him to hide, it only led him to account for, his father's sordidness.
The son generalized and inferred a moral maxim for the conduct of life
from this behavior of the father's,--a maxim, which, as he thought, had
done him great good. He says:--
This conduct on the part of a father of whose affection and virtue
I have had so many proofs, has given rise within me to reflections
on my own character which have not a little contributed to maintain
my heart uncorrupted. I have derived therefrom this great maxim of
morality, perhaps the only one of any use in practice; namely, to
avoid such situations as put our duty in antagonism with our
interest, or disclose our own advantage in the misfortunes of
another, certain that in such circumstances, however sincere the
love of virtue we bring with us, it will sooner or later, and
whether we perceive it or not, become weakened, and we shall come
to be unjust and culpable in our acts without having ceased to be
upright and blameless in our intentions.
The fruitful maxim thus deduced by Rousseau, he thinks he tried
faithfully to put in practice. With apparent perfect assurance
concerning himself, he says:--
I have sincerely desired to do what was right. I have, with all the
energy of my character, shunned situations which set my interest in
opposition to the interest of another, thus inspiring me with a
secret though involuntary desire prejudicial to that man.
Jean Jacques at Turin made speed to convert himself, by the abjurations
required, into a pretty good Catholic. He was hereon free to seek his
fortune in the Sardinian capital. This he did by getting successively
various situations in service. In one of these he stole, so he tells us,
a piece of ribbon, which was soon found in his possession. He said a
maid-servant, naming her, gave it to him. The two were confronted with
each other. In spite of the poor girl's solemn appeal, Jean Jacques
persisted in his lie against her. Both servants were discharged. The
autobiographer protests that he has suffered much remorse for this lie
of his to the harm of the innocent maid. He expresses confident hope
that his suffering sorrow, already experienced on this behalf, will
stand him in stead of punishment that might be his due in a future
state. Remorse is a note in Rousseau that distinguishes him from
Montaigne. Montaigne reviews his own life to live over his sins, not to
repent of them.
The end of several vicissitudes is, that young Rousseau gets back to
Madame de Warens. She welcomes him kindly. He says:--
From the first day, the most affectionate familiarity sprang up
between us, and that to the same degree in which it continued
during all the rest of her life. _Petit_--Child--was my name,
_Maman_--Mamma--hers; and _Petit_ and _Maman_ we remained, even
when the course of time had all but effaced the difference of our
ages. These two names seem to me marvellously well to express our
tone towards each other, the simplicity of our manners, and, more
than all, the relation of our hearts. She was to me the tenderest
of mothers, never seeking her own pleasure, but ever my welfare;
and if the senses had any thing to do with my attachment for her,
it was not to change its nature, but only to render it more
exquisite, and intoxicate me with the charm of having a young and
pretty mamma whom it was delightful for me to caress. I say quite
literally, to caress; for it never entered into her head to deny me
the tenderest maternal kisses and endearments, nor into my heart to
abuse them. Some may say that, in the end, quite other relations
subsisted between us. I grant it; but have patience,--I cannot tell
every thing at once.
With Madame de Warens, Rousseau's relations, as is intimated above,
became licentious. This continued until, after an interval of years
(nine years, with breaks), in a fit of jealousy he forsook her.
Rousseau's whole life was a series of self-indulgences, grovelling,
sometimes, beyond what is conceivable to any one not learning of it all
in detail from the man's own pen. The reader is fain at last to seek the
only relief possible from the sickening story, by flying to the
conclusion that Jean Jacques Rousseau, with all his genius, was wanting
in that mental sanity which is a condition of complete moral
responsibility.
We shall, of course, not follow the "Confessions" through their
disgusting recitals of sin and shame. We should do wrong, however, to
the literary, and even to the moral, character of the work, were we not
to point out that there are frequent oases of sweetness and beauty set
in the wastes of incredible foulness which overspread so widely the
pages of Rousseau's "Confessions." Here, for example, is an idyll of
vagabondage that might almost make one willing to play tramp one's
self, if one by so doing might have such an experience:--
I remember, particularly, having passed a delicious night without
the city on a road that skirted the Rhone or the Saone, for I
cannot remember which. On the other side were terraced gardens. It
had been a very warm day; the evening was charming; the dew
moistened the faded grass; a calm night, without a breeze; the air
was cool without being cold; the sun in setting had left crimson
vapors in the sky, which tinged the water with its roseate hue,
while the trees along the terrace were filled with nightingales
gushing out melodious answers to each other's song. I walked along
in a species of ecstasy, giving up heart and senses to the
enjoyment of the scene, only slightly sighing with regret at
enjoying it alone. Absorbed in my sweet reverie, I prolonged my
walk far into the night, without perceiving that I was wearied out.
At length I discovered it. I lay voluptuously down on the tablet of
a sort of niche or false door sunk in the terrace wall. The canopy
of my couch was formed by the over-arching boughs of the trees; a
nightingale sat exactly above me; its song lulled me to sleep; my
slumber was sweet, and my awaking still more so. It was broad day;
my eyes, on opening, fell on the water, the verdure, and the
admirable landscape spread out before me. I arose and shook off
dull sleep; and, growing hungry, I gayly directed my steps towards
the city, bent on transforming two _pieces de six blancs_ that I
had left, into a good breakfast. I was so cheerful that I went
singing along the whole way.
This happy-go-lucky, vagabond, grown-up child, this sentimentalist of
genius, had now and then different experiences,--experiences to which
the reflection of the man grown old attributes important influence on
the formation of his most controlling beliefs:--
One day, among others, having purposely turned aside to get a
closer view of a spot that appeared worthy of all admiration, I
grew so delighted with it, and wandered round it so often, that I
at length lost myself completely. After several hours of useless
walking, weary and faint with hunger and thirst, I entered a
peasant's hut which did not present a very promising appearance,
but it was the only one I saw around. I conceived it to be here as
at Geneva and throughout Switzerland, where all the inhabitants in
easy circumstances are in the situation to exercise hospitality. I
entreated the man to get me some dinner, offering to pay for it. He
presented me with some skimmed milk and coarse barley bread,
observing that that was all he had. I drank the milk with delight,
and ate the bread, chaff and all; but this was not very restorative
to a man exhausted with fatigue. The peasant, who was watching me
narrowly, judged of the truth of my story by the sincerity of my
appetite. All of a sudden, after having said that he saw perfectly
well that I was a good and true young fellow that did not come to
betray him, he opened a little trap-door by the side of his
kitchen, went down and returned a moment afterwards with a good
brown loaf of pure wheat, the remains of a toothsome ham, and a
bottle of wine, the sight of which rejoiced my heart more than all
the rest. To these he added a good thick omelette, and I made such
a dinner as none but a walker ever enjoyed. When it came to pay,
lo! his disquietude and fears again seized him; he would none of my
money, and rejected it with extraordinary manifestations of
disquiet. The funniest part of the matter was, that I could not
conceive what he was afraid of. At length, with fear and trembling,
he pronounced those terrible words, _Commissioners_ and
_Cellar-rats_. He gave me to understand that he concealed his wine
because of the excise, and his bread on account of the tax, and
that he was a lost man if they got the slightest inkling that he
was not dying of hunger. Every thing he said to me touching this
matter, whereof, indeed, I had not the slightest idea, produced an
impression on me that can never be effaced. It became the germ of
that inextinguishable hatred that afterwards sprang up in my heart
against the vexations to which these poor people are subject, and
against their oppressors. This man, though in easy circumstances,
dared not eat the bread he had gained by the sweat of his brow, and
could escape ruin only by presenting the appearance of the same
misery that reigned around him.
A hideously false world, that world of French society was, in Rousseau's
time. The falseness was full ripe to be laid bare by some one; and
Rousseau's experience of life, as well as his temperament and his
genius, fitted him to do the work of exposure that he did. What we
emphatically call character was sadly wanting in Rousseau--how sadly,
witness such an acted piece of mad folly as the following:--
I, without knowing aught of the matter,... gave myself out for a
[musical] composer. Nor was this all: having been presented to M.
de Freytorens, law-professor, who loved music, and gave concerts at
his house, nothing would do but I must give him a sample of my
talent; so I set about composing a piece for his concert quite as
boldly as though I had really been an adept in the science. I had
the constancy to work for fifteen days on this fine affair, to copy
it fair, write out the different parts, and distribute them with as
much assurance as though it had been a masterpiece of harmony.
Then, what will scarcely be believed, but which yet is gospel
truth, worthily to crown this sublime production, I tacked to the
end thereof a pretty minuet which was then having a run on the
streets.... I gave it as my own just as resolutely as though I had
been speaking to inhabitants of the moon.
They assembled to perform my piece. I explain to each the nature of
the movement, the style of execution, and the relations of the
parts--I was very full of business. For five or six minutes they
were tuning; to me each minute seemed an age. At length, all being
ready, I rap with a handsome paper _baton_ on the leader's desk the
five or six beats of the "_Make ready_." Silence is made--I gravely
set to beating time--they commence! No, never since French operas
began, was there such a _charivari_ heard. Whatever they might have
thought of my pretended talent, the effect was worse than they
could possibly have imagined. The musicians choked with laughter;
the auditors opened their eyes, and would fain have closed their
ears. But that was an impossibility. My tormenting set of
symphonists, who seemed rather to enjoy the fun, scraped away with
a din sufficient to crack the tympanum of one born deaf. I had the
firmness to go right ahead, however, sweating, it is true, at every
pore, but held back by shame; not daring to retreat, and glued to
the spot. For my consolation I heard the company whispering to each
other, quite loud enough for it to reach my ear: "It is not
bearable!" said one. "What music gone mad!" cried another. "What a
devilish din!" added a third. Poor Jean Jacques, little dreamed
you, in that cruel moment, that one day before the King of France
and all the court, thy sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and
applause, and that in all the boxes around thee the loveliest
ladies would burst forth with, "What charming sounds! what
enchanting music! every strain reaches the heart!"
But what restored every one to good humor was the minuet. Scarcely
had they played a few measures than I heard bursts of laughter
break out on all hands. Every one congratulated me on my fine
musical taste; they assured me that this minuet would make me
spoken about, and that I merited the loudest praises. I need not
attempt depicting my agony, nor own that I well deserved it.
Readers have now had an opportunity to judge for themselves, by
specimen, of the style, both of the writer and of the man Jean Jacques
Rousseau. The writer's style they must have felt, even through the
medium of imperfect anonymous translation, to be a charming one. If they
have felt the style of the man to be contrasted, as squalor is
contrasted with splendor, that they must not suppose to be a contrast of
which Jean Jacques himself, the confessor, was in the least displacently
conscious. Far from it. In a later part of his "Confessions," a part
that deals with the author as one already now acknowledged a power in
the world of letters, though with all his chief works still to write,
Rousseau speaks thus of himself (he was considering at the time the ways
and means available to him of obtaining a livelihood):--
I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my
genius, and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in
my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of
thinking.... It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for a
livelihood.
Is not that finely said? And one need not doubt that it was said with
perfect sincerity. For our own part, paradoxical though it be to declare
it, we are wholly willing to insist that Rousseau did think on a lofty
plane. The trouble with him was, not that he thus thought with his
heart, rather than with his head,--which, however, he did,--but that he
thought with his heart alone, and not at all with his conscience and his
will. In a word, his thought was sentiment rather than thought. He was a
sentimentalist instead of a thinker. One illustration of the divorce
that he decreed for himself, or rather--for we have used too positive a
form of expression--that he allowed to subsist, between sentiment and
conduct, will suffice. It was presently to be his fortune, as author of
a tract on education (the "Emile"), to change the habit of a nation in
the matter of nurture for babes. French mothers of the higher social
class in Rousseau's time almost universally gave up their infants to be
nursed at alien bosoms. Rousseau so eloquently denounced the
unnaturalness of this, that from his time it became the fashion for
French mothers to suckle their children themselves. Meantime, the
preacher himself of this beautiful humanity, living in unwedded union
with a woman (not Madame de Warens, but a woman of the laboring class,
found after Madame de Warens was abandoned), sent his illegitimate
children, against the mother's remonstrance, one after another, to the
number of five, to be brought up unknown at the hospital for foundlings!
He tells the story himself in his "Confessions." This course on his own
part he subsequently laments with many tears and many self-upbraidings.
But these, alas, he intermingles with self-justifications, nearly as
many,--so that at last it is hard to say whether the balance of his
judgment inclines for or against himself in the matter. A paradox of
inconsistencies and self-contradictions, this man,--a problem in human
character, of which the supposition of partial insanity in him, long
working subtly in the blood, seems the only solution. The occupation
finally adopted by Rousseau for obtaining subsistence, was the copying
of music. It extorts from one a measure of involuntary respect for
Rousseau, to see patiently toiling at this slavish work, to earn its
owner bread, the same pen that had lately set all Europe in ferment with
the "Emile" and "The Social Contract."
From Rousseau's "Confessions," we have not room to purvey further. It is
a melancholy book,--written under monomaniac suspicion on the part of
the author that he was the object of a wide-spread conspiracy against
his reputation, his peace of mind, and even his life. The poor,
shattered, self-consumed sensualist and sentimentalist paid dear in the
agonies of his closing years for the indulgences of an unregulated life.
The tender-hearted, really affectionate and loyal, friend came at length
to live in a world of his own imagination, full of treachery to himself.
David Hume, the Scotchman, tried to befriend him; but the monomaniac was
incapable of being befriended. Nothing could be more pitiful than were
the decline and the extinction that occurred of so much brilliant
genius, and so much lovable character. It is even doubtful whether
Rousseau did not at last take his own life. The voice of accusation is
silenced, in the presence of an earthly retribution so dreadful. One may
not indeed approve, but one may at least be free to pity, more than he
blames, in judging Rousseau.
Accompanying, and in some sort complementing, the "Confessions," are
often published several detached pieces called "Reveries," or "Walks."
These are very peculiar compositions, and very characteristic of the
author. They are dreamy meditations or reveries, sad, even sombre, in
spirit, but "beautiful exceedingly," in form of expression. Such works
as the "Rene" of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French
literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau's "Walks." We
introduce two specimen extracts. The shadow of Rousseau's monomania will
be felt thick upon them:--
It is now fifteen years since I have been in this strange
situation, which yet appears to me like a dream; ever imagining
that, disturbed by indigestion, I sleep uneasily, but shall soon
awake, freed from my troubles, but surrounded by my friends....
How could I possibly foresee the destiny that awaited me?... Could
I, if in my right senses, suppose that one day, the man I was, and
yet remain, should be taken, without any kind of doubt, for a
monster, a poisoner, an assassin, the horror of the human race, the
sport of the rabble, my only salutation to be spit upon, and that a
whole generation would unanimously amuse themselves in burying me
alive? When this strange revolution first happened, taken by
unawares, I was overwhelmed with astonishment; my agitation, my
indignation, plunged me into a delirium, which ten years have
scarcely been able to calm: during this interval, falling from
error to error, from fault to fault, and folly to folly, I have, by
my imprudence, furnished the contrivers of my fate with
instruments, which they have artfully employed to fix it without
resource....
* * *
Every future occurrence will be immaterial to me; I have in the
world neither relative, friend, nor brother; I am on the earth as
if I had fallen into some unknown planet; if I contemplate any
thing around me, it is only distressing, heart-rending objects;
every thing I cast my eyes on conveys some new subject either of
indignation or affliction; I will endeavor henceforward to banish
from my mind all painful ideas which unavailingly distress me.
Alone for the rest of my life, I must only look for consolation,
hope, or peace in my own breast; and neither ought nor will,
henceforward, think of any thing but myself. It is in this state
that I return to the continuation of that severe and just
examination which formerly I called my Confessions; I consecrate my
latter days to the study of myself, and to the preparation of that
account which I must shortly render up of my actions. I resign my
thoughts entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my own soul;
that being the only consolation that man cannot deprive me of. If
by dint of reflection on my internal propensities, I can attain to
putting them in better order, and correcting the evil that remains
in me, these meditations will not be utterly useless; and though I
am accounted worthless on earth, shall not cast away my latter
days. The leisure of my daily walks has frequently been filled with
charming contemplations, which I regret having forgot; but I will
write down those that occur in future; then, every time I read them
over, I shall forget my misfortunes, disgraces, and persecutors,
in recollecting and contemplating the integrity of my own heart.
Rousseau's books in general are now little read. They worked their work,
and ceased. But there are in some of them passages that continue to
live. Of these, perhaps quite the most famous is the "Savoyard Curate's
Confession of Faith," a document of some length, incorporated into the
"Emile." This, taken as a whole, is the most seductively eloquent
argument against Christianity that perhaps ever was written. It
contains, however, concessions to the sublime elevation of Scripture and
to the unique virtue and majesty of Jesus, which are often quoted, and
which will bear quoting here. The Savoyard Curate is represented
speaking to a young friend as follows:--
I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures
strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its
influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with
all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they,
compared with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so
simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible
that the Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be
himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an
enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in
his manners! What an affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What
sublimity in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses!
What presence of mind, what subtilety, what truth, in his replies!
How great the command over his passions! Where is the man, where
the philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness and
without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man
loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest reward
of virtue, he described exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the
resemblance was so striking that all the Fathers perceived it.