"We have had the great professor and founder of the philosophy of Vanity
in England. As I had good opportunities of knowing his proceedings almost
from day to day, he left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no
principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding but
vanity; with this vice he was possessed to a degree little short of
madness. Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every
individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character
of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this
their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labor, as well as
the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honors
the giver and the receiver, and then pleads his beggary as an excuse for
his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the
remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a
sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and
sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks,
and forms her young, but bears are not philosophers."
This was Burke's opinion of the only contemporary who can be said to
rival him in fervid and sustained eloquence, to surpass him in grace and
persuasiveness of style. Perhaps we should have been more thankful to him
if he had left us instead a record of those "proceedings almost from day
to day" which he had such "good opportunities of knowing," but it
probably never entered his head that posterity might care as much about
the doings of the citizen of Geneva as about the sayings of even a
British Right Honorable. Vanity eludes recognition by its victims in more
shapes, and more pleasing, than any other passion, and perhaps had Mr.
Burke been able imaginatively to translate Swiss Jean Jacques into Irish
Edmund, he would have found no juster equivalent for the obnoxious
trisyllable than "righteous self-esteem." For Burke was himself also, in
the subtler sense of the word, a sentimentalist, that is, a man who took
what would now be called an aesthetic view of morals and politics. No man
who ever wrote English, except perhaps Mr. Ruskin, more habitually
mistook his own personal likes and dislikes, tastes and distastes, for
general principles, and this, it may be suspected, is the secret of all
merely eloquent writing. He hints at madness as an explanation of
Rousseau, and it is curious enough that Mr. Buckle was fain to explain
_him_ in the same way. It is not, we confess, a solution that we find
very satisfactory in this latter case. Burke's fury against the French
Revolution was nothing more than was natural to a desperate man in
self-defence. It was his own life, or, at least, all that made life dear
to him, that was in danger. He had all that abstract political wisdom
which may be naturally secreted by a magnanimous nature and a sensitive
temperament, absolutely none of that rough-and-tumble kind which is so
needful for the conduct of affairs. Fastidiousness is only another form
of egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the
narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake
it for what they are seeking. Burke's hatred of Rousseau was genuine and
instinctive. It was so genuine and so instinctive as no hatred can be but
that of self, of our own weaknesses as we see them in another man. But
there was also something deeper in it than this. There was mixed with it
the natural dread in the political diviner of the political logician,--in
the empirical, of the theoretic statesman. Burke, confounding the idea of
society with the form of it then existing, would have preserved that as
the only specific against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that society as it
then existed was but another name for anarchy, would have reconstituted
it on an ideal basis. The one has left behind him some of the profoundest
aphorisms of political wisdom; the other, some of the clearest principles
of political science. The one, clinging to Divine right, found in the
fact that things were, a reason that they ought to be; the other, aiming
to solve the problem of the Divine order, would deduce from that
abstraction alone the claim of anything to be at all. There seems a mere
oppugnancy of nature between the two, and yet both were, in different
ways, the dupes of their own imaginations.
Now let us hear the opinion of a philosopher who _was_ a bear, whether
bears be philosophers or not. Boswell had a genuine relish for what was
superior in any way, from genius to claret, and of course he did not let
Rousseau escape him. "One evening at the Mitre, Johnson said
sarcastically to me, 'It seems, sir, you have kept very good company
abroad,--Rousseau and Wilkes!' I answered with a smile, 'My dear sir, you
don't call Rousseau bad company; do you really think _him_ a bad man?'
Johnson: 'Sir, if you are talking jestingly of this, I don't talk with
you. If you mean to be serious, I think him one of the worst of men, a
rascal who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been. Three or
four nations have expelled him, and it is a shame that he is protected in
this country. Rousseau, sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a
sentence for his transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from
the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in
the plantations.'" _We_ were the plantations then, and Rousseau was
destined to work there in another and much more wonderful fashion than
the gruff old Ursa Major imagined. However, there is always a refreshing
heartiness in his growl, a masculine bass with no snarl in it. The
Doctor's logic is of that fine old crusted Port sort, the native
manufacture of the British conservative mind. Three or four nations
_have_, therefore England ought. A few years later, had the Doctor been
living, if three or four nations had treated their kings as France did
hers, would he have thought the _ergo_ a very stringent one for England?
Mr. Burke, who could speak with studied respect of the Prince of Wales,
and of his vices with that charity which thinketh no evil and can afford
to think no evil of so important a living member of the British
Constitution, surely could have had no unmixed moral repugnance for
Rousseau's "disgustful amours." It was because they were _his_ that they
were so loathsome. Mr. Burke was a snob, though an inspired one. Dr.
Johnson, the friend of that wretchedest of lewd fellows, Richard Savage,
and of that gay man about town, Topham Beauclerk,--himself sprung from an
amour that would have been disgustful had it not been royal,--must also
have felt something more in respect of Rousseau than the mere repugnance
of virtue for vice. We must sometimes allow to personal temperament its
right of peremptory challenge. Johnson had not that fine sensitiveness to
the political atmosphere which made Burke presageful of coming tempest,
but both of them felt that there was something dangerous in this man.
Their dislike has in it somewhat of the energy of fear. Neither of them
had the same feeling toward Voltaire, the man of supreme talent, but both
felt that what Rousseau was possessed by was genius, with its terrible
force either to attract or repel.
"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."
Burke and Johnson were both of them sincere men, both of them men of
character as well as of intellectual force; and we cite their opinions of
Rousseau with the respect which is due to an honest conviction which has
apparent grounds for its adoption, whether we agree with it or no. But it
strikes us as a little singular that one whose life was so full of moral
inconsistency, whose character is so contemptible in many ways, in some
we might almost say so revolting, should yet have exercised so deep and
lasting an influence, and on minds so various, should still be an object
of minute and earnest discussion,--that he should have had such vigor in
his intellectual loins as to have been the father of Châteaubriand,
Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, and many more in literature, in politics
of Jefferson and Thomas Paine,--that the spots he had haunted should draw
pilgrims so unlike as Gibbon and Napoleon, nay, should draw them still,
after the lapse of near a century. Surely there must have been a basis of
sincerity in this man seldom matched, if it can prevail against so many
reasons for repugnance, aversion, and even disgust. He could not have
been the mere sentimentalist and rhetorician for which the
rough-and-ready understanding would at first glance be inclined to
condemn him. In a certain sense he was both of these, but he was
something more. It will bring us a little nearer the point we are aiming
at if we quote one other and more recent English opinion of him.
Mr. Thomas Moore, returning pleasantly in a travelling-carriage from a
trip to Italy, in which he had never forgotten the poetical shop at home,
but had carefully noted down all the pretty images that occurred to him
for future use,--Mr. Thomas Moore, on his way back from a visit to his
noble friend Byron, at Venice, who had there been leading a life so gross
as to be talked about, even amid the crash of Napoleon's fall, and who
was just writing "Don Juan" for the improvement of the world,--Mr. Thomas
Moore, fresh from the reading of Byron's Memoirs, which were so
scandalous that, by some hocus-pocus, three thousand guineas afterward
found their way into his own pocket for consenting to suppress them,--Mr.
Thomas Moore, the _ci-devant_ friend of the Prince Regent, and the author
of Little's Poems, among other objects of pilgrimage visits _Les
Charmettes_, where Rousseau had lived with Madame de Warens. So good an
opportunity for occasional verses was not to be lost, so good a text for
a little virtuous moralizing not to be thrown away; and accordingly Mr.
Moore pours out several pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sensuality
of the dead man of genius. There was no horror for Byron. Toward him all
was suavity and decorous _bienséance_. That lively sense of benefits to
be received made the Irish Anacreon wink with both his little eyes. In
the judgment of a liberal like Mr. Moore, were not the errors of a lord
excusable? But with poor Rousseau the case was very different. The son of
a watchmaker, an outcast from boyhood up, always on the perilous edge of
poverty,--what right had he to indulge himself in any immoralities? So it
is always with the sentimentalists. It is never the thing in itself that
is bad or good, but the thing in its relation to some conventional and
mostly selfish standard. Moore could be a moralist, in this case, without
any trouble, and with the advantage of winning Lord Lansdowne's approval;
he could write some graceful verses which everybody would buy, and for
the rest it is not hard to be a stoic in eight-syllable measure and a
travelling-carriage. The next dinner at Bowood will taste none the worse.
Accordingly he speaks of
"The mire, the strife
And vanities of this man's life,
Who more than all that e'er have glowed
With fancy's flame (and it was his
In fullest warmth and radiance) showed
What an impostor Genius is;
How, with that strong mimetic art
Which forms its life and soul, it takes
All shapes of thought, all hues of heart,
Nor feels itself one throb it wakes;
How, like a gem, its light may shine,
O'er the dark path by mortals trod,
Itself as mean a worm the while
As crawls at midnight o'er the sod;
* * * * *
How, with the pencil hardly dry
From coloring up such scenes of love
And beauty as make young hearts sigh,
And dream and think through heaven they rove," &c., &c.
Very spirited, is it not? One has only to overlook a little
threadbareness in the similes, and it is very good oratorical verse. But
would we believe in it, we must never read Mr. Moore's own journal, and
find out how thin a piece of veneering his own life was,--how he lived in
sham till his very nature had become subdued to it, till he could
persuade himself that a sham could be written into a reality, and
actually made experiment thereof in his Diary.