"What an impostor Genius is!"
In two respects there is nothing to be objected to in it. It is of eight
syllables, and "is" rhymes unexceptionably with "his." But is there the
least filament of truth in it? We venture to assert, not the least. It
was not Rousseau's genius that was an impostor. It was the one thing in
him that was always true. We grant that, in allowing that a man has
genius. Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose
power a man is. That is the very difference between them. We might turn
the tables on Moore, the man of talent, and say truly enough, What an
impostor talent is! Moore talks of the mimetic power with a total
misapprehension of what it really is. The mimetic power had nothing
whatever to do with the affair. Rousseau had none of it; Shakespeare had
it in excess; but what difference would it make in our judgment of Hamlet
or Othello if a manuscript of Shakespeare's memoirs should turn up, and
we should find out that he had been a pitiful fellow? None in the world;
for he is not a professed moralist, and his life does not give the
warrant to his words. But if Demosthenes, after all his Philippies,
throws away his shield and runs, we feel the contemptibleness of the
contradiction. With genius itself we never find any fault. It would be an
over-nicety that would do that. We do not get invited to nectar and
ambrosia so often that we think of grumbling and saying we have better at
home. No; the same genius that mastered him who wrote the poem masters us
in reading it, and we care for nothing outside the poem itself. How the
author lived, what he wore, how he looked,--all that is mere gossip,
about which we need not trouble ourselves. Whatever he was or did,
somehow or other God let him be worthy to write _this_, and that is
enough for us. We forgive everything to the genius; we are inexorable to
the man. Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns,--what have their biographies to do
with us? Genius is not a question of character. It may be sordid, like
the lamp of Aladdin, in its externals; what care we, while the touch of
it builds palaces for us, makes us rich as only men in dream-land are
rich, and lords to the utmost bound of imagination? So, when people talk
of the ungrateful way in which the world treats its geniuses, they speak
unwisely. There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of
mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not,
sooner or later, responded. But the man whom the genius takes possession
of for its pen, for its trowel, for its pencil, for its chisel, _him_ the
world treats according to his deserts. Does Burns drink? It sets him to
gauging casks of gin. For, remember, it is not to the practical world
that the genius appeals; it _is_ the practical world which judges of the
man's fitness for its uses, and has a right so to judge. No amount of
patronage could have made distilled liquors less toothsome to Robbie
Burns, as no amount of them could make a Burns of the Ettrick Shepherd.
There is an old story in the _Gesta Romanorum_ of a priest who was found
fault with by one of his parishioners because his life was in painful
discordance with his teaching. So one day he takes his critic out to a
stream, and, giving him to drink of it, asks him if he does not find it
sweet and pure water. The parishioner, having answered that it was, is
taken to the source, and finds that what had so refreshed him flowed from
between the jaws of a dead dog. "Let this teach thee," said the priest,
"that the very best doctrine may take its rise in a very impure and
disgustful spring, and that excellent morals may be taught by a man who
has no morals at all." It is easy enough to see the fallacy here. Had the
man known beforehand from what a carrion fountain-head the stream issued,
he could not have drunk of it without loathing. Had the priest merely
bidden him to _look_ at the stream and see how beautiful it was, instead
of tasting it, it would have been quite another matter. And this is
precisely the difference between what appeals to our aesthetic and to our
moral sense, between what is judged of by the taste and the conscience.
It is when the sentimentalist turns preacher of morals that we
investigate his character, and are justified in so doing. He may express
as many and as delicate shades of feeling as he likes,--for this the
sensibility of his organization perfectly fits him, no other person could
do it so well,--but the moment he undertakes to establish his feeling as
a rule of conduct, we ask at once how far are his own life and deed in
accordance with what he preaches? For every man feels instinctively that
all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely
action; and that while tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to
generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an
achievement of the will and a quality of the life. Fine words, says our
homely old proverb, butter no parsnips; and if the question be how to
render those vegetables palatable, an ounce of butter would be worth more
than all the orations of Cicero. The only conclusive evidence of a man's
sincerity is that he give _himself_ for a principle. Words, money, all
things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a
gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever
it may be, has taken possession of him. From that sincerity his words
gain the force and pertinency of deeds, and his money is no longer the
pale drudge 'twixt man and man, but, by a beautiful magic, what erewhile
bore the image and superscription of Caesar seems now to bear the image
and superscription of God. It is thus that there is a genius for
goodness, for magnanimity, for self-sacrifice, as well as for creative
art; and it is thus that by a more refined sort of Platonism the Infinite
Beauty dwells in and shapes to its own likeness the soul which gives it
body and individuality. But when Moore charges genius with being an
impostor, the confusion of his ideas is pitiable. There is nothing so
true, so sincere, so downright and forthright, as genius. It is always
truer than the man himself is, greater than he. If Shakespeare the man
had been as marvellous a creature as the genius that wrote his plays,
that genius so comprehensive in its intelligence, so wise even in its
play, that its clowns are moralists and philosophers, so penetrative that
a single one of its phrases reveals to us the secret of our own
character, would his contemporaries have left us so wholly without record
of him as they have done, distinguishing him in no wise from his
fellow-players?
Rousseau, no doubt, was weak, nay, more than that, was sometimes
despicable, but yet is not fairly to be reckoned among the herd of
sentimentalists. It is shocking that a man whose preaching made it
fashionable for women of rank to nurse their own children should have
sent his own, as soon as born, to the foundling hospital, still more
shocking that, in a note to his _Discours sur l'Inégalité_, he should
speak of this crime as one of the consequences of our social system. But
for all that there was a faith and an ardor of conviction in him that
distinguish him from most of the writers of his time. Nor were his
practice and his preaching always inconsistent. He contrived to pay
regularly, whatever his own circumstances were, a pension of one hundred
_livres_ a year to a maternal aunt who had been kind to him in childhood.
Nor was his asceticism a sham. He might have turned his gift into laced
coats and _châteaux_ as easily as Voltaire, had he not held it too sacred
to be bartered away in any such losing exchange.
But what is worthy of especial remark is this,--that in nearly all that
he wrote his leading object was the good of his kind, and that through
all the vicissitudes of a life which illness, sensibility of temperament,
and the approaches of insanity rendered wretched,--the associate of
infidels, the foundling child, as it were, of an age without belief,
least of all in itself,--he professed and evidently felt deeply a faith
in the goodness both of man and of God. There is no such thing as
scoffing in his writings. On the other hand, there is no stereotyped
morality. He does not ignore the existence of scepticism; he recognizes
its existence in his own nature, meets it frankly face to face, and makes
it confess that there are things in the teaching of Christ that are
deeper than its doubt. The influence of his early education at Geneva is
apparent here. An intellect so acute as his, trained in the school of
Calvin in a republic where theological discussion was as much the
amusement of the people as the opera was at Paris, could not fail to be a
good logician. He had the fortitude to follow his logic wherever it led
him. If the very impressibility of character which quickened his
perception of the beauties of nature, and made him alive to the charm of
music and musical expression, prevented him from being in the highest
sense an original writer, and if his ideas were mostly suggested to him
by books, yet the clearness, consecutiveness, and eloquence with which he
stated and enforced them made them his own. There was at least that
original fire in him which could fuse them and run them in a novel mould.
His power lay in this very ability of manipulating the thoughts of
others. Fond of paradox he doubtless was, but he had a way of putting
things that arrested attention and excited thought. It was, perhaps, this
very sensibility of the surrounding atmosphere of feeling and
speculation, which made Rousseau more directly influential on
contemporary thought (or perhaps we should say sentiment) than any writer
of his time. And this is rarely consistent with enduring greatness in
literature. It forces us to remember, against our will, the oratorical
character of his works. They were all pleas, and he a great advocate,
with Europe in the jury-box. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence
produces conviction for the moment, but it is only by truth to nature and
the everlasting intuitions of mankind that those abiding influences are
won that enlarge from generation to generation. Rousseau was in many
respects--as great pleaders always are--a man of the day, who must needs
become a mere name to posterity, yet he could not but have had in him
some not inconsiderable share of that principle by which man eternizes
himself. For it is only to such that the night cometh not in which no man
shall work, and he is still operative both in politics and literature by
the principles he formulated or the emotions to which he gave a voice so
piercing and so sympathetic.
In judging Rousseau, it would be unfair not to take note of the malarious
atmosphere in which he grew up. The constitution of his mind was thus
early infected with a feverish taint that made him shiveringly sensitive
to a temperature which hardier natures found bracing. To him this rough
world was but too literally a rack. Good-humored Mother Nature commonly
imbeds the nerves of her children in a padding of self-conceit that
serves as a buffer against the ordinary shocks to which even a life of
routine is liable, and it would seem at first sight as if Rousseau had
been better cared for than usual in this regard. But as his self-conceit
was enormous, so was the reaction from it proportionate, and the fretting
suspiciousness of temper, sure mark of an unsound mind, which rendered
him incapable of intimate friendship, while passionately longing for it,
became inevitably, when turned inward, a tormenting self-distrust. To
dwell in unrealities is the doom of the sentimentalist; but it should not
be forgotten that the same fitful intensity of emotion which makes them
real as the means of elation, gives them substance also for torture. Too
irritably jealous to endure the rude society of men, he steeped his
senses in the enervating incense that women are only too ready to burn.
If their friendship be a safeguard to the other sex, their homage is
fatal to all but the strongest, and Rousseau was weak both by inheritance
and early training. His father was one of those feeble creatures for whom
a fine phrase could always satisfactorily fill the void that
non-performance leaves behind it. If he neglected duty, he made up for it
by that cultivation of the finer sentiments of our common nature which
waters flowers of speech with the brineless tears of a flabby remorse,
without one fibre of resolve in it, and which impoverishes the character
in proportion as it enriches the vocabulary. He was a very Apicius in
that digestible kind of woe which makes no man leaner, and had a favorite
receipt for cooking you up a sorrow _à la douleur inassouvie_ that had
just enough delicious sharpness in it to bring tears into the eyes by
tickling the palate. "When he said to me, 'Jean Jacques, let us speak of
thy mother,' I said to him, 'Well, father, we are going to weep, then,'
and this word alone drew tears from him. 'Ah !' said he, groaning, 'give
her back to me, console me for her, fill the void she has left in my
soul!'" Alas! in such cases, the void she leaves is only that she found.
The grief that seeks any other than its own society will erelong want an
object. This admirable parent allowed his son to become an outcast at
sixteen, without any attempt to reclaim him, in order to enjoy unmolested
a petty inheritance to which the boy was entitled in right of his mother.
"This conduct," Rousseau tells us, "of a father whose tenderness and
virtue were so well known to me, caused me to make reflections on myself
which have not a little contributed to make my heart sound. I drew from
it this great maxim of morals, the only one perhaps serviceable in
practice, to avoid situations which put our duties in opposition to our
interest, and which show us our own advantage in the wrong of another,
sure that in such situations, _however sincere may be one's love of
virtue_, it sooner or later grows weak without our perceiving it, _and
that we become unjust and wicked in action without having ceased to be
just and good in soul_."
This maxim may do for that "fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised
and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks its adversary," which
Milton could not praise,--that is, for a manhood whose distinction it is
not to be manly,--but it is chiefly worth notice as being the
characteristic doctrine of sentimentalism. This disjoining of deed from
will, of practice from theory, is to put asunder what God has joined by
an indissoluble sacrament. The soul must be tainted before the action
become corrupt; and there is no self-delusion more fatal than that which
makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while
the life is grovelling and sensual,--witness Coleridge. In his case we
feel something like disgust. But where, as in his son Hartley, there is
hereditary infirmity, where the man sees the principle that might rescue
him slip from the clutch of a nerveless will, like a rope through the
fingers of a drowning man, and the confession of faith is the moan of
despair, there is room for no harsher feeling than pity. Rousseau showed
through life a singular proneness for being convinced by his own
eloquence; he was always his own first convert; and this reconciles his
power as a writer with his weakness as a man. He and all like him mistake
emotion for conviction, velleity for resolve, the brief eddy of sentiment
for the midcurrent of ever-gathering faith in duty that draws to itself
all the affluents of conscience and will, and gives continuity of purpose
to life. They are like men who love the stimulus of being under
conviction, as it is called, who, forever getting religion, never get
capital enough to retire upon and spend for their own need and the common
service.
The sentimentalist is the spiritual hypochondriac, with whom fancies
become facts, while facts are a discomfort because they will not be
evaporated into fancy. In his eyes, Theory is too fine a dame to confess
even a country-cousinship with coarse handed Practice, whose homely ways
would disconcert her artificial world. The very susceptibility that makes
him quick to feel, makes him also incapable of deep and durable feeling.
He loves to think he suffers, and keeps a pet sorrow, a blue-devil
familiar, that goes with him everywhere, like Paracelsus's black dog. He
takes good care, however, that it shall not be the true sulphurous
article that sometimes takes a fancy to fly away with his conjurer. René
says: "In my madness I had gone so far as even to wish I might experience
a misfortune, so that my suffering might at least have a real object."
But no; selfishness is only active egotism, and there is nothing and
nobody, with a single exception, which this sort of creature will not
sacrifice, rather than give any other than an imaginary pang to his idol.
Vicarious pain he is not unwilling to endure, nay, will even commit
suicide by proxy, like the German poet who let his wife kill herself to
give him a sensation. Had young Jerusalem been anything like Goethe's
portrait of him in Werther, he would have taken very good care not to
blow out the brains which he would have thought only too precious. Real
sorrows are uncomfortable things, but purely aesthetic ones are by no
means unpleasant, and I have always fancied the handsome young Wolfgang
writing those distracted letters to Auguste Stolberg with a looking-glass
in front of him to give back an image of his desolation, and finding it
rather pleasant than otherwise to shed the tear of sympathy with self
that would seem so bitter to his fair correspondent. The tears that have
real salt in them will keep; they are the difficult, manly tears that are
shed in secret; but the pathos soon evaporates from that fresh-water with
which a man can bedew a dead donkey in public, while his wife is having a
good cry over his neglect of her at home. We do not think the worse of
Goethe for hypothetically desolating himself in the fashion aforesaid,
for with many constitutions it is as purely natural a crisis as
dentition, which the stronger worry through, and turn out very sensible,
agreeable fellows. But where there is an arrest of development, and the
heartbreak of the patient is audibly prolonged through life, we have a
spectacle which the toughest heart would wish to get as far away from as
possible.
We would not be supposed to overlook the distinction, too often lost
sight of, between sentimentalism and sentiment, the latter being a very
excellent thing in its way, as genuine things are apt to be. Sentiment is
intellectualized emotion, emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty
crystals by the fancy. This is the delightful staple of the poets of
social life like Horace and Béranger, or Thackeray, when he too rarely
played with verse. It puts into words for us that decorous average of
feeling to the expression of which society can consent without danger of
being indiscreetly moved. It is excellent for people who are willing to
save their souls alive to any extent that shall not be discomposing. It
is even satisfying till some deeper experience has given us a hunger
which what we so glibly call "the world" cannot sate, just as a water-ice
is nourishment enough to a man who has had his dinner. It is the
sufficing lyrical interpreter of those lighter hours that should make
part of every healthy man's day, and is noxious only when it palls men's
appetite for the truly profound poetry which is very passion of very soul
sobered by afterthought and embodied in eternal types by imagination.
True sentiment is emotion ripened by a slow ferment of the mind and
qualified to an agreeable temperance by that taste which is the
conscience of polite society. But the sentimentalist always insists on
taking his emotion neat, and, as his sense gradually deadens to the
stimulus, increases his dose till he ends in a kind of moral deliquium.
At first the debaucher, he becomes at last the victim of his sensations.
Among the ancients we find no trace of sentimentalism. Their masculine
mood both of body and mind left no room for it, and hence the bracing
quality of their literature compared with that of recent times, its tonic
property, that seems almost too astringent to palates relaxed by a
daintier diet. The first great example of the degenerate modern tendency
was Petrarch, who may be said to have given it impulse and direction. A
more perfect specimen of the type has not since appeared. An intellectual
voluptuary, a moral _dilettante_, the first instance of that character,
since too common, the gentleman in search of a sensation, seeking a
solitude at Vaucluse because it made him more likely to be in demand at
Avignon, praising philosophic poverty with a sharp eye to the next rich
benefice in the gift of his patron, commending a good life but careful
first of a good living, happy only in seclusion but making a dangerous
journey to enjoy the theatrical show of a coronation in the Capitol,
cherishing a fruitless passion which broke his heart three or four times
a year and yet could not make an end of him till he had reached the ripe
age of seventy and survived his mistress a quarter of a century,--surely
a more exquisite perfection of inconsistency would be hard to find.
When Petrarch returned from his journey into the North of Europe in 1332,
he balanced the books of his unrequited passion, and, finding that he had
now been in love seven years, thought the time had at last come to call
deliberately on Death. Had Death taken him at his word, he would have
protested that he was only in fun. For we find him always taking good
care of an excellent constitution, avoiding the plague with commendable
assiduity, and in the very year when he declares it absolutely essential
to his peace of mind to die for good and all, taking refuge in the
fortress of Capranica, from a wholesome dread of having his throat cut by
robbers. There is such a difference between dying in a sonnet with a
cambric handkerchief at one's eyes, and the prosaic reality of demise
certified in the parish register! Practically it is inconvenient to be
dead. Among other things, it puts an end to the manufacture of sonnets.
But there seems to have been an excellent understanding between Petrarch
and Death, for he was brought to that grisly monarch's door so often,
that, otherwise, nothing short of a miracle or the nine lives of that
animal whom love also makes lyrical could have saved him. "I consent," he
cries, "to live and die in Africa among its serpents, upon Caucasus, or
Atlas, if, while I live, to breathe a pure air, and after my death a
little corner of earth where to bestow my body, may be allowed me. This
is all I ask, but this I cannot obtain. Doomed always to wander, and to
be a stranger everywhere, O Fortune, Fortune, fix me at last to some one
spot! I do not covet thy favors. Let me enjoy a tranquil poverty, let me
pass in this retreat the few days that remain to me!" The pathetic stop
of Petrarch's poetical organ was one he could pull out at pleasure,--and
indeed we soon learn to distrust literary tears, as the cheap subterfuge
for want of real feeling with natures of this quality. Solitude with him
was but the pseudonyme of notoriety. Poverty was the archdeaconry of
Parma, with other ecclesiastical pickings. During his retreat at
Vaucluse, in the very height of that divine sonneteering love of Laura,
of that sensitive purity which called Avignon Babylon, and rebuked the
sinfulness of Clement, he was himself begetting that kind of children
which we spell with a _b_. We believe that, if Messer Francesco had been
present when the woman was taken in adultery, he would have flung the
first stone without the slightest feeling of inconsistency, nay, with a
sublime sense of virtue. The truth is, that it made very little
difference to him what sort of proper sentiment he expressed, provided he
could do it elegantly and with unction.
Would any one feel the difference between his faint abstractions and the
Platonism of a powerful nature fitted alike for the withdrawal of ideal
contemplation and for breasting the storms of life,--would any one know
how wide a depth divides a noble friendship based on sympathy of pursuit
and aspiration, on that mutual help which souls capable of
self-sustainment are the readiest to give or to take, and a simulated
passion, true neither to the spiritual nor the sensual part of man,--let
him compare the sonnets of Petrarch with those which Michel Angelo
addressed to Vittoria Colonna. In them the airiest pinnacles of sentiment
and speculation are buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, and of
an actual, not fancied experience, and the depth of feeling is measured
by the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch's all
ingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are cold, but the
coldness of the one is self-restraint, while the other chills with
pretence of warmth. In Michel Angelo's, you feel the great architect; in
Petrarch's the artist who can best realize his conception in the limits
of a cherry-stone. And yet this man influenced literature longer and more
widely than almost any other in modern times. So great is the charm of
elegance, so unreal is the larger part of what is written!
Certainly I do not mean to say that a work of art should be looked at by
the light of the artist's biography, or measured by our standard of his
character. Nor do I reckon what was genuine in Petrarch--his love of
letters, his refinement, his skill in the superficial graces of language,
that rhetorical art by which the music of words supplants their meaning,
and the verse moulds the thought instead of being plastic to it--after
any such fashion. I have no ambition for that character of _valet de
chambre_ which is said to disenchant the most heroic figures into mere
every-day personages, for it implies a mean soul no less than a servile
condition. But we have a right to demand a certain amount of reality,
however small, in the emotion of a man who makes it his business to
endeavor at exciting our own. We have a privilege of nature to shiver
before a painted flame, how cunningly soever the colors be laid on. Yet
our love of minute biographical detail, our desire to make ourselves
spies upon the men of the past, seems so much of an instinct in us, that
we must look for the spring of it in human nature, and that somewhat
deeper than mere curiosity or love of gossip. It should seem to arise
from what must be considered on the whole a creditable feeling, namely,
that we value character more than any amount of talent,--the skill to
_be_ something, above that of doing anything but the best of its kind.
The highest creative genius, and that only, is privileged from arrest by
this personality, for there the thing produced is altogether disengaged
from the producer. But in natures incapable of this escape from
themselves, the author is inevitably mixed with his work, and we have a
feeling that the amount of his sterling character is the security for the
notes he issues. Especially we feel so when truth to self, which is
always self-forgetful, and not truth to nature, makes an essential part
of the value of what is offered us; as where a man undertakes to narrate
personal experience or to enforce a dogma. This is particularly true as
respects sentimentalists, because of their intrusive self-consciousness;
for there is no more universal characteristic of human nature than the
instinct of men to apologize to themselves for themselves, and to justify
personal failings by generalizing them into universal laws. A man would
be the keenest devil's advocate against himself, were it not that he has
always taken a retaining fee for the defence; for we think that the
indirect and mostly unconscious pleas in abatement which we read between
the lines in the works of many authors are oftener written to set
themselves right in their own eyes than in those of the world. And in the
real life of the sentimentalist it is the same. He is under the wretched
necessity of keeping up, at least in public, the character he has
assumed, till he at last reaches that last shift of bankrupt
self-respect, to play the hypocrite with himself. Lamartine, after
passing round the hat in Europe and America, takes to his bed from
wounded pride when the French Senate votes him a subsidy, and sheds tears
of humiliation. Ideally, he resents it; in practical coin, he will accept
the shame without a wry face.
George Sand, speaking of Rousseau's "Confessions," says that an
autobiographer always makes himself the hero of his own novel, and cannot
help idealizing, even if he would. But the weak point of all
sentimentalists is that they always have been, and always continue under
every conceivable circumstance to be, their own ideals, whether they are
writing their own lives or no. Rousseau opens his book with the
statement: "I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to
believe myself unlike any that exists. If I am not worth more, at least I
am different." O exquisite cunning of self-flattery! It is this very
imagined difference that makes us worth more in our own foolish sight.
For while all men are apt to think, or to persuade themselves that they
think, all other men their accomplices in vice or weakness, they are not
difficult of belief that they are singular in any quality or talent on
which they hug themselves. More than this; people who are truly original
are the last to find it out, for the moment we become conscious of a
virtue it has left us or is getting ready to go. Originality does not
consist in a fidgety assertion of selfhood, but in the faculty of getting
rid of it altogether, that the truer genius of the man, which commerces
with universal nature and with other souls through a common sympathy with
that, may take all his powers wholly to itself,--and the truly original
man could no more be jealous of his peculiar gift, than the grass could
take credit to itself for being green. What is the reason that all
children are geniuses, (though they contrive so soon to outgrow that
dangerous quality,) except that they never cross-examine themselves on
the subject? The moment that process begins, their speech loses its gift
of unexpectedness, and they become as tediously impertinent as the rest
of us.
If there never was any one like him, if he constituted a genus in
himself, to what end write confessions in which no other human being
could ever be in a condition to take the least possible interest? All men
are interested in Montaigne in proportion as all men find more of
themselves in him, and all men see but one image in the glass which the
greatest of poets holds up to nature, an image which at once startles and
charms them with its familiarity. Fabulists always endow their animals
with the passions and desires of men. But if an ox could dictate his
confessions, what glimmer of understanding should we find in those bovine
confidences, unless on some theory of pre existence, some blank misgiving
of a creature moving about in worlds not realized? The truth is, that we
recognize the common humanity of Rousseau in the very weakness that
betrayed him into this conceit of himself; we find he is just like the
rest of us in this very assumption of essential difference, for among all
animals man is the only one who tries to pass for more than he is, and so
involves himself in the condemnation of seeming less.
But it would be sheer waste of time to hunt Rousseau through all his
doublings of inconsistency, and run him to earth in every new paradox.
His first two books attacked, one of them literature, and the other
society. But this did not prevent him from being diligent with his pen,
nor from availing himself of his credit with persons who enjoyed all the
advantages of that inequality whose evils he had so pointedly exposed.
Indeed, it is curious how little practical communism there has been, how
few professors it has had who would not have gained by a general
dividend. It is perhaps no frantic effort of generosity in a philosopher
with ten crowns in his pocket when he offers to make common stock with a
neighbor who has ten thousand of yearly income, nor is it an uncommon
thing to see such theories knocked clean out of a man's head by the
descent of a thumping legacy. But, consistent or not, Rousseau remains
permanently interesting as the highest and most perfect type of the
sentimentalist of genius. His was perhaps the acutest mind that was ever
mated with an organization so diseased, the brain most far-reaching in
speculation that ever kept itself steady and worked out its problems amid
such disordered tumult of the nerves.[166] His letter to the Archbishop
of Paris, admirable for its lucid power and soberness of tone, and his
_Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques_, which no man can read and believe him to
have been sane, show him to us in his strength and weakness, and give us
a more charitable, let us hope therefore a truer, notion of him than his
own apology for himself. That he was a man of genius appears unmistakably
in his impressibility by the deeper meaning of the epoch in which he
lived. Before an eruption, clouds steeped through and through with
electric life gather over the crater, as if in sympathy and expectation.
As the mountain heaves and cracks, these vapory masses are seamed with
fire, as if they felt and answered the dumb agony that is struggling for
utterance below. Just such flashes of eager sympathetic fire break
continually from the cloudy volumes of Rousseau, the result at once and
the warning of that convulsion of which Paris was to be the crater and
all Europe to feel the spasm. There are symptoms enough elsewhere of that
want of faith in the existing order which made the Revolution
inevitable,--even so shallow an observer as Horace Walpole could forebode
it so early as 1765,--but Rousseau more than all others is the
unconscious expression of the groping after something radically new, the
instinct for a change that should be organic and pervade every fibre of
the social and political body. Freedom of thought owes far more to the
jester Voltaire, who also had his solid kernel of earnest, than to the
sombre Genevese, whose earnestness is of the deadly kind. Yet, for good
or evil, the latter was the father of modern democracy, and with out him
our Declaration of Independence would have wanted some of those sentences
in which the immemorial longings of the poor and the dreams of solitary
enthusiasts were at last affirmed as axioms in the manifesto of a nation,
so that all the world might hear.
Though Rousseau, like many other fanatics, had a remarkable vein of
common sense in him, (witness his remarks on duelling, on
landscape-gardening, on French poetry, and much of his thought on
education,) we cannot trace many practical results to his teaching, least
of all in politics. For the great difficulty with his system, if system
it may be called, is, that, while it professes to follow nature, it not
only assumes as a starting-point that the individual man may be made over
again, but proceeds to the conclusion that man himself, that human
nature, must be made over again, and governments remodelled on a purely
theoretic basis. But when something like an experiment in this direction
was made in 1789, not only did it fail as regarded man in general, but
even as regards the particular variety of man that inhabited France. The
Revolution accomplished many changes, and beneficent ones, yet it left
France peopled, not by a new race without traditions, but by Frenchmen.
Still, there could not but be a wonderful force in the words of a man
who, above all others, had the secret of making abstractions glow with
his own fervor; and his ideas--dispersed now in the atmosphere of
thought--have influenced, perhaps still continue to influence, speculative
minds, which prefer swift and sure generalization to hesitating and
doubtful experience.
Rousseau has, in one respect, been utterly misrepresented and
misunderstood. Even Châteaubriand most unfilially classes him and
Voltaire together. It appears to me that the inmost core of his being was
religious. Had he remained in the Catholic Church he might have been a
saint. Had he come earlier, he might have founded an order. His was
precisely the nature on which religious enthusiasm takes the strongest
hold,--a temperament which finds a sensuous delight in spiritual things,
and satisfies its craving for excitement with celestial debauch. He had
not the iron temper of a great reformer and organizer like Knox, who,
true Scotchman that he was, found a way to weld this world and the other
together in a cast-iron creed; but he had as much as any man ever had
that gift of a great preacher to make the oratorical fervor which
persuades himself while it lasts into the abiding conviction of his
hearers. That very persuasion of his that the soul could remain pure
while the life was corrupt, is not unexampled among men who have left
holier names than he. His "Confessions," also, would assign him to that
class with whom the religious sentiment is strong, and the moral nature
weak. They are apt to believe that they may, as special pleaders say,
confess and avoid. Hawthorne has admirably illustrated this in the
penance of Mr. Dimmesdale. With all the soil that is upon Rousseau, I
cannot help looking on him as one capable beyond any in his generation of
being divinely possessed; and if it happened otherwise, when we remember
the much that hindered and the little that helped in a life and time like
his, we shall be much readier to pity than to condemn. It was his very
fitness for being something better that makes him able to shock us so
with what in too many respects he unhappily was. Less gifted, he had been
less hardly judged. More than any other of the sentimentalists, except
possibly Sterne, he had in him a staple of sincerity. Compared with
Châteaubriand, he is honesty, compared with Lamartine, he is manliness
itself. His nearest congener in our own tongue is Cowper.
In the whole school there is a sickly taint. The strongest mark which
Rousseau has left upon literature is a sensibility to the picturesque in
Nature, not with Nature as a strengthener and consoler, a wholesome tonic
for a mind ill at ease with itself, but with Nature as a kind of feminine
echo to the mood, flattering it with sympathy rather than correcting it
with rebuke or lifting it away from its unmanly depression, as in the
wholesomer fellow-feeling of Wordsworth. They seek in her an accessary,
and not a reproof. It is less a sympathy with Nature than a sympathy with
ourselves as we compel her to reflect us. It is solitude, Nature for her
estrangement from man, not for her companionship with him,--it is
desolation and ruin, Nature as she has triumphed over man,--with which
this order of mind seeks communion and in which it finds solace. It is
with the hostile and destructive power of matter, and not with the spirit
of life and renewal that dwells in it, that they ally themselves. And in
human character it is the same. St. Preux, René, Werther, Manfred,
Quasimodo, they are all anomalies, distortions, ruins,--so much easier is
it to caricature life from our own sickly conception of it, than to paint
it in its noble simplicity; so much cheaper is unreality than truth.
Every man is conscious that he leads two lives,--the one trivial and
ordinary, the other sacred and recluse; one which he carries to society
and the dinner-table, the other in which his youth and aspiration survive
for him, and which is a confidence between himself and God. Both may be
equally sincere, and there need be no contradiction between them, any
more than in a healthy man between soul and body. If the higher life be
real and earnest, its result, whether in literature or affairs, will be
real and earnest too. But no man can produce great things who is not
thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself, who would not exchange the
finest show for the poorest reality, who does not so love his work that
he is not only glad to give himself for it, but finds rather a gain than
a sacrifice in the surrender. The sentimentalist does not think of what
he does so much as of what the world will think of what he does. He
translates should into would, looks upon the spheres of duty and beauty
as alien to each other, and can never learn how life rounds itself to a
noble completeness between these two opposite but mutually sustaining
poles of what we long for and what we must.
Did Rousseau, then, lead a life of this quality? Perhaps, when we
consider the contrast which every man who looks backward must feel
between the life he planned and the life which circumstance within him
and without him has made for him, we should rather ask, Was this the life
he meant to lead? Perhaps, when we take into account his faculty of
self-deception,--it may be no greater than our own,--we should ask, Was
this the life he believed he led? Have we any right to judge this man
after our blunt English fashion, and condemn him, as we are wont to do,
on the finding of a jury of average householders? Is French reality
precisely our reality? Could we tolerate tragedy in rhymed alexandrines,
instead of blank verse? The whole life of Rousseau is pitched on this
heroic key, and for the most trivial occasion he must be ready with the
sublime sentiments that are supposed to suit him rather than it. It is
one of the most curious features of the sentimental ailment, that, while
it shuns the contact of men, it courts publicity. In proportion as
solitude and communion with self lead the sentimentalist to exaggerate
the importance of his own personality, he comes to think that the least
event connected with it is of consequence to his fellow-men. If he change
his shirt, he would have mankind aware of it. Victor Hugo, the greatest
living representative of the class, considers it necessary to let the
world know by letter from time to time his opinions on every conceivable
subject about which it is not asked nor is of the least value unless we
concede to him an immediate inspiration. We men of colder blood, in whom
self-consciousness takes the form of pride, and who have deified
_mauvaise honte_ as if our defect were our virtue, find it especially
hard to understand that artistic impulse of more southern races to _pose_
themselves properly on every occasion, and not even to die without some
tribute of deference to the taste of the world they are leaving. Was not
even mighty Caesar's last thought of his drapery? Let us not condemn
Rousseau for what seems to us the indecent exposure of himself in his
"Confessions."
Those who allow an oratorical and purely conventional side disconnected
with our private understanding of the facts, and with life, in which
everything has a wholly parliamentary sense where truth is made
subservient to the momentary exigencies of eloquence, should be
charitable to Rousseau. While we encourage a distinction which
establishes two kinds of truth, one for the world, and another for the
conscience, while we take pleasure in a kind of speech that has no
relation to the real thought of speaker or hearer, but to the rostrum
only, we must not be hasty to condemn a sentimentalism which we do our
best to foster. We listen in public with the gravity or augurs to what we
smile at when we meet a brother adept. France is the native land of
eulogy, of truth padded out to the size and shape demanded by
_comme-il-faut_. The French Academy has, perhaps, done more harm by the
vogue it has given to this style, than it has done good by its literary
purism; for the best purity of a language depends on the limpidity of its
source in veracity of thought. Rousseau was in many respects a typical
Frenchman, and it is not to be wondered at if he too often fell in with
the fashion of saying what was expected of him, and what he thought due
to the situation, rather than what would have been true to his inmost
consciousness. Perhaps we should allow something also to the influence of
a Calvinistic training, which certainly helps men who have the least
natural tendency towards it to set faith above works, and to persuade
themselves of the efficacy of an inward grace to offset an outward and
visible defection from it.
As the sentimentalist always takes a fanciful, sometimes an unreal, life
for an ideal one, it would be too much to say that Rousseau was a man of
earnest convictions. But he was a man of fitfully intense ones, as suited
so mobile a temperament, and his writings, more than those of any other
of his tribe, carry with them that persuasion that was in him while he
wrote. In them at least he is as consistent as a man who admits new ideas
can ever be. The children of his brain he never abandoned, but clung to
them with paternal fidelity. Intellectually he was true and fearless;
constitutionally, timid, contradictory, and weak; but never, if we
understand him rightly, false. He was a little too credulous of sonorous
sentiment, but he was never, like Châteaubriand or Lamartine, the lackey
of fine phrases. If, as some fanciful physiologists have assumed, there
be a masculine and feminine lobe of the brain, it would seem that in men
of sentimental turn the masculine half fell in love with and made an idol
of the other, obeying and admiring all the pretty whims of this _folle du
logis_. In Rousseau the mistress had some noble elements of character,
and less taint of the _demi-monde_ than is visible in more recent cases
of the same illicit relation.
Footnotes:
[165] _Histoire des Idées Morales et Politiques en France au XVIIIme
Siecle._ Par M. Jules Barni, Professeur à l'Académie de Genève, Tome
II. Paris, 1867.
[166] Perhaps we should except Newton.