs with elderly
ladies, and grateful, should not be confused with the atrocious
cruelties and inhumanities that existed in France and had existed for
a hundred years and more.
A wise man of the East was once eating his dinner of dried figs, and
at the same time explaining to an admiring group the beauty and
healthfulness of a purely vegetable diet.
"Look at your figs through this," said a scientist present, handing
the man a microscope. The pundit looked and saw his precious figs were
covered with crawling microbes.
He handed the microscope back and said, "Friend, keep your glass--the
bugs no longer exist."
Jean Jacques handed the peasantry of France a reading-glass; Voltaire
did as much for the nobility.
* * * * *
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Switzerland, which land, as all
folks know, has produced her full quota and more of reformers. The
father of Jean Jacques, quite naturally, was a watchmaker, with
mainspring ill-adjusted and dial askew, according to the report of the
son, who claimed to be full-jeweled, but was not perfectly adjusted to
position and temperature. Jean Jacques tells us that his first
misfortune was his birth, and this cost his mother her life. He was
adopted by Time and Chance and fed by Fate. When the lad was ten the
father fled from Geneva to escape the penalty of a foolish brawl, and
never again saw the son who was to rescue the family-name from
oblivion.
Kinsmen of the mother gave the boy into the hands of a retired
clergyman who levied polite blackmail on his former constituents by
asking them to place children, their own and others, in his hands that
they might be taught the way of life--and that the clergyman might
live, which, according to Whistlerian philosophy, was unnecessary.
That the boy was clever, shrewd, quick to learn, secretive as castaway
children ever are, can well be understood. He became a secretary, an
engineer, a valet, a waiter, working life's gamut backward, thus
proving that in human service there is no high nor low degree, only
this: he, at this time, knew nothing about human service--he was
fighting for existence.
Knowledge comes through desire, but where desire comes from no man can
say. It surely is not a matter of will.
Jean Jacques had a hunger for knowledge, and this, some wise men say,
is the precious legacy of mother to son. He wanted to know!
And it was this desire that shaped his career.
He asked questions of priests all day long, because he was filled with
the fallacy that priests knew the secrets of the unknowable and were
on friendly terms with God.
To escape importunity a priest sent him to Madame De Warens. Now
Madame was a widow, rich and volatile, filled with a holy religious
zeal. Where religion begins and sex ends no man can say--the books are
silent and revelation is dumb. Indeed, there be those who are so bold
as to say that art, love and religion are one.
Leaving this to the specialists, let us simply say that the love of
learning landed Jean Jacques, aged seventeen, poetic and philosophic
vagabond, into the precious care of Madame De Warens, who kept a
religious retreat for novitiates intent on the ideal life.
The religion of Mohammed made converts in numbers like unto the sands
of the desert, because they were promised a Paradise peopled by dark-
eyed houris. Orthodoxy got its hold by a promise of rest, idleness and
freedom from responsibility. The heaven into which Jean Jacques
slipped was a combination of all that Allah, Gabriel and the seductive
dreams of Moody, Sankey and such could provide. Science founded on
truth can never be popular until mankind further evolves, since it
offers nothing better than toil and difficulty, and after each
achievement increased work as a reward for work. This condition stands
no show when compared with a heaven that gives harps that never
require tuning, robes that need not be laundered, and mansions that
demand no plumbing.
Jean Jacques lived an ideal existence; he was the guest, pupil,
servant and lover of the Religious Lady who kept the Religious
Retreat. Also, he was immune from responsibility. But Paradise has one
serious objection--the serpent. This time the serpent was jealousy.
Whenever the Religious Lady had guests of quality, the snake sank its
fangs deep into the quivering flesh of her valet-lover. Thus does the
Law of Compensation never rest.
"What is your favorite book?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson of George
Eliot.