of the people, carried out, would lead to the utter subversion of
central authority, and reduce nations to an absolute democracy of small
communities. They would divide and subdivide until society was resolved
into its original elements. This idea existed among the early Greek
states, when a state rarely comprised more than a single city or town or
village, such as might be found among the tribes of North American
Indians. The great political question in Ancient Greece was the autonomy
of cities, which kept the whole land in constant wars and dissensions
and quarrels and jealousies, and prevented that centralization of power
which would have made Greece unconquerable and the mistress of the
world. Our wholesome American system of autonomy in local affairs, with
a common authority in matters affecting the general good, is organized
liberty. But the ancient and outgrown idea of unregulated autonomy was
revived by Rousseau; and though it could not be carried out by the
French Revolutionists who accepted nearly all his theories, it led to
the disintegration of France, and the multiplication of offices fatal to
a healthy central power. Napoleon broke up all this in his centralized
despotism, even if, to keep the Revolutionary sympathy, he retained the
Departments which were substituted for the ancient Provinces.
The extreme spirit of democratic liberty which is the characteristic of
Rousseau's political philosophy led to the advocacy of the wildest
doctrines of equality. He would prevent the accumulation of wealth, so
that, to use his words, "no one citizen should be rich enough to buy
another, and no one so poor as to be obliged to sell himself." He would
have neither rich people nor beggars. What could flow from such
doctrines but discontent and unreasonable expectations among the poor,
and a general fear and sense of insecurity among the rich? This "state
of nature," moreover, in his view, could be reached only by going
backward and destroying all civilization,--and it was civilization which
he ever decried,--a very pleasant doctrine to vagabonds, but likely to
be treated with derisive mockery by all those who have something
to conserve.
Another and most dangerous principle which was advocated in the "Social
Contract" was that religion has nothing to do with the affairs of civil
and political life; that religious obligations do not bind a citizen;
that Christianity, in fact, ignores all the great relations of man in
society. This is distinct from the Puritan doctrine of the separation of
the Church from the State, by which is simply meant that priests ought
not to interfere in matters purely political, nor the government meddle
with religious affairs,--a prime doctrine in a free State. But no body
of men were ever more ardent defenders of the doctrine that all
religious ideas ought to bear on the social and political fabric than
the Puritans, They would break up slavery, if it derogated from the
doctrine of the common brotherhood of man as declared by Christ; they
would use their influence as Christians to root out all evil
institutions and laws, and bring the sublime truths of the Master to
bear on all the relations of life,--on citizens at the ballot-box, at
the helm of power, and in legislative bodies. Christianity was to them
the supreme law, with which all human laws must harmonize. But Rousseau
would throw out Christianity altogether, as foreign to the duties and
relations of both citizens and rulers, pretending that it ignored all
connection with mundane affairs and had reference only to the salvation
of the soul,--as if all Christ's teachings were not regulative of the
springs of conduct between man and man, as indicative of the relations
between man and God! Like Voltaire, Rousseau had the excuse of a corrupt
ecclesiasticism to be broken into; but the Church and Christianity are
two different things. This he did not see. No one was more impatient of
all restraints than Rousseau; yet he maintained that men, if calling
themselves Christians, must submit to every wrong and injustice, looking
for a remedy in the future world,--thus pouring contempt on those who
had no right, according to his view of their system, to complain of
injustice or strive to rise above temporal evils. Christianity, he said,
inculcates servitude and dependence; its spirit is favorable to tyrants;
true Christians are formed to be slaves, and they know it, and never
trouble themselves about conspiracies and insurrections, since this
transitory world has no value in their eyes. He denied that Christians
could be good soldiers,--a falsehood rebuked for us by the wars of the
Reformation, by the troops of Cromwell and Gustavus Adolphus, by our
American soldiers in the late Civil War. Thus he would throw away the
greatest stimulus to heroism,--even the consciousness of duty, and
devotion to great truths and interests.
I cannot follow out the political ideas of Rousseau in his various other
treatises, in which he prepared the way for revolution and for the
excesses of the Reign of Terror. The truth is, Rousseau's feelings were
vastly superior to his thinking. Whatever of good is to result from his
influence will arise out of the impulse he gave toward the search for
ideals that should embrace the many as well as the few in their
benefits; when he himself attempted to apply this impulse to philosophic
political thought, his unregulated mind went all astray.
Let us now turn to consider a moment his doctrines pertaining to
education, as brought out in his greatest and most unexceptionable work,
his "Émile."
In this remarkable book everything pertaining to human life appears to
be discussed. The duties of parents, child-management, punishments,
perception and the beginning of thinking; toys, games, catechisms, all
passions and sentiments, religion, friendship, love, jealousy, pity; the
means of happiness, the pleasures and profits of travel, the principles
of virtue, of justice and liberty; language, books; the nature of man
and of woman, the arts of conventional life, politeness, riches,
poverty, society, marriage,--on all these and other questions he
discourses with great sagacity and good sense, and with unrivalled
beauty of expression, often rising to great eloquence, never dull or
uninstructive, aiming to present virtue and vice in their true colors,
inspiring exalted sentiments, and presenting happiness in simple
pleasures and natural life.
This treatise is both full and original. The author supposes an
imaginary pupil, named Émile, and he himself, intrusted with the care of
the boy's education, attends him from his cradle to his manhood, assists
him with the necessary directions for his general improvement, and
finally introduces him to an amiable and unsophisticated girl, whose
love he wins by his virtues and whom he honorably marries; so that,
although a treatise, the work is invested with the fascination of
a novel.
In reading this book, which made so great a noise in Europe, with so
much that is admirable I find but little to criticise, except three
things, which mar its beauty and make it both dangerous and false, in
which the unsoundness of Rousseau's mind and character--the strange
paradoxes of his life in mixing up good with evil--are brought out, and
that so forcibly that the author was hunted and persecuted from one part
of Europe to another on account of it.
The first is that he makes all natural impulses generous and virtuous,
and man, therefore, naturally good instead of perverse,--thus throwing
not only Christianity but experience entirely aside, and laying down
maxims which, logically carried out, would make society perfect if only
Nature were always consulted. This doctrine indirectly makes all the
treasures of human experience useless, and untutored impulse the guide
of life. It would break the restraints which civilization and a
knowledge of life impose, and reduce man to a primitive state. In the
advocacy of this subtle falsehood, Rousseau pours contempt on all the
teachings of mankind,--on all schools and colleges, on all
conventionalities and social laws, yea, on learning itself. He always
stigmatizes scholars as pedants.
Secondly, he would reduce woman to insignificance, having her rule by
arts and small devices; making her the inferior of man, on whom she is
dependent and to whose caprice she is bound to submit,--a sort of toy or
slave, engrossed only with domestic duties, like the woman of antiquity.
He would give new rights and liberties to man, but none to woman as
man's equal,--thus keeping her in a dependence utterly irreconcilable
with the bold freedom which he otherwise advocates. The dangerous
tendency of his writings is somewhat checked, however, by the
everlasting hostility with which women of character and force of
will--such as they call "strong-minded"--will ever pursue him. He will
be no oracle to them.
But a still more marked defect weakens "Émile" as one of the guide-books
of the world, great as are its varied excellencies. The author
undermines all faith in Christianity as a revelation, or as a means of
man's communion with the Divine, for guidance, consolation, or
inspiration. Nor does he support one of his moral or religious doctrines
by an appeal to the Sacred Scriptures, which have been so deep a well of
moral and spiritual wisdom for so many races of men. Practically, he is
infidel and pagan, although he professes to admire some of the moral
truths which he never applies to his system. He is a pure Theist or
Deist, recognizing, like the old Greeks, no religion but that of Nature,
and valuing no attainments but such as are suggested by Nature and
Reason, which are the gods he worships from first to last in all his
writings. The Confession of Faith by the Savoyard Vicar introduced into
the fourth of the six "Books" of this work, which, having nothing to do
with his main object, he unnecessarily drags in, is an artful and
specious onslaught on all doctrines and facts revealed in the Bible,--on
all miracles, all prophecies, and all supernatural revelation,--thus
attacking Christianity in its most vital points, and making it of no
more authority than Buddhism or Mohammedanism. Faith is utterly
extinguished. A cold reason is all that he would leave to man,--no
consolation but what the mind can arrive at unaided, no knowledge but
what can be reached by original scientific investigation. He destroys
not only all faith but all authority, by a low appeal to prejudices, and
by vulgar wit such as the infidels of a former age used in their
heartless and flippant controversies. I am not surprised at the
hostility displayed even in France against him by both Catholics and
Protestants. When he advocated his rights of man, from which Thomas
Paine and Jefferson himself drew their maxims, he appealed to the
self-love of the great mass of men ground down by feudal injustices and
inequalities,--to the sense of justice, sophistically it is true, but in
a way which commanded the respect of the intellect. When he assailed
Christianity in its innermost fortresses, while professing to be a
Christian, he incurred the indignation of all Christians and the
contempt of all infidels,--for he added hypocrisy to scepticism, which
they did not. Diderot, D'Alembert, and others were bold unbelievers, and
did not veil their hostilities under a weak disguise. I have never read
a writer who in spirit was more essentially pagan than Rousseau, or who
wrote maxims more entirely antagonistic to Christianity.
Aside from these great falsities,--the perfection of natural impulse,
the inferiority of woman, and the worthlessness of Christianity,--as
inculcated in this book, "Émile" must certainly be ranked among the
great classics of educational literature. With these expurgated it
confirms the admirable methods inspired by its unmethodical suggestions.
Noting the oppressiveness of the usual order of education through books
and apparatus, he scorns all tradition, and cries, "Let the child learn
direct from Nature!" Himself sensitive and humane, having suffered as a
child from the tyranny of adults, he demands the tenderest care and
sympathy for children, a patient study of their characteristics, a
gentle, progressive leading of them to discover for themselves rather
than a cramming of them with facts. The first moral education should be
negative,--no preaching of virtue and truth, but shielding from vice and
error. He says: "Take the very reverse of the current practice, and you
will almost always do right." This spirit, indeed, is the key to his
entire plan. His ideas were those of the nineteenth, not the eighteenth
century. Free play to childish vitality; punishment the natural
inconvenience consequent on wrong-doing; the incitement of the desire to
learn; the training of sense-activity rather than reflection, in early
years; the acquirement of the power to learn rather than the
acquisition of learning,--in short, the natural and scientifically
progressive rather than the bookish and analytically literary method was
the end and aim of "Émile."
Actually, this book accomplished little in its own time, chiefly because
of its attack on established religion. Influentially, it reappeared in
Pestalozzi, the first practical reformer of methods; in Froebel, the
inventor of the Kindergarten; in Spencer, the great systematizer of the
philosophy of development; and through these its spirit pervades the
whole world of education at the present time.
In Rousseau's "New Héloïse" there are the same contradictions, the same
paradoxes, the same unsoundness as in his other works, but it is more
eloquent than any. It is a novel in which he paints all the aspirations
of the soul, all its unrest, all its indefinite longings, its raptures,
and its despair; in which he unfetters the imagination and sanctifies
every impulse, not only of affection, but of passion. This novel was the
pioneer of the sentimental romances which rapidly followed in France and
England and Germany,--worse than our sensational literature, since the
author veiled his immoralities by painting the transports of passion
under the guise of love, which ever has its seat in the affections and
is sustained only by respect. Here Rousseau was a disguised seducer, a
poisoner of the moral sentiments, a foe to what is most sacred; and he
was the more dangerous from his irresistible eloquence. His sophistries
in regard to political and social rights may be met by reason, but not
his attacks on the heart, with his imaginary sorrows and joys, his
painting of raptures which can never be found. Here he undermines virtue
as he had undermined truth and law. Here reprobation must become
unqualified, and he appears one of the very worst men who ever exercised
a commanding influence on a wicked and perverse generation.
And this view of the man is rather confirmed by his own
"Confessions,"--a singularly attractive book, yet from which, after the
perusal of the long catalogue of his sorrows, joys, humiliations,
triumphs, ecstasies and miseries, glories and shame, one rises with
great disappointment, since no great truths, useful lessons, or even
ennobling sentiments are impressed upon the mind to make us wiser or
better. The "Confessions" are only a revelation of that sensibility,
excessive and morbid, which reminds us of Byron and his misanthropic
poetry,--showing a man defiant, proud, vain, unreasonable, unsatisfied,
supremely worldly and egotistic. The first six Books are mere annals of
sentimental debauchery; the last six, a kind of thermometer of
friendship, containing an accurate account of kisses given and
received, with slights, huffs, visits, quarrels, suspicions, and
jealousies, interspersed with grand sentiments and profound views of
life and human nature, yet all illustrative of the utter vanity of
earth, and the failure of all mortal pleasures to satisfy the cravings
of an immortal mind. The "Confessions" remind us of "Manfred" and
"Ecclesiastes" blended,--exceedingly readable, and often
unexceptionable, where virtue is commended and vice portrayed in its
true light, but on the whole a book which no unsophisticated or
inexperienced person can read without the consciousness of receiving a
moral taint; a book in no respect leading to repose or lofty
contemplation, or to submission to the evils of life, which it
catalogues with amazing detail; a book not even conducive to innocent
entertainment. It is the revelation of the inner life of a sensualist,
an egotist, and a hypocrite, with a maudlin although genuine admiration
for Nature and virtue and friendship and love. And the book reveals one
of the most miserable and dissatisfied men that ever walked the earth,
seeking peace in solitude and virtue, while yielding to unrestrained
impulses; a man of morbid sensibility, ever yearning for happiness and
pursuing it by impossible and impracticable paths. No sadder
autobiography has ever been written. It is a lame and impotent attempt
at self-justification, revealing on every page the writer's distrust of
the virtues which he exalts, and of man whose reason and majesty he
deifies,--even of the friendships in which he sought consolation, and of
the retirements where he hoped for rest.
The book reveals the man. The writer has no hope or repose or faith.
Nothing pleases him long, and he is driven by his wild and undisciplined
nature from one retreat to another, by persecution more fancied than
real, until he dies, not without suspicion of having taken his own life.
Such was Rousseau: the greatest literary genius of his age, the apostle
of the reforms which were attempted in the French Revolution, and of
ideas which still have a wondrous power,--some of which are grand and
true, but more of which are sophistical, false, and dangerous. His
theories are all plausible; and all are enforced with matchless
eloquence of style, but not with eloquence of thought or true feeling,
like the soaring flights of Pascal,--in every respect his superior in
genius, because more profound and lofty. Rousseau's writings, like his
life, are one vast contradiction, the blending of truth with error,--the
truth valuable even when commonplace, the error subtle and
dangerous,--so that his general influence must be considered bad
wherever man is weak or credulous or inexperienced or perverse. I wish
I could speak better of a man whom so many honestly admire, and whose
influence has been so marked during the last hundred years, and will be
equally great for a hundred years to come; a man from whom Madame de
Staël, Jefferson, and Lamartine drew so much of their inspiration, whose
ideas about childhood have so helpfully transformed the educational
methods of our own time. But I must speak my honest conviction, from the
light I have, at the same time hoping that fuller light may justify more
leniency to one of the great oracles whose doctrines are still cherished
by many of the guides of modern thought.
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
1771-1832.
THE MODERN NOVEL.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century the two most prominent
figures in English literature were Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. They
are still read and admired, especially Scott; but it is not easy to
understand the enormous popularity of these two men in their own day.
Their busts or pictures were in every cultivated family and in almost
every shop-window. Everybody was familiar with the lineaments of their
countenances, and even with every peculiarity of their dress. Who did
not know the shape of the Byronic collar and the rough, plaided form of
"the Wizard of the North"? Who could not repeat the most famous passages
in the writings of these two authors?
Is it so now? If not, what a commentary might be written on human fame!
How transitory are the judgments of men in regard to every one whom
fashion stamps! The verdict of critics is that only some half-dozen
authors are now read with the interest and glow which their works called
out a hundred years ago. Even the novels of Sir Walter, although to be
found in every library, kindle but little enthusiasm compared with that
excited by the masterpieces of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and of
the favorites of the passing day. Why is this? Will these later lights
also cease to burn? Will they too pass away? Is this age so much
advanced that what pleased our grandfathers and grandmothers has no
charm for us, but is often "flat, stale, and unprofitable,"--at least,
decidedly uninteresting?
I am inclined to the opinion that only a very small part of any man's
writings is really immortal. Take out the "Elegy in a Country
Churchyard," and how much is left of Gray for other generations to
admire? And so of Goldsmith: besides the "Vicar of Wakefield" and the
"Deserted Village," there is little in his writings that is likely to
prove immortal. Johnson wrote but little poetry that is now generally
valued. Certainly his dictionary, his greatest work, is not immortal,
and is scarcely a standard. Indeed, we have outgrown nearly everything
which was prized so highly a century ago, not only in poetry and
fiction, but in philosophy, theology, and science. Perhaps that is least
permanent which once was regarded as most certain.
If, then, the poetry and novels of Sir Walter Scott are not so much
read or admired as they once were, we only say that he is no exception
to the rule. I have in mind but two authors in the whole range of
English literature that are read and prized as much to-day as they were
two hundred years ago. And if this is true, what shall we say of
rhetoricians like Macaulay, of critics like Carlyle, of theologians like
Jonathan Edwards, of historians like Hume and Guizot, and of many other
great men of whom it has been the fashion to say that their works are
lasting as the language in which they were written? Some few books will
doubtless live, but, alas, how few! Where now are the eight hundred
thousand in the Alexandrian library, which Ptolemy collected with so
great care,--what, even, their titles? Where are the writings of Varro,
said to have been the most learned man of all antiquity?
I make these introductory remarks to show how shallow is the criticism
passed upon a novelist or poet like Scott, in that he is not now so
popular or so much read as he was in his own day. It is the fate of most
great writers,--the Augustines, the Voltaires, the Bayles of the world.
It is enough to say that they were lauded and valued in their time,
since this is about all we can say of most of the works supposed to be
immortal. But when we remember the enthusiasm with which the novels of
Scott were at first received, the great sums of money which were paid
for them, and the honors he received from them, he may well claim a
renown and a popularity such as no other literary man ever enjoyed. His
eyes beheld the glory of a great name; his ears rang with the plaudits
of idolaters; he had the consciousness of doing good work, universally
acknowledged and gratefully remembered. Scarcely any other novelist ever
created so much healthy pleasure combined with so much sound
instruction. And, further, he left behind him a reproachless name,
having fewer personal defects than any literary man of his time, being
everywhere beloved, esteemed, and almost worshipped; whom distant
travellers came to see,--sure of kind and gracious treatment; a hero in
their eyes to the last, with no drawbacks such as marred the fame of
Byron or of Burns. That so great a genius as Scott is fading in the
minds of this generation may be not without comfort to those honest and
hard-working men in every walk of human life who can say: We too were
useful in our day, and had our share of honors and rewards,--all perhaps
that we deserved, or even more. What if we are forgotten, as most men
are destined to be? To live in the mouths of men is not the greatest
thing or the best. "Act well your part, there all the honor lies," for
life after all is a drama or a stage. The supremest happiness is not in
being praised; it is in the consciousness of doing right and being
possessed with the power of goodness.
When, however, a man has been seated on such a lofty pinnacle as was Sir
Walter Scott, we wish to know something of his personal traits, and the
steps by which he advanced to fame. Was he overrated, as most famous men
have been? What is the niche he will probably occupy in the temple of
literary fame? What are the characteristics of his productions? What
gave him his prodigious and extraordinary popularity? Was he a born
genius, like Byron and Burns, or was he merely a most industrious
worker, aided by fortunate circumstances and the caprices of fashion?
What were the intellectual forces of his day, and how did he come to be
counted among them?