Rousseau. / Morley, John, 1838-1923
 |
Author: Morley, John, 1838-1923
Title: Rousseau.
Publisher: London Macmillan 1886
Tag(s): rousseau, jean-jacques, 1712-1778; rousseau; new heloisa; social contract; savoyard vicar; chap; social
Contributor(s): Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
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Rights: GNU General Public License
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Identifier: rousseau02morluoft
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Presented to the
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LIBRARY
by the
ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE
LIBRARY
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JOHN MORLEY
VOL. II.
MACMILLAX AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1910
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CONTENTS OF VOL. TI.
CHAPTEK I.
Montmorency — The New Heloisa.
Conditions prei'eJiiifj the (.oiuposition of the Xew Heloisa
Tlie Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg .
Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances
Peaceful life at Montmorency ....
Equivocal prudence occasionally sliow n by Rousseau
His want of gratitude for commonplace service
Bad health, and thoughts of suicide
Episode of Jladame Latour de Franqueville
Relation of the New Heloisa to Rousseau's general dt
trine .......
Action of the fust part of the story .
ontrasted with contemporary literature .
And with contemporarj- manners
Criticism of the language and principal actors .
Popularity of the New Heloisa
Its reactionary intellectual direction
Action of the second part ....
ts influence on Goethe and others .
istinction between Rousseau and his school .
Singular pictures of domesticity
Sumptuarj' details ...
The slowness of movement in the work justified
PAQB
1
2
4
9
12
13
16
17
20
25
25
27
28, 29
31
33
36
38
40
42
44
46
:{.')
VI
CONTENTS.
Exaltation of marriage ......
Eqiialitarian tendoncies ......
Not inconsistent with social quietism
Compensation in the political consequences of the triumpl
of sentiment .......
Circumstances of the publication of the New Heloisa
Nature of the trade in books .....
Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius .
Rousseau's suspicions ......
The great struggle of the moment ....
Proscription of Emilius ......
ni<(lit of the author ......
PAGE
47
49
51
54
55
57
61
62
64
67
67
CHAPTEB
. II.
Persecution.
Kou.sseau's journey from Switzerland .... 69
Absence of vindictiveness
70
Arrival at Yverdun
72
Repairs to Motiers .
73
Relations with Frederick the Great
74
Life at Motiers
77
Lord Marischal
79
Voltaire
81
Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop
of Pa
ris
83
Its dialectic ....
86
The ministers of Neuchatel
90
Rousseau's singular costume
. 92
His throng of visitors
93
Lewis, prince of Wiirtemberg .
. 95
Gibbon
96
Boswell .....
. 98
Corsican affairs
. 99
The feud at Geneva
. 102
CONTENTS.
Vll
Rousseau renounces his citizenship .
Tlie Letters from the Mountain
Political side .....
Consequent persecution at Motiei-s .
Flight to the isle of St. Peter .
The fifth of the BSveries .
Proscription by the government of Benie
Rousseau's singular request
His renewed flight ....
Persuaded to seek shelter in England
PAUK
105
106
107
107
108
109
116
116
117
US
CHAPTER III.
The Social Coxtract.
Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility
Abandonment of the position of the Discourses
Doubtful idea of equality ....
he Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method
t it has glimpses of relativity
uence of Greek examples .
And of Geneva .....
Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just
Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory
hy the Social Contract made fanatics
Verbal quality of its propositions .
The doctrine of public safety .
The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples
Its early jihases ....
Its history in the sixteenth century
Hooker and Grotius
Looke ......
Hobbes ......
Central propositions of the Social Contrat
1. Origin of society in compact
t—
119
121
121
124
127
129
131
132
135
137
138
113
141
144
146
148
149
151
154
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER V.
Thk Savoyard Vicak.
Shallow liojjes eutertained by the dogmatic atheists-
The good side of the religious reaction
Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence
Earlier forms of deism ......
The deism of the Savoyard Vicar ....
The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity
A divinity for fair weather .....
Religious self-denial , '
The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission
His position towards Christianity ....
Its eifectiveness as a solvent .....
Weakness of the subjective test ....
The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growiu
intellectual conviction
The true satisfaction of the religious emotion .
PAGE
256
258
25.9
260
264
265
268
269
270
272
273
276
276
277
CHAPTER VI.
England.
Rousseau's English portrait .
His recej>tion in Paris ....
And in Loudon . . . . •
,-4Iume's account of him ....
Settlement at "Wootton ....
The ([uarrel with Hume . . . •
Detail of the charges against Hume
Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick
Baselessness of the whole delusioii .
Hume's conduct in the quarrel
. 281
. 282
. 283
. 284
. 286
. 287
287-291
. 291
292
. 293
CONTENTS.
XI
The war of pamphlets
Common theory of Rousseau's madness
Preparatory conditions .
Extension of disorder from the affective 1
gence .....
The Confessions ....
His life at Wootton
Flight from Derbyshire .
And from England ....
fe to the intelli-
295
•29«)
299
.301
306
306
308
CHAPTER VIT.
The End.
The elder Mirabcau 309
Shelters Rousseau at Fleury
311
Rousseau at Trye
312
In Dauphiuy
314
Return to Paris ....
314
The RSvcrks
315
Life in Paris .....
316
Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him
317
An Easter excursion
320
Rousseau"s unsociality
322
Poland and Spain ....
324
Withdrawal to Ermenonville .
326
His death
. 326
f
Vly }• V, 's ifj.
KOUSSEAU.
CHAPTER L
MONTMORENCY — THE NEW HELOISA.
The many conditions of intellectual productiveness
are still hidden in such profound obscurity that we
are unable to explain why a period of stoiTay moral
agitation seems to be in certain natures the indis-
pensable antecedent of their highest creative effort.
Byron is one instance, and Rousseau is another, in
which the current of stimulating force made this
rapid way from the lower to the higher parts of
character, and only expended itself after having
traversed the whole range of emotion and faculty,
from their meanest, most realistic, most personal
forms of exercise, up to the summit of what is lofty
and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an
odious complication of moral maladies as beset Rous-
seau in the winter of 1758. Yet within three years of
this miserable epoch he had completed not only the
New Heloisa, which is the monument of his fall, but
the Social Contract, which was the most influential,
VOL. II. B
2 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
and Emilius, wliich was perhaps the most elevated
and spiritual, of all the productions of the prolific
genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor
light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of
Rousseau's success lay in the circumstance that he
began to write late, and it is true that no other
author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the
age of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No
tale of years, however, could have ripened such fruit
without native strength and incommunicable savour.
Nor can the mechanical movement of those better
ordered characters wliich keep the balance of the
world even, impart to literature that peculiar quality,
peculiar but not the finest, that comes from experience
of the black unlighted abysses of the soid.
Tlie period of actual production was externally
calm. The New Heloisa was completed in 1759, and
published in 1761. The Social Contract was pub-
lished in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks
later. Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the
last time in his life, at peace with most of his fellows.
Though he never relented from his antipathy to the
Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more
real and serious persecution than any which he imputed
to them, transformed his antipathy intoa gloomy frenzy.
The new friends whom he made at Montmorency
were among the greatest people in the kingdom.
The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal
of France, and as intimate a friend of the king as
the king was capable of having. The Mar6chale de
r. MONTMORE^•CY. 3
Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one of the most
beautiful, and continued to be one of the most
brilliant leaders of the last aristocratic generation
that was destined to sport on the slopes of the
volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal and
homely soul ; the latter, restless, imperious, pene-
trating, unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau
were marked by perfect sincerity and straightforward
friendship. They gave him a convenient apartment
in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he
retreated when he cared for a change from his narrow
cottage. He was a constant guest at their table,
where he met the highest personages in France. The
marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk
with him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable
as ever to shine in conversation, yet eager to show
his great friends that they had to do with no common
mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New
Heloisa aloud to them. At ten in the morning he
used to wait upon the mart^chale, and there by her
bedside he read the story of the love, the sin, the
repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux,
the wisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of
Lord Edward, in tones which enchanted her both
with his book and its author for all the rest of the
day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
enchanted.^ This, as he expected, amply reconciled
her to the uncouthness and clumsiness of his conver-
sation, which was at least as maladroit and as spirit-
' Conf., I. 62.
4 ROUSSEAU, CHAP.
less in the presence of a duchess as it was in presences
less imposing.
One side of character is obviously tested by the
way in which a man beai's himself in his relations
with those of greater social consideration. Rousseau
was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with a
most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He
had a dog whose name was Due. When he came to
sit at a duke's table, he changed his dog's name to
Turc} Again, one day in a transport of tenderness
he embraced the old marshal — the duchess embraced
Rousseau ten times a day, for the age was effusive —
" Ah, monsieur le mar^chal, I used to hate the great
before I knew you, and I hate them still more, since
you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be
for them to have themselves adored.'"' On another
occasion he happened to be playing at chess with the
Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
cottage.^ In spite of the signs and grimaces of the
1 Conf., X. - lb. X. 70.
3 Louis Francois de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776),
was great-gnuulsou of the brother of the Great Coude. He per-
formed creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession
(in Piedmont 1744, in Belgium 1745) ; had a scheme of foreign
policy as director of the secret diplomacy of Lewis xv. (1745-
17.')6), which was to make Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a
barrier against Russia primarily, and Austria secondarily ; lastly
went into moderate opposition to the court, protesting against
the destruction of tha 2Mrlc7nents (1771), and afterwards opposing
the reforms of Turgot (177G). Finally he had the honour of
refusing the sacraments of tlie church on his deathbed. See
Martin's Hist, de France, xv. and xvi.
L MONTMORENCY. 5
attendants, he insisted on beating the prince in a
couple of games. Then he said with respectful
gra\ity, " Monseigneur, I honour your serene high-
ness too much not to beat you at chess always."^ A
few days after, the vanquished prince sent him a pre-
sent of game which Rousseau duly accepted. The
present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote
to Madame de Boufl3ers that he would receive no
more, and that he loved the prince's conversation
better than his gifts.^ He admits that this was an
ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game " from
a prince of the blood who throws such good feeling
into the present, is not so much the delicacy of a
proud man bent on preserving his independence, as
the rusticity of an immannerly person who does not
know his place." ^ Considering the extreme virulence
with which Rousseau always resented gifts even of
the most trifling kind from his friends, one may per-
haps find some inconsistency in this condemnation of
a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on
all other occasions. If the fact of the donor being a
prince of the blood is allowed to modify the quality
of the donation, that is hardly a defensible position in
the austere citizen of Geneva, Madame de Boufflers,*
1 Con/., 97. Corr., v. 215.
2 Corr., ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760. ^ Conf., x. 98.
* The reader will distinguish this correspondent of Rous-
seau's, Comtcsse de Boufllers-Rouveret (1727-18 — ), from the
Duchesse de Boufflers, which was the title of Rousseau's Mar^-
chale de Lu.xembourg before her second marriage. And also
from the Marquise de Boufflers. said to be the mistress of the
6 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet
more intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave
liim a judicious warning when she bade hira beware
of laying himself open to a charge of affectation, lest
it should obscure the briglitness of his virtue and so
hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Eegulus would
have accepted such marks of esteem, without feeling
in them any hurt to their disinterestedness and
frugality."^ Perhaps there is a flutter of self-con-
sciousness that is not far removed from this aflecta-
tion, in the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that
after dining at the castle, he used to return home
gleefully to sup ■with a mason who was his neighbour
and his friend.^ On the whole, however, and so far as
we know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily
with these high people. His letters to them are for
the most jjart marked by self-respect and a moderate
graciousness, though now and again he makes rather
too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts
his independence with something too much of pro-
old king Stanislaus at Luneville, and the mother of the Chevalier
de Boufflers (who was the intimate of Voltaire, sat in the States
General, emigrated, did homage to Napoleon, and finally died
peaceably under Lewis xviii.). See Jal's Did. Critique, 259-
2G2. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present Comtesse de
Boufflers {Nouvcaux Lundis, iv. 163). She is the Madame de
Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Jolinson in his
Temple chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a
remarkable manner (Boswell's Life, ch. li. p. 467). Also much
talked of in H. Wal^jole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick •
April 15, 1768.
>■ Sh-eckeisen. ii. 32. " Conf., x. 71.
I. MONTMORENCY. 7
testation.^ Their relations with him are a curious
sign of the interest which the members of the great
world took in the men who were quietly preparing
the destruction both of them and their world. The
Marechale de Luxembourg places this squalid dweller
in a hovel on her estate in tlie place of honour at her
table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of
Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a
man whom he employs at a few sous an hour to copy
manuscript for him. The Countess of Boufflers, in
sending him the money, insists that he is to count
her his warmest friend.^ When his dog dies, the
countess writes to sympathise with his chagrin, and
the prince begs to be allowed to replace it.^ And
when persecution and trouble and infinite confusion
came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their
own comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there
must have been in the unhappy man, besides all the
recorded pettinesses and perversities which revolt us
in him, a vein of something which touched men, and
made women devoted to him, until he splenetically
drove both men and women away from him 1 With
Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as with
the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we
have now parted company. But they are instantly
succeeded by new devotees. And the lovers of
Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led
captive by idle fancy. IMadame de Boufflers was one
1 For instance, Corr. ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.
2 Streckeisen, iL 28, etc. » lb., 29.
8 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
of the most distinguished spirits of her time. Hei
friendship for him was such, that his sensuous vanity
made Rousseau against all reason or probability con-
found it with a warmer form of emotion, and he
plumes himself in a manner most displeasing on
the victory which he won over his own feelings on
the occasion.^ As a matter of fact he had no feel-
ings to conquer, any more than the supposed object
of them ever bore him any ill-will for his indifTer-
ence, as in his mania of suspicion he afterwards
believed.
There was a calm about the too few years he passed
at Montmorency, which leaves us in doubt whether
this mania would ever have afflicted him, if his natural
irritation had not been made intense and irresistible
by the cruel distractions that followed the publication
of Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present
friends. The simplicity of their way of dealing with
him contrasted singularly, as he thought, with the
never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they were
officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just
cast off.^ Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the com-
panionship of persons Avhose rank may have flattered
his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his old literary
friends in Paris, they entered into no competition
with him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius.
Madame de Boufflers, indeed, wrote a tragedy, but
he told her grufily enough that it was a plagiarism
from Southerue's Oroouoko.^ That Eousseau was
1 Con/., X. 99. • rh., x. 57 ^ Th. xi. 119.
I. MONTMORENCY. 9
thoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive
literary jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his
readiness to suspect that other authors were jealous
of him. No one suspects others of a meanness of
this kind unless he is capable of it himself. The
resounding success Avhich followed the New Heloisa
and Emilius put an end to these apprehensions. It
raised him to a pedestal in popular esteem as high
as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That
very success unfortunately brought troubles which
destroyed Eousseau's last chance of ending his days
in full reasonableness.
Meanwhile he enjoyed his final intei-val of moderate
wholesomeness and peace. He felt his old healthy joy
in the green earth. One of the letters commemorates
his delight in the great scudding south-west winds of
February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to
all who live with nature.^ At the end of his garden
was a summer-house, and here even on wintry days
he sat composing or copying. It was not music only
that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making
transcripts of his romance, and he sold them to the
Duchess of Luxembourg and other ladies for some
moderate fee.^ Sometimes he moved from his o^vn
lodging to the quarters in the park which his great
friends had induced him to accept. "They were
charmingly neat ; the furniture was of white and blue.
It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in the
midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of
1 Corr., ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761. ' lb., iL 102, 176, etc
10 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
every kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower
poured round me, that I composed in a continual
ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what eager-
ness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe
the bahny air ! What good coffee I used to make
under the porch in company with my Theresa ! The
cat and the dog made up the party. That would
have sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I
should never have known weariness." And so to
the assurance, so often repeated under so many dif-
ferent circumstances, that here was a true heaven
upon earth, where if fates had only allowed he
would have known unbroken innocence and lasting
happiness.^
Yet he had the wisdom to warn others acrainst
attempting a life such as he craved for himself. As
on a more memorable occasion, there came to him a
young man who would fain have been with him always,
and whom he sent away exceeding sorrowful. " The
tirst lesson I should give you would be not to surrender
yourself to the taste you say you have for the con-
templative life. It is only an indolence of the soul,
to be condemned at any age, but especially so at yours.
Man is not made to meditate, but to act. Labour
therefore in the condition of life in which you have
been placed by your family and by providence : that
is the first precept of the virtue which you ^vish to
follow. If residence at Paris, joined to the business
you have there, seems to you irreconcilable with virtue,
1 Conf., X. 60.
I. MONTMORENCY. 11
do better still, and return to your own province. Go
live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace
your honest parents. There you will be truly fulfil-
ling the duties that virtue imposes on you."^ This
intermixture of sound sense with rmutterable per-
versities almost suggests a doubt how far the per-
versities were sincere, until we remember thatEousseau
even in the most exalted part of his writings was care-
ful to separate immediate practical maxims from his
theoretical principles of social philosophy.^
Occasionally his good sense takes so stiflf and
unsympathetic a form as to fill us with a wanner
dislike for him than his worst paradoxes inspire. A
correspondent had written to him about the frightful
persecutions which were being inflicted on the Pro-
testants in some district of France. Eousseau's letter
is a masterpiece in the style of Eliphaz the Temanite.
Our brethren must surely have given some pretext
for the evil treatment to which they were subjected.
One who is a Christian must learn to suffer, and every
man's conduct ought to conform to his doctrine. Our
brethren, moreover, ought to remember that the word
of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws
set up by the prince. The writer cannot venture to
1 Cffir., ii. 12.
" As M. St. Marc Girardin has put it: "There are in all
Rousseau's discussions two things to be carefully distinguished
from one another ; the maxims of the discourse, and the con-
clusions of the controversy. The maxims are ordinarily para-
doxical ; the conclusions are full of good sense." litv. des Deux
Mondcs, Aug. 1852, p. 501.
12 ROUSSEAU. OHAP,
run any risk by interceding in favour of our brethren
with the government. " Every one has his own call-
ing upon the earth ; mine is to tell the public harsh
but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentle-
ness, tolerance, so far as it depended upon me ; 'tis
no fault of mine if the world has not listened. I have
made it a rule to keep to general truths ; I produce
no libels, no satires ; I attack no man, but men ; not
an action, but a vice."^ The worst of the worthy
sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is that they are such
cowards : a man groans over a wrong, he holds his
tongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about
it.- If Voltaire could not write like F^nelon, at least
he could never talk like Tartufe ; he responded to no
tale of wrong with words about his mission, with
strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and
the spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an
hour of oppression one would rather have been the
friend of the saviour of the Galas and of Sirven, than
of the vindicator of theism.
Eousseau, however, had good sense enough in less
equivocal forms than this. For example, in another
letter he remonstrates with a correspondent for judg-
ing the rich too harshly. " You do not bear in mind
that having from their childhood contracted a thousand
wants which we are without, then to bring them doAvn
to the condition of the poor, would be to make them
more miserable than the poor. We should be just
1 Corr., ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.
■^ [b., 1766. (Ewv., Ixxv. 364.
I. MONTMORENCY. 1 3
towards all the world, even to those who are not just
to us. Ah, if we had the virtues opposed to the vices
which we reproach in them, we should soon forget
that such people were in the world. One word more.
To have any right to despise the rich, we ought our-
selves to be prudent and thrifty, so as to have no
need of riches."^ In the observance of this just pre-
cept Eousseau was to the end of his life absolutely
without fault. No one was more rigorously careful
to make his independence sure by the fewness of his
wants and by minute financial probity. This firm
limitation of his material desires was one cause of his
habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept pre-
sents, though no doubt another cause was the stubborn
and ungracious egoism which made him resent every
obligation.
It is worth remembering in illustration of the
peculiar susceptibility and softness of his character
where women were concerned — it was not quite with-
out exception — that he did not fly into a fit of rage
over their gifts, as he did over those of men. He
remonstrated, but in gentler key. " Wliat could I do
with four pullets 1" he wrote to a lady who had
presented them to him. " I began by sending two of
them to people to v.hom I am indifferent. That made
me think of the difference there is between a present
and a testimony of friendship. The first wiU never
find in me anything but a thankless heart ; the second.
. . Ah, if you had only given me news of yourself
1 Corr., ii. 32. (1758.)
U ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
without sending me anything else, how rich and how
grateful you wouhl have made me ; instead of that
the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is to
forget all about them; let us say no more."^ Rude
and repellent as this may seem, and as it is, there is a
rough kind of playfulness about it, when compared
with the truculence which he was not slow to exhibit
to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any
service, he was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance
of the true qualities of friendship, with which thank-
fulness has no connection. He ostentatiously refused
to offer thanks for services himself, even to a woman
whom he always treated with so much consideration
as the Mar(§chale de Luxembourg. He once declared
boldly that modesty is a false virtue," and though he
did not go so far as to make gratitude the subject of
a corresponding formula of denunciation, he always
implied that this too is really one of the false virtues.
He confessed to Malesherbes, without the slightest
contrition, that he was ungrateful by nature.^ To
Madame d'Epinay he once went still further, declaring
that he found it hard not to hate those who had used
him well.* Undoubtedly he was right so far as this,
that gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a
benefactor is no merit ; a service done in expectation
of gratitude is from that fact stripped of the quality
which makes gratitude due, and is a mere piece of
1 Corr., ii. 63. Jan. 1.5, 1779.
2 Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 102.
^ 4tl) Letteivp; i>75. •» Mtm., ii. 299
I. MONTMORENCY. 15
egoism in altruistic disguisa Kindness in its genuine
forms is a testimony of good feeling, and conventional
speech is perhaps a little too hard, as well as too
shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient evil names
because he is unable to respond to the good feeling.
Rousseau protested against a conception of friendship
which makes of what ought to be disinterested help-
fulness a title to everlasting tribute. His way of
expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it was
not without an element of uprightness and veracity.
As in his greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon
private relations, he hid wholesome ingredients of
rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of common
form. " I am well pleased," he said to a friend, " both
with thee and thy letters, except the end, where thou
say'st thou art more mine than thine own. For there
thou liest, and it is not worth while to take the trouble
to thee and thxni a man as thine intimate, only to tell
him untruths."^ Chesterfield was for people with
much self-love of the small sort, probably a more
agreeable person to meet than Doctor Johnson, but
Johnson was the more wholesome companion for
a man.
Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to
have let spleen take the place of honest surliness, and
so drifted into clumsy and ill-humoured banter, of a
sort that gives a dre?,ry shudder to one fresh from
Voltaire. " So you have chosen for yourself a tender
and virtuous mistress ! I am not surprised ; aJl
1 Carr., ii. 98. July 10, 1759.
16 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
mistresses are that. You have chosen her in Paris !
To find a tender and virtuous mistress in Paris is to
have not such bad luck. You have made her a
promise of marriage 1 My friend, you have made a
blunder ; for if you continue to love, the promise is
supeiiiuous, and if you do not, then it is no avail.
You have signed it with your blood 1 That is all but
trade ; but I don't know that the choice of the ink
in which he writes, gives anything to the fidelity of
the man who signs." ■^
We can only add that the health in which a man
writes may possibly excuse the dismal quality of what
he writes, and that Eousseau was now as always the
prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made
him distraught. " My sufferings are not very excru-
ciating just now," he wrote on a later occasion, "but
they are incessant, and I am not out of pain a single
moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad.
I feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of
my suspicions ; but if anything can excuse me, it is
my mournful state, my loneliness," and so on.^ This
prolonged physical anguish, which was made more
intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental
breaking of a surgical instrument,^ sometimes so nearly
wore his fortitude away as to make him think of
suicide.^ In Lord Edward's famous letter on suicide
in the New Heloisa, while denying in forcible terms
the right of ending one's days merely to escape from
» Corr., ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759. - lb., ii 179. Jan. 18, 1761.
3 lb., ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761. •» lb., ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.
I, MONTMORENCY. 17
intolerahle mental distress, he admits that inasmuch
as phjsical disorJei-s only grow incessantly worse,
violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse
for a man making away with himself ; he ceases to be
a human being before dying, and in putting an end to
his life he only completes his release from a body that
embarrasses him, and contains his soul no longer.^
The thought was often present to him in this form.
Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose
grew very deliberate under an aggravation of his
malady, and he seriously looked upon his own case as
falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's excep-
tion.- It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declara-
tions like these, to know what writers can be thinking
of when, with respect to the controversy on the manner
of Rousseau's death, they pronounce him incapable
of such a dereliction of his own most cherished prin-
ciples as anything like self-destruction would have
been.
As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments
on his table, and sombre thoughts of suicide in his
head, the ray of a little episode of romance shone in
* Nouv. ffil., III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed
essays on " Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul" were pub-
lished in London : — "With Remarks, intended as an Antidote
to the Poison contained in these Performances, by the Editor ;
to which is added, Two Letters on Suicide, from Rousseau's
Eloisa." In the preface the reader is told that these " two very
masterly letters have been much celebrated." See Hume's
Essays, by Green and Grose, i. 69, 70.
" Corr., iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763
VOL. IL C
1 8 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris,
absorbed in the New Ileloisa, like all the women of
the time, identified themselves with the Julie and the
Claire of the novel that none could resist. The}^
wrote anonymously to the author, claiming their
identification with characters fondly supposed to be
immortal. " You will know that Julie is not dead,
and that she lives to love j^ou ; I am not this Julie,
you perceive it by my style ; I am only her cousin,
or rather her friend, as Claire was." The unfortunate
Saint Preux responded as gallantly as he could be
expected to do in the intervals of surgery. " You do
not know that the Saint Preux to whom you write
is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder,
and that the very letter he writes to you is often
interrupted by distractions of a very different kind."^
He figures rather uncouthly, but the unkno\ATi fair
were not at first disabused, and one of them never
was. Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to
be made the victim of a masculine pleasantry. From
women he never feared anything. His letters were
found too short, too cold. He replied to the remon-
strance by a reference of extreme coarseness. His
correspondents wrote from the neighbourhood of the
Palais Eoyal, then and for long after the haunt of
mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter
more than I thought," he said brutally.^ The vul-
garity of the lackey was never quite obliterated in
him, even when the lackey had written Emilius.
' Corr., ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761. - P. 294. .Tan. 11, 1762,
r. MONTMORENCY. 19
This was too much for the imaginary Claire. " I have
given myself three good blows on my breast for the
correspondence that I was silly enough to open be-
tween you," she wrote to Julie, and she remained
implacable. The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful
to the end of Eousseau's life. She took his part
vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote in
defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the
most remarkable of all the instances of that unreason-
ing passion which the New Heloisa inflamed in the
breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour
pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness
could repulse. She only saw him three times in all,
the first time not until 1766, when he was on his way
through Paris to England. The second time, in 1772,
she \asited him without mentioning her name, and he
did not recognise her ; she brought him some music
to copy, and went away unknown. She made another
attempt, announcing herself : he gave her a frosty
welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come
no more. With a strange fidelity she bore him no
grudge, but cherished his memory and sorrowed over
his misfortunes to the day of her death. He was not
an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think
kindly of the idolatress.^ Worshippers are ever
^ Madame Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife
of a man in the financial world, who used her ill and dissipated
as much of her fortune as he could, and from whom she separ-
ated in 1775. After that she resumed her maiden name and
was known as Madame de Franqueville. il asset- Path ay, ii
182, and Sainte Beuve, Canscries, ii. 63.
20 KOUSSEAU.
CHAP.
dearer to us than their graven images. Let us turn
to the romance which touched "women in this way, and
helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.
II.
As has been already said, it is the business of
criticism to separate what is accidental in form,
transitory in manner, and merely local in suggestion,
from the general ideas Avhich live under a casual and
particular literary robe. And so we have to distin-
guish the external conditions under which a book like
the New Heloisa is produced, from the li\nng qualities
in the author which gave the external conditions their
hold upon him, and turned their development in one
direction rather than another. We are only encourag-
ing poverty of spirit, when we insist on fixing our
eyes on a few of the minutiae of construction, instead
of patiently seizing larger impressions and more
durable meanings ; when we stop at the fortuitous
incidents of composition, instead of advancing to the
central elements of the writer's character.
These incidents in the case of the New Heloisa we
know; the sensuous communion with nature in her
summer mood in the woods of Montmorency, the long
hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing
passion for the too sage Julie of actual experience.
But the power of these impressions from without
depended on secrets of conformation Anthin. An
adult with marked character is, consciously or uncon-
L THE NEW HELOiSA. 21
sciously, his own character's victim or sport. It is
his whole system of impulses, ideas, pre-occupations,
that make those critigal situations ready, into which
he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn
him. And this inner system not only prepares the
situation ; it forces his interpretation of the situation.
Much of the interest of the New Heloisa springs from
the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of which
the author himself was probably unconscious, of the
general doctrine of life and conduct which he only
professed to expound in writings of graver pretension.
Rousseau generally spoke of his romance in phrases
of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weak-
ness. It was in truth as entirely a monument of the
strength, no less than the weakness, of his whole
scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it was not so
deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and
musing air which imderlies all the assumption of
ardent passion, made a way for the doctrine into
sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by
the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the
didactic manner of the Emilius.
Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully re-
member was only present to his own mind in an
informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly de-
scribed as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in
as much of the supposed freshness of primitive times,
as the hardened crust of civil institutions and social
use might allow. In this survey, however incoher-
ently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes
22 ROUSSEAU.
CHAl"
was the very last that was likely to escape Rousseau's
attention. Hence it was with this that he began.
The Discourses had been an attack upon the general
ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief
that society has done to human nature at large. The
romance treated one set of emotions in human nature
particularly, though it also touches the whole emotional
sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the field was
accompanied by a total revolution in the metliod.
Polemic was abandoned ; the presence of hostility
was forgotten in appearance, if not in the heart of
the writer ; instead of discussion, presentation ; instead
of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing of
persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There
is, it is true, a monstrous superfluity of ethical exposi-
tion of most doubtful value, but then that, as we have
already said, was in the manners of the time. All
people in those days with any pretensions to use their
minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner,
and violently translated the dictates of sensibility into
formulas of morality. The important thing to remark
is not that this semi-didactic strain is present, but
that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far
more subordinate place, than the subject and the
reigning taste would have led us to expect. It is true,
also, that Rousseau declared his intention in the two
characters of Julie and of AVolmar, who eventually
became Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation
between the two great opposing parties, the devout
and the rationalistic ; of teaching them the lesson of
L THE NEW HELOISA. 23
reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is pos-
sible to believe in a God witliout being a hypocrite,
and the other that it is possible to be an unbeliever
without being a scoundrel.^ This intention, if it was
really present to Rousseau's mind while he was writing,
and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed
for the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a com-
position of which he was always a little ashamed, must
at any rate have been of a very pale kind. It would
hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had
so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had
presided over the composition, and contemporary
readers saw nothing of it. In the first part of the
story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly not
visible, and in the second part neither of the two con-
tending factions was likely to learn any lesson with
respect to the other. Churchmen would have insisted
that Wolmar was really a Christian dressed up as an
atheist, and pliilosophers would hardly have accepted
Juhe as a type of the too believing people who broke
Galas on the wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.
French critics tell us that no one now reads the
New Heloisa in France except deliberate students of
the works of Rousseau, and certainly few in tliis
generation read it in our ovm country.'^ The action
» Corr., ii. 214. Con/., ix. 289.
' English translations of Rousseau's works appeared very
speedily after the originals. A second edition of the Heloisa
was called for as early as May 1761. See Cot^. ii. 223. A
German translation of the Heloisa appeared at Leipzig in 1761
in six duodecimos-
24 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
is very slight, and the play of motives very simple,
when contrasted with the ingenuity of invention, the
elaborate subtleties of psychological analysis, the power
of rapid change from one perturbing incident or ex-
cited humour to another, which mark the modern
writer of sentimental fiction. As the title warns us,
it is a story of a youthful tutor and a too fair disciple,
straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy
into the heated places of passion. The high pride of
Julie's father forbade all hope of their union, and in
very desperation the unhappy pair lost the self-control
of virtue, and threw themselves into the pit that lies
so ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick
step, for Julie had with her purity lost none of the
other lovelinesses of a dutiful character. Her lover
was hurried away from the country by the generous
solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest,
tenderest, and best of men. Julie, left undisturbed
by her lover's presence, stricken with affliction at the
death of a sweet and affectionate mother, and pressed
by the importunities of a father whom she dearly loved,
in spite of all the disasters which his will had brought
upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron
from some northern court. Wolmar was much older
than she was ; a devotee of calm reason, without a
system and without prejudices, benevolent, orderly,
above all things judicious. The lover meditated
suicide, from which he was only diverted by the
arguments of Lord Edward, who did more than
argue ; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship
I. THE NEW HELOiSA. 25
of Admiral Anson, then just starting for his famous
voyage round the world. And this marks the end of
the first episode.
Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous
for young girls, and maintained that Pachardson was
grievously mistaken in supposing that they could be
instructed by romances. It was like setting fire to
the house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps
play.^ As he admitted so much, he is not open to
attack on this side, except from those who hold the
theory that no books ought to be written which may
not prudently be put into the hands of the young, —
a puerile and contemptible doctrine that must emas-
culate all literature and all art, by excluding the most
interesting of human relations and the most powerful
of human passions. There is not a single composition
of the first rank outside of science, from the Bible
downwards, that could undergo the test The most
useful standard for measuring the significance of a
book in this respect is found in the manners of the
time, and the prevailing tone of contemporary litera-
ture. In trying to appreciate the meaning of the
New Heloisa and its popularity, it is weD to think of
it as a delineation of love, in connection not only with
such a book as the Pucelle, where there is at least
wit, but with a story like Duclos's, which all ladies
both read and were not in the least ashamed to
acknowledge that they had read ; or still worse, such
an abomination as Diderot's first stories ; or a story
1 Forinstfjica,"tta-/-^H; 168. Nov. 19, 1762.
iOni
?k»
2fi uml'sskau. chap.
like Laolos's, whit-h came a generation later, and with
its intinite l)riskne.ss and devilry carried the tradition
of artistic impurity to as vigorous a manifestation as
it is eapahlc of reai.hing.^ To a geiieratinn whose
literature is as pure as the best English, American,
and tierman literature is in the present day, the New
lleloisa might without douot V)e corrupting. To the
j)eople who read (.'rrliillun and the Pucelle, it was
without di>ul(t elevating.
The case is just as strong if we tuni from books
to manners. Withnut lookin>' bevi.nil the circle of
names that occur in iJousseaus own history, we see how
deep the dei>ravity hail become. Madame d'Epinay's
gallant sat at table with the husliand, and the husl)and
was perfectly aware of the relations between tiiem,
M. d'Epinay ha<l notorious relations with two public
women, and was not a-shamed to refer to them in the
presence of his wife, and even to seek her sympathy
on an occasion when one of them was in some trouble.
Not only this, l)ut husband and lover used to pursue
their debaucheries in the town together in jovial
comradeship. An opera dancer jtresitled at the table
of a patrician abbe in his country house, and he passed
weeks in her house in the town. As for shame, says
Barbier on one occasion, ""tis true the king has a
mistress, but who has not] — cxcej)t the Duke of
Orleans ; he has withdrawn to Ste. Genevieve, and
is thoroughly despised in consequence, and rightly."*
» Choderlos de La Clos : 174 1-1 SO.^.
* Jourual. iv. 406. (Ed. Cliarpentier, 1S57.)
L THE NEW HELOiSA. 27
Reeking disorder such as all this illustrates, made the
passion of the two imaginary lovers of the fair lake
seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One
virtue was lost in that simple paradise, but even that
loss was followed by circumstances of mental pain and
far circling distress, which banished the sin into a
secondary place; and what remained to strike the
imagination of the time were delightful pictures of
fast union between two enchanting women, of the
patience and compassionateness of a grave mother, of
the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal
friend. Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes
and turns of grossness coidd make a small collection
of such defilements from the New Heloisa without
any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character,
and so they came out in his work. Saint Preux
afflicts us -vWth touches of this kind, just as we are
afflicted with similar touches in the Confessions.
They were not noticed at that day, when people's
ears did not affect to be any chaster than the rest
of them.
A historian of opinion is concerned with the general
effect that was actually produced by a remarkable
book, and with the causes that produced it. It is not
his easy task to produce a demonstration that if the
readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the
moralist might desire them to be, or if they had all
been discriminating and scientific critics, not this, but
a very different impression would have followed. To-
day we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloisa.
28 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
A long story told in letters has grown to be a form
incomprehensible and intolerable to us. We find
Eichardson hard to be borne, and he put far greater
vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rous-
seau did, though he was not any less diffuse, and he
abounds in repetitions as Rousseau does not. Rous-
seau Avas absolutely without humour ; that belongs to
the keenly observant natures, and to those who love
men in the concrete, not only humanity in the
abstract. The pleasantries of Julie's cousin, for
instance, are heavy and misplaced. Thus the whole
book is in one key, without the dramatic changes of
Richardson, too few even as those are. And who
now can endure that antique fashion of apostrophising
men and women, hot with passion and eager with all
active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities,
as if their passion and their activity were only the
inconsiderable embodiment of fine general ideas 1 We
have not a single thrill, when Saint Preux being led
into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to
lie dying, murmurs passionately, " What shall I now
see in the same place of refuge where once all breathed
the ecstasy that intoxicated my soul, in this same
object who both caused and shared my transports !
the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring !" ^
This rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to
the more realistic taste of a later age, was as natural
then as that facility of shedding tears, which appears
so deeply incredible a performance to a generation
^ Nouv. mi., III. xiv. 48.
I. THE NEW HELOiSA. 29
that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility,
without realising for the honour of its ancestors the
physiological truth of the power of the will over the
secretions.
The characters seem as stiff as some of the language,
to us who are accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness
of delineation. Yet the New Heloisa was nothing
less than the beginning of that fresh, full, highly-
coloured style which has now taught us to find so
Httle charm in the source and original of it. Saint
Preux is a personage whom no widest charity, literary,
philosophic, or Christian, can make endurable. Egoism
is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance
of fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in
our old poets turn graciously on the lover's eagerness
to offer every sacrifice at the feet of his mistress.
Even Werther, stricken creature as he was, yet had
the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be
the instniment of surrounding the life of his beloved
with snares. Saint Preux's egoism is uubrightened
by a single ray of tender abnegation, or a single touch
of the sweet humiUty of devoted passion. The slave
of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratifi-
cation. With some rotund nothing on his lips about
virtue being the only path to happiness, his heart
burns with sickly desire. He -HTites first like a peda-
gogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then
like a pedagogue without the philter, and that is the
worse of the two. Lovelace and the Count of Valmont
are manly and hopeful characters in comparison.
30 ROUSSEAU,
CHAP,
Werther, again, at least represents a principle of
rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair,
and he retains strength enough to know that hia
weakness is shameful. His despair, moreover, is
deeply coloured with repulsed social ambition.^ He
feels the world about him. His French prototype, on
the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed
selfishness of a sensual love for which there is no
universe outside of its own fevered pulsation.
Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for
the reason that she belongs to the less displeasing
sex. At least, she preserves fortitude, self-control,
and profound considerateness for others. At a certain
point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm.
If the New Heloisa could be said to have any moral
intention, it is here where women learn from the
example of Julie's energetic return to duty, the possi-
bility and the satisfaction of bending character back
to comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from
a moral point of view, the reader may wish that Julie
had been less of a preacher, as well as less of a sinner.
And even as sinner, she would have been more
readily forgiven if she had been less deliberate. A
maiden who sacrifices her virtue in order that the
visible consequences may force her parents to consent
to a marriage, is too strategical to be perfectly touch-
ing. As was said by the cleverest, though not the
greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated
by Rousseau, when one has renounced the charms of
J S.g. Letters, 40-46.
I. THE NEW HELOiSA. 31
virtue, it is at least well to have all the charms that
entire surrender of heart can bestow.^ In spite of
this, however, Julie struck the imagination of the
time, and stnick it in a way that was thoroughly
wholesome. The type taught men some respect for
the dignity of women, and it taught women a firmer
respect for themselves. It is useless, even if it be
possible, to present an example too lofty for the com-
prehension of an age. At this moment the most
brilliant genius in the country was filling France "with
impish merriment at the expense of the greatest
heroine that France had then to boast. In such an
atmosphere Julie had almost the halo of saintliness.
We may say all we choose about the inconsistency,
the excess of preaching, the excess of prudence, in
the character of Julie. It was said pungently enough
by the wits of the time.^ Nothing that could be
' Madame de Stael (1765-1817), in her Lettres imr Ics icrits
et le caracUre de J. J. Lausseau, written when she was twenty,
and her first work of any pretensions. (Euv., i. 41. Ed. 1820.
' Nowhere more pungently than in a little piece of some half-
dozen pages, headed, Prediction tirie d'un vieiix Manuscrit, the
form of which is bonowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute
about French music, Le petit PropfUte de Bochmisckbroda,
though it seems to me to be superior to Grimm in pointedness.
Here are a few verses from the supposed prophecy of the man
who should come — and of what he should do. " Et la multitude
courra sur ses pas et plusieurs croiront en lui. Et il leur dim :
Vous etes des sc^lerats et des fripons, vos femmes sont toutes
des femmes perdues, et je viens vivre parmi vous. Et il ajoutera
tons Ics hommes sont vertueux dans le pays ou je suis n^, et je
n'habiterai jamais le pays ou je suis ne. . . . Et il dira au8.si
qu'il est impossible d'avoir des mreurs, et do lire des Romans,
32 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
said on all this affected the fact, that the "women
between 1760 and the Eevolution were intoxicated
by Rousseau's creation to such a pitch that they
would pay any price for a glass out of which Eousseau
had drunk, they would Idss a scrap of paper that
contained a piece of his handwriting, and vow that
no woman of true sensibility could hesitate to conse-
crate her life to him, if she were only certain to be
rewarded by his attachment.^ The booksellers were
unable to meet the demand. The book was let out
at the rate of twelve sous a volume, and the volume
could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes
shared the excitement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers,
and bourgeois.^ Stories were told of fine ladies,
dressed for the ball, who took the book up for half
an hour until the time should come for starting ; they
read until midnight, and when informed that the
carriage waited, answered not a word, and when
reminded by and by that it was two o'clock, still read
et il fera un Roman ; et dans son Roman lo vice sera en action
et la vertn en paroles, et ses personages serout forcenes d'amour
et de pliilosophie. Et dans son Roman on apprendra I'art de
suborner philosophiquement une jeune fiUe. Et I'Ecoli^re
perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et elle fera avec son maitre
des sottises et des maximes. . . . Et le bel Ami etant dans un
Bateau seul avec sa Maitresse voudra le jetter dans I'eau et se
precipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de la Philo-
sophie et de la Vertu,"and so on, humorously enough in its
way.
^ See passages in Goncourt's La Femme mt ISi&me siicle, p.
380.
- Mussct-Patbay, ii. 361. See Madame Roland's Mim., L
207,
J. THE NEW HELOiSA. 33
ou, and tlien at four, liaving ordered the horses to be
taken out of the carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and
passed the remainder of the night in reading. In
Germany the effect was just as astonishing. Kant
only once in his life failed to take liis afternoon
walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the
\vitchery of the New Heloisa. Gallantry was suc-
ceeded by passion, expansion, exaltation ; moods far
more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm is
dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with
better hopes for character. To move the sympathetic
faculties is the first step towards kindling all the
other energies which make life wiser and more
fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing
in the character of Julie concentrates this outburst of
sympathy in subjective broodings. Julie is the repre-
sentative of one recalled to the straight path by
practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for others,
not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the
sympathy of others for herself, and in moonstruck
subjective aspirations. The women who wept over
her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of
whimpering introspection. The danger lay in the
mischievous intellectual direction which Rousseau im-
parted to this effusion.
The stir wliich the Julie communicated to the
affections in so many ways, marked progress, but in
all the elements of reason she was the most perilous
of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind,
constituted as it is, to march forward a space further
VOL. II. D
34 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
to the light, without making some fresh swerve
obliquely towards old darkness. The great effusion
of natural sentiment was in the air before the New
Heloisa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite
channels. One beautiful character, Vauven argues
(1715-1747), had begun to teach the culture of
emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweet-
ness and moderation, as that " Great thoughts come
from the heart." But he came too soon, and, alas
for us all, he died young, and he made no mark.
Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs
when men are beginning to feel the urgent spirit of a
new time. Diderot strove with more powerful efforts,
in the midst of all his herculean labours for the
acquisition and ordering of knowledge, in the same
direction towards the great outer world of nature,
and towards the great inner world of nature in the
human breast. His criticisms on the paintings of
each year, mediocre as the paintings were, are admir-
able even now for their richness and freshness. If
Diderot had been endowed with emotional tenacity,
as he was with tenacity of understanding and of
purpose, the student of the eigliteenth century would
probably have been spared the not perfectly agreeable
task of threading a way along the sinuosities of the
character and work of Rousseau. But Rousseau had
what Diderot lacked — sustained ecstatic moods, and
fervid trances ; his literary gesture was so command-
ing, his apparel so glistening, his voice so rich in
long-drawn notes of plangent vibration.. His word?;
L THE NEW HELOiSA. 35
are the words of a prophet ; a prophet, it is under-
stood, who had lived in Paris, and belonged to the
eighteenth century, and wrote in French instead of
Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that
he raised feeling, now passionate, now quietest, into
the supreme place which it was to occupy alone, and
not on an equal throne and in equal alliance with
understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he
placed emotion as its substitute. And he made this
evil doctrine come from the lips of a fictitious character,
who stimulated fancy and fascinated imagination.
Voltaire laughed at the baisers Acres of Madame de
Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis
of Xim^nes had crushed the wretched romance. ^ But
Madame de Wolmar was so far from crushed, that
she turned the flood of feeling which her own charms,
passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a
direction that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in
vain.
It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that
the action of the story takes the turn which sensible
men like Voltaire found laughable. Saint Preux is
absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his
return to Europe he is speedily invited by the sage
Wolmar, who knows his past history perfectly well,
to pay them a visit They all meet with leapings on
1 Corr., March 3, aud March 19, 1761. The criticisms of
Ximenes, a thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were
entirely literary, and were directed against the too strained and
highly coloured quality of the phrases — " baisers ftcres "— amonp
them.
36 ROUSSEAU. CHAF,
the neck and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar
preserving an open, serene, and smiling air. He
takes his young friend to a chamber, which is to be
reserved for him and for him only. In a few days
he takes an opportunity of visiting some distant pro-
perty, leaving his wife and Saint Preux together,
with the sublime of magnanimity. At the same time
he confides to Claire his intention of entrusting to
Saint Preux the education of his children. All goes
perfectly well, and the household presents a picture
of contentment, prosperity, moderation, affection, and
evenly diffused happiness, which in spite of the dis-
agreeableness of the situation is even now extremely
charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured
by a source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, "so
sage, so reasonable, so far from every kind of vice, so
little under the influence of human passions, is with-
out the only belief that makes virtue precious, and
in the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries
at the bottom of his heart the frightful peace of the
wicked."^ He is an atheist. Julie is now a pietest,
locking herself for hours in her chambers, spending
days in self-examination and prayer, constantly read-
ing the pages of the good F^nelon. ^ "I fear," she
writes to Saint Preux, " that you do not gain all you
might from religion in the conduct of your life, and
that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the
Christian. You believe prayers to be of scanty
service. That is not, you know, the doctrine of Saint
.' miv. JM., V. V. 115 - VI. vii.
L THE NEW lIELOiSA. 37
Paul, nor what our Church jnofesses. We are free,
it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill.
And whence should light and force come, if not from
him who is their very well-spring'? . . . Let us be
humble, to be sage ; let us see our Aveakuess, and we
shall be strong."^ This was the opening of the
deistical reaction ; it was thus, associated with every-
thing that stnick imagination and moved the sentiment
of his readers, that Rousseau brought back those
sophistical conclusions which Pascal had drawn from
premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervating
displacement of reason by celestial contemplation,
which F^nelon had once made beautiful by the per-
suasion of virtuous example. He was justified in
saying, as he afterwards did, that there was nothing
in the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which
was not to be found in the letters of Julie. These
were the efifective preparations for that more famous
manifesto ; they surrounded belief with all the
attractions of an interesting and sympathetic preacher,
and set it to a harmony of circumstance that touched
softer fibres.
For, curiously enough, while the first half of the
romance is a scene of disorderly passion, the second
is the glorification of the family. A modem writer
of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness
against the character of Wolmar, — supposed, we may
notice in passing, to be partially drawn fromD'Holbach,
— a man performing so long an experiment on these
1 VI. vi.
38 ROUSSEAU, CHAP,
two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a suigeon
engaged in vivisection.^ It was, however, much less
difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept
so unwholesome and prurient a situation. They
forgot all the evil that was in it, in the charm of the
account of Wolmar's active, peaceful, finigal, sunny
household. The influence of this was immense.^ It
may be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux
waits for Julie in her room, suggested the far lovelier
passage of Faust in the chamber of the hapless
Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther
(1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread
and butter, if Saint Preux had not gone to see Julie
take cream and cakes with her children and her female
servants. And perhaps the other and nobler Charlotte
of the JVahlverwandtschaften (1809) would not have
detained us so long with her moss hut, her terrace,
her park prospect, if Julie had not had her elysium,
where the sweet freshness of the air, the cool shadows,
the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and
colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song
of a thousand birds, reminded the returned traveller
of Tinian and Juan Fernandez. There is an animation,
a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightness in this
picture, which will always make it enchanting, even
to those who cannot make their Avay through any
other letter in the New Heloisa.^ Such qualities
place it as an idyllic piece far above such pieces in
1 Michelet's Loicis XV. et Louis XVI., p. 58.
^ Scfi Hettner's Literaturgeschichte, ii. 486. ^ IV. xi.
I. THE NEW IIELOiSA. 39
Goetlie's two famous romances. They have a clear-
ness and spontaneous freshness which are not among
the bountiful gifts of Goethe. There are other admir-
able landscapes in the New Heloisa, though not too
many of them, and the minute and careful way in
which Eousseau made their features real to himself, is
accidentally shown in his urgent prayer for exactitude
in the engraving of the striking scene where Saint
Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their old love
for one another.^ " I have traversed all Rousseau's
ground with the Heloisa before me," said Byron,
" and am struck to a degree I cannot express, with
the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the
beauty of their reality."- They were memories made
true by long dreaming, by endless brooding. The
painter lived with these scenes ever present to the
inner eye. They were his real world, of which the
tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around
him only gave suggestion. He thought of the green
steeps, the rocks, the mountain pines, the waters of
the lake, " the populous solitude of bees and birds,"
as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality.
And they were always benign, standing in relief with
the malignity or folly of the hurtful insect, Man. He
was never a manichajun towards natiu-e. To him she
1 IV. xvii. See vol. iii. 423.
* In 1816. Moore's Life, iiL 247 ; also 285. And the note
to the stanzas in the Third Canto, — a note curious for a slight
admi.xture of transcendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron,
who, sentimental though he was, usually rejoiced in a truly
Voltairean common sense.
40 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
was all good and bounteous. The demon forces that
so fascinated Byron were to Eousseau invisible.
These were the compositions that presently inspired
the landscapes of Paid and Virginia (1788), of Atala
and Ren6 (1801), and of Ohermann (1804), as well as
those punier imitators who resemble their masters as
the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms
of David. They were the outcome of eager and
spontaneous feeling for nature, and not the mere
hackneyed common-form and inflated description of
the literary pastoral.-^
This leads to another great and important distinc-
tion to be drawn between Rousseau and the school
whom in other respects he inspired. The admirable
Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark,
^ "The present fasliion in France, of passing sometime in
the country, is new ; at this time of tlie year, and for many
weeks past, Paris is, comparatively speaking, empty. Every-
body who has a country seat is at it, and such as have none
visit others wlio liave. This rcniarkabh^. revolution in the
French manners is certainly one of the best customs they have
taken from England ; and its introduction was effected the
easier, lieing assisted by the magic of Rousseau's writings.
Mankind are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, when
living, was hunted fj'om country to country, to seek an asylum,
with as much venom as if lie had been a mad dog ; thanks to
the vile spirit of bigotry, whicli has not received its death
wound. Women of the iirst fashion in France are now ashamed
of not nursing their own children ; and stays are universally
proscribed from the bodies of the poor infants, which were for
so many ages torture to them, as they ai-e still in Spain. Tlie
country residence may not liave effects eijually obvious ; but
they will be. no less sure in the end, and in all respects benelicia]
to every class in the state " Arthur Young's Travels, i. 72.
r. TIIK NFAV nELOiSA. 41
that the union of the poetry of the family and the
hearth with the poetry of nature is essentially wanting
to Rousseau.^ It only shows tliat the great critic had
for the moment forgotten the whole of the second
part of the New Heloisa, and his failure to identify
Cowper's allusion to the matinee h Vanglaise certainly
proves that he had at any rate forgotten one of the
most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth in
French literature.' The tendency to read Rousseau
only in the Byronic sense is one of those foregone
conclusions which are constantly tempting the critic
to travel out of his record. Rousseau assuredly had
a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done
into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social
animation and domestic order. He had exalted the
simplicity of the savage state in his Discourses, but
when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found it
in a household that was more, and not less, systemati-
cally disciplined than those of the common society
1 Causcries, xi. 195.
* Nouv. Hd., V. iii. " You remember Rousseau's (lescrii)tion
of an English morning : such are the mornings I spend with
these good people." — Cow7)er to Joseph Hill, Oct 25, 1765.
Works, iii. 269. In a letter to William Unwin (Sept. 21,
1779), speaking of his being engaged in mending \vindows, he
says, " Rousseau would have been charmed to have seen mc so
occui)ied, and would have exclaimed with rapture that he had
found the Emilius who, he supposed, had subsisted only in his
own idea," For a description illustrative of the likene-ss between
Rousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see letter to
Newton (Sept. 18. 1784, v. 78), and conii)are it with the descrip-
tion of 1^3 Charmettes, making proper allowance for the colour
of prose. ^ o.*f.'--*^' lO'
42 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
around him. The paradise in which his Julie moved
with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and no
less than an establishment of the best kind of the
rural middle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tran-
quilly austere. No most sentimental savage could
have found it endurable, or could himself without
profound transformation of his manners have been
endured in it. The New Heloisa ends by exalting
/ respectability, and putting the spirit of insurrec-
tion to shame. Self-control, not revolt, is its last
word.
This is what separates Rousseau here and through-
out from Senancour, Byron, and the rest. He con-
summates the triumph of will, while their reigning
mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence
of will, the little worth of common aims, the fretting
triviality of common rules. Franklin or Cobbett
might have gloried in the regularity of Madame de
Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the
day was marked out with precision. By artful adjust-
ment of pursuits, it was contrived that the men-
servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants,
except at their repasts. The women, namely, a cook,
a housemaid, and a nurse, found their pastime in
rambles with their mistress and her children, and
lived mainly with them. The men were amused
by games for Avhich their master made regulated pro-
vision, now for summer, now for winter, offering
prizes of a nscfid kind for jirowess and adroitness.
Often on a Siii'.day night all the household met in an
I. THE NEW HELOISA. 43
ample chamber, and passed the evening in dancing.
Wlien Saint Preux inquired whether this was not a
rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Julie wisely
answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe
duties, that if you add to them the further burden of
indifferent forms, it must always be at the cost of the
essential.^ The servants were taken from the country,
never from the town. They entered the household
young, were gradually trained, and never went away
except to establish themselves.
The vulirar and obvious criticism on all this is that
it is Utopian, that such households do not generally
exist, because neither masters nor servants possess the
qualitiesneededto maintain these relations of unbroken
order and friendliness. Perhaps not ; and masters
and servants will be more and more removed from the
possession of such qualities, and their relations further
distant from such order and friendliness, if writers
cease to press the beauty and serviceableness of a
domesticity that is at present only possible in a few
rare cases, or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of
peace, the deterioration of character, that are the
results of our present system. Undoubtedly it is
much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-
patriarchal fehcity, than for the rest of us to realise
it. It was his function to press ideals of sweeter hfe
on his contemporaries, and they may be coimted
fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this
function with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly
' IV. X. 260.
44 ROUSSEAU, CHAP.
persuasion. His scornful diatribes against the domestic
police of great houses, and the essential inhumanity
of the ordinary household relations, are both excellent
and of permanent interest. There is the full breath
of a new humaneness in them. They were the right
way of attacking the decrepitude of feudal luxury
and insolence, and its imitation among the great
farmers-2;eneral. This criticism of the conditions of
domestic service marks a beginning of true democracy,
as distinguished from the mere pulverisation of aris-
tocracy. It rests on the claim of the common people
to an equal consideration, as equally useful and equally
capable of virtue and vice ; and it implies the essential
priority of social over political reform.
The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table
partakes of the general plenty, but this plenty is not
ruinous. The senses are gratified without daintiness.
The food is common, but excellent of its kind. The
service is simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere
show, all that depends on vulgar opinion, all fine and
elaborate dishes whose value comes of their rarity,
and whose names you must know before finding any
goodness in them, are banished without recall Even
in such delicacies as they permit themselves, our
friends abstain every day from certain things which
are reserved for feasts on special occasions, and which
are thus made more delightful without being more
costly. What do you suppose these delicacies arel
Rare game, or fish from the sea, or dainties from
abroad ? Better than all tluit ; some delicious vegetable
lU TIIE NEW HELOlSA. 45
of tho district, one of the savoury things that grow in
our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a
peculiar way, some cheese from our mountains. The
service is modest and rustic, but clean and smiling.
Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you die
of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your
only dessert, here take the place of honest dishes.
Here people have not the art of nourishing the stomach
through the eyes, but they know how to add grace to
good cheer, to eat heartily %nthout inconvenience, to
drink merrily without losmg reason, to sit long at
table without weariness, and always to rise from it
without disgust.^
One singularity in this ideal household was the
avoidance of those middle exchanges between produc-
tion and consumption, which enrich the shopkeeper
but impoverish his customers. Not one of these
exchanges is made without loss, and the multiplication
of these losses would weaken even a man of fortune.
Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the con-
venience of each party to the bargain serves as profit
for botL Thus the wool is sent to the factories, from
which they receive cloth in exchange ; \Wne, oil, and
bread are produced in the house; the butcher pays
himself in live cattle; the grocer receives grain in
return for his goods ; the wages of the labourers and
the house-servants are derived from the produce of
the land which they render valuable. ^ It was reserved
for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest, to carry to its highest
1 V. ii. 37. ■'' ^'- >i- i^-^'^-
46 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP
point this confusion of what is so fascinating in a book
with wliat is practicable in society.
The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered
interior may strike the impatient modern as somewhat
long, and the movement as very slow, just as people
complain of the same things in Goethe's JFa]i.lverwan-
dfschaften. Such complaint only proves inability,
which is or is not justifiable, to seize the spirit of the
writer. The expatiation was long and the movement
slow, because Eousseau was full of his thoughts ; they
were a deep and glowing itavt of himself, and did not
merely skim swiftly and lightly through his mind.
Anybody wdio takes tlie trouble may find out the
difference between this expression of long mental
brooding, and a merely elaborated diction.^ The
length is an essential part of the matter. The whole
work is the reflection of a series of slow inner processes,
the many careful weavings of a lonely and miserable
man's dreams. And Julie expressed the spirit and
the joy of these dreams when she wrote, " People are
only happy before they are happy. Man, so eager
and so feeble, made to desire all and obtain little, has
received from heaven a consoling force which brings
all that he desires close to him, which subjects it to
his imagination, which makes it sensible and present
before him, which delivers it over to him. The land
of chimera is the only one in this world that is worth
dwelling in, and such is the nothingness of the human
' Rousseau coiisiderecl that the Fourth and Sixth parts of the
New HeloVsa were iiiasterpii.ceii of diction. Con/, ix. 334.
L THE NEW HELOlSA. 47
lot, that except the being who exists in and by him-
self, there is nothing beautiful except that which does
not exist." ^
Closely connected ■with the \-igorous attempt to
fascinate his public with the charm of a serene, joyful,
and ordered house, is the restoration of marriage in
the New Heloisa to a rank among high and honourable
obligations, and its representation as the best support
of an equable life of right conduct and fruitful har-
monious emotion. Rousseau even invested it with the
mysterious dignity as of some natural sacrament
" This chaste knot of nature is subject neither to the
sovereign power nor to paternal authority," he cried,
"but only to the authority of the common Father."
And he pointed his remark by a bitter allusion to a
celebrated case in which a great house had prevailed
on the courts to annul the marriage of an elder son
with a yoimg actress, though her character was excel-
lent, and though she had befriended him when he was
abandoned by everybody else.^ This was one of the
countless democratic thnists in the book. In the case
of its heroine, however, the author associated the
sanctity of marriage not only with equality but with
religion. "We may imagine the spleen with which the
philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and
their light esteem of marriage bonds, read Julie's
eloquent account of her emotions at the moment of
1 VI. viii. 298. Cmf., xL 106.
' TLe I^ Bedoyere case, which began in 1745. See Barbier,
iv. 54. 50. etc.
48 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
her union with Wohnar. " I seemed to behold the
orean of Providence and to hear the voice of God, as
the minister gravely pronounced the words of the holy
service. The purity, the dignity, the sanctity of
marriage, so vividly set forth in the words of scripture;
its chaste and sublime duties, so important to the
happiness, order, and peace of the human race, so
sweet to fulfil even for their oavu sake — all this made
such an impression on me that I seemed to feel within
my breast a sudden revolution. An unknown power
seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of my affec-
tions, and to restore them to accordance with the law
of duty and of nature. The eternal eye that sees
everything, I said to myself, now reads to the depth
of my heart. "^ She has all the well-known fervour
of the proselyte, and never wearies of extolling the
peace of the wedded state. Love is no essential to
its perfection. " "Worth, virtue, a certain accord not
so much in condition and age as in character and
temper, are enough between husband and wife ; and
this does not prevent the growth from such a union of
a very tender attachment, which is none the less sweet
for not being exactly love, and is all the more lasting." ^
1 III. xviii. 84.
2 III. XX. 116. In tlie letter to Christopher de Beaumont
(p. 102), he fires a double shot against the pliilosophers on the
one hand, and the church on the other ; exalting continence
and purity, of which the philosophers in their reaction against
asceticism thought lightly, and exalting marriage over the
celibate st;>-te, which the churchmen associated with mysterious
sanctity.
I. THE NEW HELOiSA. 49
Years after, when Saint Preux has returned and
is settled in the household, she even tries to per-
suade him to imitate her example, and find content-
ment in marriage with her cousin. The earnestness
with which she presses the point, the very sensible
but not very delicate references to the hygienic draw-
backs of celibacy, and the fact that the cousin whom
she would fain have him marry, had complaisantly
assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the
fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.
Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm.
When people are weary of a certain way of surveying
life, and have their faces eagerly set in some new
direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to
read ; they assimilate as much as falls in with their
dominant mood, and the rest passes away unseen.
The French public were bewitched by Jidie, and were
no more capable of criticising her than Julie was
capable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her
passion for him. WTien we say that Rousseau was
the author of this movement, all we mean is that his
book and its chief personage awoke emotion to self-
consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an
impulse in favour of social order, and then very
calamitously at the same moment divorced it from the
fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcing it
from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason.
Apart from the general tendency of the New
Heloisa in numberless indirect ways to bring the
manners of the great into contempt, by the presenta-
VOL. ir. E
50 ROUSSEAU.
OH A p.
tion of the happiness of a simple and worthy life,
thrifty, self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct
protest of singular eloquence and gravity. Julie's
father is deeply revolted at the bare notion of marry-
ing his daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his
vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the
mouth of an English nobleman. This is perhaps an
infelicitous piece of prosopopoeia, but it is interesting
as illustrative of the idea of England in the eighteenth
century as the home of stout-hearted freedom. We
may quote one piece from the numerous bits of very
straightforward speaking in which our representative
expressed his mind as to the significance of birth.
"My friend has nobility," cried Lord Edward, "not
written in ink on mouldering parchments, but graven
in his heart in characters that can never be effaced-
For my own part, by God, I should be sorry to have
no other proof of my merit but that of a man who
has been in his grave these five hundred years. If
you know the English nobility, you know that it is
the most enlightened, the best informed, the wisest,
the bravest in Europe. That being so, I don't care
to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not,
it is true, the slaves of the prince, but his friends ;
nor the tyrants of the people, but their leaders. We
hold the balance true between people, and monarch.
Our first duty is towards the nation, our second to-
wards him who governs; it is not his will but his
right that we consider. . . . We suffer no one in the
land to say God and my sivord, nor more than this, God
I. THE NEW HELOiSA. 61
and my nrfht"^ All this was only putting Montesquieu
into heroics, it is true, but a great many people read
the romance who were not likely to read the gi-aver
book. And there was a wide difference between the
calm statement of a number of political propositions
about government, and their transformation into
dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social
inequality that does not correspond with inequalities
of worth.
There is no contradiction between this and the
social quietism of other parts of the book. Moral
considerations and the paramount place that they
hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once
his contempt for the artificial privileges and assump-
tions of high rank, and his contempt for anything
like discontent with the conditions of humble rank.
Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to
despise both those who have departed from it, and
those who would depart from it if they could. So
Julie does her best to make the lot of the peasants
as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever
helping them to change it for another. She teaches
them to respect their natural condition in respecting
themselves. Her prime maxim is to discourage change
of station and calling, but above all to dissuade the
villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving
the true pleasures of his natural career for the fever
and corruption of towns.^ Presently a recollection of
the sombre things that he had seen in his rambles
^ I. Ixii. » V. VL
52 ROUSSEAU. CHAF
through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral visions,
and he admitted that there were some lands in which
the publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the
misery that covers the fields, the bitter greed of some
grasping farmer, the inflexible rigour of an inhuman
master, take something from the charm of his rural
scenes. '• Worn-out horses ready to expire under the
blows they receive, wretched peasants attenuated by
hunger, broken by weariness, clad in rags, hamlets all
in ruins — these things offer a mournful spectacle to
the eye : one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think
of the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to
feed."i
Yet there is no hint in the New Heloisa of the
socialism which Morelly and Mably fl.img themselves
upon, as the remedy for all these desperate horrors.
Property, in every page of the New Heloisa, is held
in full respect ; the master has the honourable burden
of patriarchal duty ; the servant the not less honour-
able burden of industry and faithfulness ; disobedience
or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and
more than paternal inflexibilit}'. The insurrectionary
quality and eff"ect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct
preaching or vehement denunciation of the abuses
that filled France with cruelty on the one hand and
sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a
social state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist,
nor any miseries save those which are inseparable from
humanity. The contrast between the sober, cheerful,
1 V. vii. HI.
1. TUE NEW HELOiSA. 53
prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of the
reality of the field life of France, — this was the element
that filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.
Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous
questions that lay about that tragic scene of deserted
fields, ruined hamlets, tottering brutes, and hunger-
stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many
traits in Julie which endeared her to that generation,
and might endear her even to our own if it only knew
her. Wolmar's house was near a great high-road, and
so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one of these
was allowed to go empty away. And Julie had as
many excellent reasons to give for her charity, as if
she had been one of the philosophers of whom she
thought so sui'passingly ill. If you look at mendi-
cancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling
whose end is to nourish feelings of humanity and
brotherly love 1 From the point of view of talent,
why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar who
stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes
me shed tears over imaginary sorrows 1 If the great
number of beggars is burdensome to the state, of how
many other professions that people encourage, may
you not say the same 1 How can I be sure that the
man to whom I give alms is not an honest soul, whom
I may save from perishing 1 In short, whatever we
may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to
the beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay
honour to suffering humanity or to its image. ^ Nothing
' V. ii. 31-33.
54 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
could be more admirably illustrative of the author's
confidence that the first thing for us to do is to satisfy
our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shall be
added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that
Necker, — a sort of Julie in a frock-coat, who had
never fallen, the incarnation of this doctrine on the
great stage of affairs, — was hailed to power to ward
ofi' the l^ankruptcy of the state by means of a good
heart and moral sentences, while Tiu'got with science
and firmness for his resources was driven away as an
economist and a philosopher.
At a first glance, it may seem that there was com-
pensation for the triumph of sentiment over reason,
and that if France was ruined by the dreams in which
Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was
saved by the fervour and resoluteness of the aspira-
tions with which he filled the most generous of her
children. No wide movement, we may be sure, is
thoroughly understood until we have mastered both
its material and its ideal sides. Materially, Rousseau's
work w^as inevitably fraught with confusion because
in this .sphere not to be scientific, not to be careful in
tracing effects to their true causes, is to be without
any security that the causes with which we try to deal
will lead to the effects t'tiat we desire. A Roman
statesman w^ho had gone to the Sermon on the Mount
for a method of staying the economic ruin of the
empire, its thinning population, its decreasing capital,
would obviously have found nothing of what he sought
But the moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching
I, MONTMORENCY. 55
that may have no bearing on economics, or even a
bearing purely mischievous, and which has to be cor-
rected by teaching that probably goes equally far in
the contrary direction of moral mischief. In the
ideal sphere, the processes are very complex. In
measuring a man's influence within it we have to
balance. Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent
in leading men and women to desire simple lives, and
a more harmonious social order. Was this eminent
benefit more than counterbalanced by the eminent
disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectual
direction? By commending irrational retrogression
from active use of the understanding back to dreamy
contemplation ?
To one teacher is usually only one task allotted.
We do not reproach want of science to the virtuous
and b enevol ent Channing ; his goodness and eff'usion
stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did,
to sentimental but humane aspiration. It was this
kind of influence that formed the opinion which at
last destroyed American slavery. We owe a place in
the temple that commemorates human emancipation,
to every man who has kindled in his generation a
brighter flame of moral enthusiasm, and a more eager
care for the realisation of good and virtuous ideals.
m.
The story of the circumstances of the publication
of Emilius and the persecution which befell its author
56 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
in consequence, recalls us to the distinctively evil side
of French history in this critical epoch, and carries us
away from light into the thick darkness of political
intrigue, obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment
which was at once tyrannical and decrepit. It is
almost impossible for us to realise the existence in the
same society of such boundless license of thought, and
such unscrupulous restraint upon its expression. Not
one of Rousseau's three chief works, for instance, was
printed in France. The whole trade in books was a
sort of contraband, and was carried on with the
stealth, subterfuge, daring, and knavery that are
demanded in contraband dealings. An author or a
bookseller was forced to be as careful as a kidnapper
of coolies or the captain of a slaver would be in our
own time. He had to steer clear of the court, of the
parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses
of the king and the minister, of the friends of the
mistresses, and above all of that organised hierarchy
of ignorance and oppression in all times and places
where they raise their masked heads, — the bishops
and ecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot
produced his comedy to please the devout at the
expense of the philosophers (1760). Madame de
Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxem-
bourg, instigated and protected him, for Diderot had
oflended her.^ Morellet replied in a piece in which
the keen vision of feminine spite detected a reference
to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had
^ For the Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviiL 58.
1. MONTiMORENCY. 67
relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung
into the Bastile.^ Diderot was thrown for three
months into Vincennes, where we saw him ou a
memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind (1748),
nominally because it was held to contain irreligious
doctrine, really because he had given ofl'ence to
D'Argenson's mistress by hinting that she might be
very handsome, but that her judgment on scientific
experiment was of no value.-
The New Heloisa could not openly circulate in
France so long as it contained the words, " I would
rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner than the
mistress of a king." The last word was altered to
" prince," and then Rousseau was warned that he
would offend the Prince de Conti and Madame da
Boufflers.^ No work of merit could appear without
more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of
slavish mutilation could make the writer secure against
the accidental grudge of people who had influence in
high quarters/
If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual
time of the eighteenth century needed all the craft of
a smuggler, their morality was reduced to an equally
^ Morellet's Mim., i. 89-93. Rousseau, Con/., x. 85, etc.
This Vision is also in the style of Grimm's Pitit ProphUe, like
the piece referred to in a previous note, vol. ii. p. 31.
^ Madame de Vandeul's M6m. sur Diderot, p. 27. Rous.seau.
Conf., vii. 130.
' Nuuv. mi, V. xiii. 194. Con/., x. 43.
* The reader will find a fuller mention of the French book
trade in my Diderot, ch. vL
58 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
low level in dealing not only with the j)olice, but with
their own accomplices, the book- writers. They excused
themselves from paying proper sums to authors, on
the ground that they were robbed of the profits that
would enable them to pay such sums, by the piracy
of their brethren in trade. But then they all pirated
the works of one another. The whole commerce was
a mass of fraud and chicane, and every prominent
author passed his life between two fires. He was
robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than
robbery and piracy, they were defaced and distorted
by the booksellers. On the other side he was tor-
mented to death by the suspicion and timidity, alter-
nately with the hatred and active tyranny of the
administration. As we read the story of the lives of
all these strenuous men, their struggles, their incessant
mortifications, their constantly reviving and ever
irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may
wish that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily
lives of some of them had faded away from memory,
and left us nothing to think of in connection with
their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity, self-
sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the
cause of human emancipation and progress. Happily
the mutual hate of the Christian factions, to which
liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to their
mutual love, prevented a common union for burning
the philosophers as well as their books. All torments
short of this they endured, and they had the great
merit of enduring them without any hope of being
L MONTMOllENCY. 59
rewarded after their death, as truly good men must
always be capable of doing.
Eousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any
intention of courting it in even its slightest forms.
Holland was now the great printing press of France,
and when we are counting up the contributions of
Protestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is
just to remember the indispensable services rendered
by the freedom of the press in Holland to the dissem-
ination of French thought in the eighteenth century,
as well as the shelter that it gave to the French thinkers
in the seventeenth, including Descartes, the greatest
of them alL The monstrous tediousness of printing
a book at Amsterdam or the Hague, the delay, loss,
and confusion in receiving and transmitting the proofs,
and the subterranean character of the entire process,
including the circulation of the book after it was once
fairly printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to
authors of more impetuous temper. He agreed with
Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer, to sell him
the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript
had then to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam.
Rousseau wrote it out in very small characters, sealed
it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care of the
chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be
a native of Yaud. In passing the barrier, the packet
fell into the hands of the officials. They tore it open
and examined it, happily unconscious that they were
handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that
they had ever meddled with. It was not until the
60 ROUSSEAU. OHAP.
chaplain claimed it in the name of ambassadorial
privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to go on
its wa}^ to the press. ^ Rousseau repeats a hundred
times, not only in the Confessions, but also in letters
to his friends, how resolutely and carefully he avoided
any evasion of the laws of the country in which he
lived. The French government was anxious enough
on all grounds to secui'e for France the production of
the books of which France was the great consumer,
but the severity of its censorship prevented this.'-^
The introduction of the books, when printed, was
tolerated or connived at, because the country would
hardly have endured to be deprived of the enjoyment
of its own literature. By a greater inconsistency the
reprinting of a book which had once found admission
into the country, was also connived at. Thus M. de
Malesherbes, out of friendship for Eousseau, wished
to have an edition of the New Helo'isa printed in
France, and sold for the benefit of the author. That
he should have done so is a curious illustration of the
low morality engendered by a repressive system im-
perfectly carried out. For Rousseau had sold the
book to Rey. Rey had treated with a French book-
seller in the usual way, that is, had sent him half the
edition printed, the bookseller paying either in cash
or other books for all the copies he received. There-
fore to i)rint an independent edition in Paris was to
' Conf., xi. 127.
- See a letter from Roussean to Malesherbes, Nov. 5. 1760.
Corr., ii. 157.
I. MONTMORENCY. 61
injure, not Eey the foreigner, but the French book-
seller who stood practically in Key's place. It was
setting two French bookseUers to ruin one another.
Rousseau emphatically declined to receive any profit
from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes, you
sold to Eey a right which you had not got, the right
of sole proprietorship, excluding the competition of a
pirated reprint. Then, answered Rousseau, if the
right which I sold happens to prove less than I
thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of
my mistake, I owe to Rey compensation for any loss
that he may suffer.^
The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of
reason was shown on numerous occasions. As director
of the book trade he was really the censor of the
literature of the time.^ The story of his service to
' Corr., ii. 157.
-' C. G. de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721— gnillotined,
1794), son of the chancellor, and one of the best instructed and
most enlightened men of the century — a Turgot of tlie second
rank — was Directeur de la Librairie from 1750-1763. The
process was this : a book was submitted to him ; he named a
censor for it ; on the censor's report the director gave or refused
permission to print, or required alterations. Even after these
formalities were complied with, the book was liable to a decree
of the royal council, a decree of the parliament, or else a letlre-
cU-cadict might send the author to the Bastile. See Barbier
vii. 126.
After Lord Shelbume saw Malesherbes, he said, " I have seen
for the first time in my life what I never thought could exist—
a man whose soul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet
who is full of life and ardour." Mdile. Lespinasse's Lettres,
90.
62 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP
Diderot is well known — how he warned Diderot that
the police were about to visit his house and overhaul
his papers, and how when Diderot despaired of being
able to put them out of sight in his narrow quarters,
Malesherbes said, "Then send them all to me," and
took care of them until the storm was overpast. The
proofs of the New Heloisa came through his hands,
and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in the
affairs relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau
entrusted the whole matter to him and to Madame de
Luxembourg, being confident that, in acting through
persons of such authority and position, he should be
protected against any unwitting illegality. Instead
of being sent to Rey, the manuscript was sold to a
bookseller in Paris for six thousand francs.^ A Ions
time elapsed before any proofs reached the author,
and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed
in France as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes
was in some sort the director of the enterprise, the
author felt no alarm. Dnclos came to visit him one
day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the Savoyard
Vicar's Profession of Faith. " What, citizen," he cried,
" and that is part of a book that they are printing at
Paris ! Be kind enough not to tell any one that you
read this to me."^ Still Rousseau remained secure.
Then the printing came to a standstill, and he could
not find out the reason, because Malesherbes was
away, and the printer did not take the trouble to
answer his letters. "My natui-al tendency," he says,
1 See note, p. 132. ^ Conf., xi. 134.
L MONTMORENCY. 63
and as the rest of his life only too abundantly proved,
'•is to be afraid of darkness ; mystery always disturbs
me, it is utterly antipathetic to my character, which
is open even to the pitch of imprudence. The aspect
of the most hideous monster would alarm me little, I
verily beHeve ; but if I discern at night a figure in a
white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life."^
So he at once fancied that by some means the Jesuits
had got possession of his book, and knowing him to
be at death's door, designed to keep the Emilius back
until he was actually dead, when they would publish
a truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.'^
He wrote letter upon letter to the printer, to Males-
herbes, to Madame de Luxembourg, and if answers
did not come, or did not come exactly when he
expected them, he grew delirious ^nth anxiety. If he
dropped his conviction that the Jesuits were plotting
the ruin of his book and the defilement of his reputa-
tion, he lost no time in fastening a similar design upon
the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were acquitted,
then the turn of the philosophers came. We have
constantly to remember that all this time the unfor-
tunate man was suffering incessant pain, and passing
his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes
threw off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion,
and dreamed in their stead of some sunny spot in
pleasant Touraine, where under a mild climate and
among a gentle people he should peacefully end hia
1 Con/., xi. 139.
"* lb., li. 139. Corr., iL 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761. etr.
64 KOUSSEAU. CHAP,
days.^ At other times he was fond of supposing M.
de Luxembourg not a duke, nor a marshal of France,
but a good country squire living in some old mansion,
and himself not an author, not a maker of books, but
with moderate intelligence and slight attainment,
finding with the squire and his dame the happiness of
his life, and contributing to the happiness of theirs.^
Alas, in spite of all his precautions, he had unwittingly
drifted into the stream of great aflFairs. He and his
book were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction ; and
a persecution set in, which destroyed his last chance
of a composed life, by giving his reason, already dis-
turbed, a final blow from which it never recovered.
Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement
against the Jesuits. That formidable order had
offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to
recognise her power and position, — a manly policy, as
creditable to their moral vigour as it was contrary to
the maxims which had made them powerful. They
had also off"ended Choiseul by the part they had taken
in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parlia-
ments had always been their enemies. This was due
first to the jealousy with which corporations of lawyers
always regard corporations of ecclesiastics, and next to
their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which had been not
only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion
of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the
hostility of the parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by
the harshness with which the system of confessional
* Conf., xi. 150. - Fourth Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377-
I. MONTMOKENCV. 65
tickets was at this time being carried out. Finally,
the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of
all retrograde interests, was now weakened by the
Seven Years' War ; and was unable to bring effective
influence to bear on Lewis xv. At last he gave his
consent to the destruction of the order. The com-
mercial bankruptcy of one of their missions was the
immediate occasion of their fall, and nothinir coiild
save them. " I only know one man," said Grimm,
"in a position to have composed an apology for the
Jesuits in fine style, if it had been in his way to take
the side of that tribe, and this man is ]\I. Rousseau."
The parliaments went to work -with alacrity, but they
were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they were
to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they
were no allies of the one even when destroying the other.
Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and
variations of innovating speculation with any marked
nicety. Anything with the stamp of rationality on
its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the
school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted
one of their number, like Voltaire or Helv6tius. The
Emihus appeared in ]May 1762. On the 11th of June
the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt
by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested.
For Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire
and others ; he courageously insisted on placing his
name on the title-page of all his works,^ and so there
* With one trifling exception, the Letter to Grinini on the
Opera of Oniphale (1752) : Hcriis sur la Musi^ue, p. 337.
VOL. ir. F
66 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
was none of the usual difficulty in identifying the
author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged
irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.^
The indecency of the requisition in which the
advocate-general demanded its jiroscription, was ad-
mitted even by people who were least likely to defend
Rousseau.^ The author was charged with saying not
only that man may be saved Avithout believing in God,
but even that the Christian religion does not exist —
a paradox too flagrant even for the writer of the Dis-
course on Inequality. No evidence was produced
either that the alleged assertions were in the book,
or that the name of the author was really the name
on its title-page. Kousseau fared no worse, but
better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single
man of letters of that time who escaped arbitrary
imprisonment.
The unfortunate author had news of the ferment
which his work was creating in Paris, and received
notes of warning from every liand, but he could not
believe that the only man in France who believed in
God was to be the victim of the defenders of Chris-
tianity.^ On the 8tli of June he spent a merry day
with two friends, taking their dinner in the fields.
"Ever since my youth 1 had a habit of reading at
' See Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpeiitier, 1857).
A -succinct contenijiorary account of tlie f^cneral situation is to
be found in D'Alerabert's little book, the IkstmdiondesJ^suites
- Grimm, for instance : Corr. Lit., iii. 117.
s awr., ii. 337. June 7, 1072. Uonf., xi. 152, 162.
I. MONTMORENCY. 67
night in my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I
put out the caudle, and tried to fall asleep for a few
minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My ordinary
readin!? at night was the Bible, and I have read it
continuously through at least five or six times in this
way. That night, finding myself more wakeful than
usual, I prolonged my reading, and read through the
whole of the book which ends with the Levite of
Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of
Judges. The story affected me deeply, and I was
busy over it in a kind of dream, when all at once I
was roused by lights and noises. " ^
It was two o'clock in the morniug. A messenger
had come in hot haste to carry him to Madame do
Luxembourg. News had reached her of the proposed
decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well
enough to be sure that if he were seized and examined,
her own share and that of Malesherbes in the pro-
duction of the condemned book would be made public,
and their position uncomfortabl}' compromiseil. It
was to their iutcrest that he should avoid arrest by
fiight, and they had no difficulty in persuading him
to fall in with their plans. After a tearful farewell
with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sight
for seventeen years, and many embraces from the
greater ladies of the castle, he was thrust into a chaise
and despatched on the first stage of eight melancholy
years of wandenng and despair, to be driven from
' Conf., xi. 162. Tlxe Levite's story is to bo read in Judges,
cli. xix.
68 ROUSSEAU, CHAP. i.
place to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of
magistrates and religious doctors, and then by the
yet more cruel spectres of his own diseased imagina-
tion, until at length his whole soul became the home
of weariness and tormentr-
CHAPTER II
PERSECUTION.^
Those to whom life consists in the immediate con-
sciousness of their o^vn direct relations \\'ith the
people and circumstances that are in close contact vnth
them, find it hard to follow the moods of a man to
whom such consciousness is the least part of himself,
and such relations the least real part of his life. Rous-
seau was no sooner in the post-chaise which was bear-
ing him away towards Switzerland, than the troubles
of the preWous day at once dropped into a pale and
distant past, and he returned to a world where was
neither parhament, nor decree for burning books, nor
any warrant for personal arrest. He took up the
thread where harassing circumstances had broken it,
and again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite
of Ephraim. His dream absorbed him so entirely as
to take specific literary form, and before the journey
was at an end he had composed a long impassioned
version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's
usual fine sonorousness in a high degree, no man now
reads it ; the author himself always preserved a car-
' June, 1762 — DeceiiilKjr, 1765.
70 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
tain tenderness for it.^ The contrast between this
singular quietism and the angry stir that marked
Voltaire's many flights in post-chaises, points like all
else to the profound difference between the pair.
Contrast with Voltaire's shrill cries under any per-
sonal vexation, this calm utterance: — "Though the
consequences of this aflair have plunged me into a
gulf of woes from which I shall never come up again
so long as I live, I bear these gentlemen no grudge.
I am aware that their object was not to do me any
harm, but only to reach ends of their owti. I know
that towards ine they have neither liking nor hate.
I was found in their way, like a pebble that you
thrust aside with the foot without even lookinir at it.
They ought not to say they have performed their
duty, but that they have done their business."- A
new note from a persecuted writer.
Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth
possessed him that he was the victim of a dark un-
fathomable plot, and in spite of passing outbreaks
of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and
active resentments. The world was not real enough
to him for this. A throng of phantoms pressed noise-
lessly before his sight, and dulled all sense of more
actual impression. "It is amazing," he wrote, " with
what ease I forget past ill, however fresh it may be.
In proportion as the anticipation of it alarms and
^ Co7if., xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume o/
liis works entitled Milatiges.
-' Corr., iii. 416.
tl. PERSECUTION. 71
confuses mo when I see it coming, so the memory oi
it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment
after it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which
torments itself incessantly in anticipating woes that
are still unborn, makes a diversion for my memory,
and hinders me from recalling those which have srone.
I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have
suffered in foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget
it ; while on the contrary, being incessantly busy with
my past happiness, I recall it and brood and ruminate
over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I wish."^
The same turn of humour saved him from vindictive-
ncss. " I concern myself too little with the offence,
to feel much concern about the ofTender. I only
think of the hurt that I have received from him, on
account of the hurt that he may still do me ; and if
I were sure he would do me no more, what he had al-
ready done would be forgotten straightway." Though
he does not carry the analysis any further, we may
easily perceive that the same explanation covers what
he called his natural ingratitude. Kindness was not
much more \nvidly understood by him than malice.
It was only one form of the troublesome interposition
of an outer world in his life ; he was fain to hurry
back from it to the real world of his dreams. If any
man called practical is tempted to despise this dream-
ing creature, as he fares in his chaise from stage to
stage, let him remember that one making that jouniey
through France less than thirty years later might
* Conf., xi. 172.
72 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
have seen the castles of the great flaring in the
destruction of a most righteous vengeance, the great
themselves fleeing ignobly from the land to which
their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of
improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse,
while the legion of toilers with eyes blinded by the
oj^pression of ages were groping with passionate un-
certain hand for that divine something which they
thought of as justice and right. And this was what
Rousseau both partially foresaw and helped to pre-
pare,^ while the common politicians, like Choiseul
or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game — the elemental
forces rising unseen into tempest around them.
He reached the territory of the canton of Berne,
and alighted at the house of an old friend at Yverdun,^
where native air, the beauty of the spot, and the
charms of the season, immediatelj^ repaired all weari-
ness and fatigue.^ Friends at Geneva wrote letters
of sincere feeling, joyful that he had not followed the
precedent of Socrates too closely by remaining in the
power of a government eager to destroy him.'^ A
post or two later brought worse news. The Council
at Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social
Contract also, to be publicly burnt, and issued a
warrant of arrest against their author, if he should
set foot in the territory of the republic (June
^ For a remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, sec
Conf., xi. 13G.
2 M. Koguin. June 14, 1762.
^ Corr., ii. 347. * Streckeisen, i. 35
II.
PERSECUTION. 73
19).^ Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the
free Government which he had held up to the rever-
ence of Europe, could have condemned him unheard,
but he took occasion in a highly characteristic manner
to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly
taken his part.- AVithin a fortnight this blow wa5
followed by another. His two books were reported
to the senate of Berne, and Eousseau was informed
by one of the authorities that a notification was on
its way admonishing him to quit the canton within
the space of fifteen days.^ This stroke he avoided
by flight to Motiers, a village in the principality of
Neuchatel (July 10), then part of the dominions of
the King of Prussia.* Eousseau had some antipathy
' His friend Moultou wrote him the news. Streckeisen, i.
43. Geneva was the only place at which the Social Contract
was burnt. Here there were peculiar reasons, as we shall sec.
2 Corr., ii. 356. » lb., ii. 358, 369, etc.
•• The principality of Xeuchatel had fallen by marriage
(1504) to the French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with
certain interruptions retained it until the extinction of the
line by the death of ilarie, Duchess of r\emours (1707). Fif-
teen claimants arose with lifteen varieties of far-oif title, as well
as a party for constituting Neuchatel a Republic and making
it a fourteenth canton. (Saint Simon, v. 276.) The Estates
adjudged the sovereignty to the Protestant house of Prussia
(Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis xiv., as heir of the pretensions of the
extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of Utrecht (1713),
Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the cession by
Prussia of the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it until
1306. The disturbed history of the connection between Prussia
and Neuchatel from 1S14, wlien it became the twenty-first
canton of the Swiss Confederation, down to 1857, does not here
eoncem us. VvliT iJ/*.*
74 KOUSSEAU. CHAP.
to Frederick, both because he had beaten the French,
whom Eousseau loved, and because his maxims and
his conduct ahke seemed to trample under foot respect
for the natural law and not a few human duties. He
had composed a verse to the effect that Frederick
thought like a philosopher and acted like a king,
philosopher and king notoriously being words of
equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also a
passage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the
Daunians, which was commonly understood to mean
Frederick, King of the Prussians. Still Eousseau was
acute enough to know that mean passions usually
only rule the weak, and have little hold over the
strong. He boldly wrote both to the king and to
Lord Marischal, the governor of the principality,
informing them that he was there, and asking per-
mission to remain in the only asylum left for him
upon the earth. ^ He compared himself loftily to
Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the
kinsx in a vein that must have amused the strong
'o
man. " I have said much ill of you, perhaps I shall
still say more ; yet, driven from France, from Geneva,
from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter
in your states. Perhaps I was wrong in not be-
ginning there ; this is eulogy of which you are worthy.
Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I seek
none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty
that I am in your power, and that I am so of set
design. Your majesty will disjjose of me as shall
1 Gorr., ii. 370.
tl. PERSECUTION. 75
seem good to you."' Frederick, though no admirer
of Rousseau or his Avritings,- readily granted the
required permission. He also, says Lord Marischal,
" crave me orders to furnish him his small necessaries
if he would accept them ; and though that king's
philosophy be very dilFerent from that of Jean Jacques,
yet he does not think that a man of an irreproach-
able life is to be persecuted because his sentiments
are singular. He designs to build him a hermitage
with a Httle garden, which I find he will not accept,
nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered
him,"^ When the offer of the floui*, wine, and fire-
wood was at lensrth made in as delicate terms as
possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds which
may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather
touching simplicity.* " I have enough to live on for
two or three years," he said, "but if I were dying of
hunger, I would rather in the present condition of
your good prince, and not being of any service to
him, go and eat grass and grub up roots, than accept
a morsel of bread from him."^ Hume might well
call this a phenomenon in the world of letters, and
one very honourable for the person concerned.*^ And
we recognise its dignity the more when we contrast
1 Corr., ii. 371. July 1762.
^ D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the
philosophers, to Voltaire, Nov. 22, 17C5.
' Letter to Hume ; Burton's Life of Ilumey ii. 105, corrob-
orating Conf., xii. 196.
* Marischal to J. J. R. ; Streckeisen, ii. 70.
'" Corr., iii 40. Nov. 1, 1762. * Burton's Life, ii. 113.
^!
76 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
it with the baseness of Voltaire, who drew his pen-
sion from the King of Prussia while Frederick was
in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was
sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the
malicious expectation that he would one day have to
allow the King of Prussia himself a pension. ^ And
Rousseau was a poor man, living among the poor and
in their style. His annual outlay at this time was
covered by the modest sum of sixty louis.^ What
stamps his refusal of Frederick's gifts as true dignity,
is the fact that he not only did not refuse money
for any work done, but expected and asked for it.
Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect
plants for him. Joyfully, replied Rousseau, " but as
I cannot subsist without the aid of my own labour,
I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it might
otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of
my time for nothing."^ In the same year, we may
add, when the tremendous struggle of the Seven
Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote a
second terse epistle to the king, and with this their
direct communication came to an end. "Sire, you
are my protector and my benefactor; I would fain
repay you if I can. You wish to give me bread ; is
there none of your own subjects in want of it ? Take
that sword away from ray sight, it dazzles and pains
me. It has done its work only too well ; the sceptre
is abandoned. Great is the career for kings of your
' Voltaire's Corr. (1758). (Eicv., Ixxv. pp. 31 and 80.
- Con/., xii. 237. ^ Corr., iii. 41. Nov. 11, 17C2
II. PERSECUTION. 77
stuff, and you are still far from the term ; time
presses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom
well your heart, Frederick ! Can you dare to die
without having been the greatest of men 1 Would
that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubt-
able, covering his states with multitudes of men to
whom he should be a father ; then will J. J. Kousseau,
the foe of kings, hasten to die at the foot of his
throne."^ Frederick, strong as his interest was in
all ciuious persons who could amuse him, was too
busy to answer this, and Rousseau was not yet re-
cognised as Voltaire's rival in power and popu-
larity.
Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages
standing in the flat bottom of the Val de Travers, a
widish valley that lies between the gorges of the Jura
and the Lake of Neuchatel, and is famous in our day
for its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The
flat of the valley, with the Reuss making a bald and
colourless way through the midst of it, is nearly tree-
less, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In
winter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is
high, and the surrounding hills admit the sun's rays
late and cut them off early. Rousseau's description,
accurate and recognisable as it is," strikes an impartial
tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of scenery
is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand
outlines, changes of light, soft variations of colour;
' Cin-r., iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762.
» Ik, iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763.
78 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
the landscape lives for him with an unspoken sugges-
tion ami intimate association, to all of which the swift
passing stranger is very cold.
His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst
of the other houses, and his walks, which were at
least as important to him as the home in which he
dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming
cascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities
of a humble sort, and here that interest in plants
which had always been strong in him, began to grow
into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling
about them, that when in his botanical expeditions
he came across a single flower of its kind, he could
never bring himself to pluck it. His sight, though
not good for distant objects, was of the very finest for
things held close ; his sense of smell was so acute and
subtle that, according to a good witness, he might
have classified plants by odours, if language furnished
as many names as nature supplies varieties of
fragrance.^ He insisted in all botanising and other
walking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the
heat of the dog-days ; ho declared that the action of
the sun did him good. When the days began to turn,
the Slimmer was straightway at an end for him : " My
imagination," he said, in a j)hrase Avhich went further
through his life than he supposed, "at once brings
winter." He hate<l rain as nuich as he loved sun, so
he must once have lost all the mystic fascination of
the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through palo
^ Benidrdii) de St. I'icrro, xii. 103. 59, etc.
n. PERSECUTION. 79
showers, and now again must have lost the sombre
majesty of the pines of liis valley dripping in torn
edges of cloud, and all those other sights in landscape
that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense.
One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier,
the summer retreat of Lord Marischal. For him he
rapidly conceived the same warm friendship which he
felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just
left And the sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as
warm a liking for the strange refugee who had come
to him for shelter, or shall we call it a kind of shaggy
compassion, as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His
letters, which are numerous enough, abound in expres-
sions of hearty good-will. These, if we reflect on the
genuine worth, veracity, penetration, and experience
of the old man who wrote them, may fairly l)e counted
the best testimony that remains to the existence of
something sterhng at the bottom of Rousseau's char-
acter.^ It is here no insincere fine lady of the French
court, but a homel}' and weather-beaten Scotchman,
who speaks so often of his refugee's rectitude of heart
and true sensibility. ^
^ George Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of Frederick's
famous field-mai-shal, James Keith. They liail taken part in the
Jacobite rising of 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James
Keith brought his brother into the service of the King of
Prussia, who sent him as ambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards
made him Governor of Neuchatel (1754), and eventually
prevailed on the English Government to reinstate him in the
rights which he had forfeited by his share in the rebellion
(1763).
- Streckcisen, ii. 98, etc
80 KOUSSEAU. CHAP.
He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum
on Theresa, who had joined Rousseau at Motiers,
and in other ways he showed a true solicitude and
considerateness both for her and for him.-' It was his
constant dream that on his return to Scotland, Jean
Jacques should accompany him, and that with David
Hume, they Avould malve a trio of philosophic hermits ;
that this was no mere cheery pleasantly is shown by
the pains he took in settling the route for the journey."
The plan only fell through in consequence of Frederick's
cordial urgency that his friend should end his days
with him ; he returned to Prussia and lived at Sans
Souci until the close, always retaining something of
his good- will for " his excellent savage," as he called
the author of the Discourses. They had some common
antipathies, including the fun(.lamental one of dislike
to society, and especially to the society of the people
of Neuchatel, the Gascons of Switzerland. " Eousseau
is ga}^ in company," Lord Marischal wrote to Hume,
" polite, and what the French call ainiaUe, and gains
^ One of Rousseau's chief distresses hitlierto arose from the
indigence in whi(^li Theresa would be placed in case of his
death. I>ey, the bookseller, gave her an annuity of about £16
a year, and Lord Marischal's gift seems to liave been 300 louis,
the only money that Rousseau was ever induced to accept from
;iny one in his life. See Streckeisen, ii. 99 ; Corr., iii. 336.
The nnist delicate and sincere of the many offers to provide for
Theresa was made by Madame de Verdelin (Streckeisen, ii. 506).
The language in which Madame de Verdelin speaks of Theresa
iu all her letter's is the best testimony to character that this
unicli-abused creature has ti) produce.
■'' //>., 90, 92, etc. Sununer of 1763.
II. PERSECUTION. 81
ground daily in the opinion of even the clergy here.
His enemies elsewhere continue to persecute him, and
he is pestered with anonymous letters."^
Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the
master hand. Voltaire had been universally suspected
of stirring up the feeling of Geneva against its too
famous citizen, 2 though for a man of less energy the
affair of the Galas, which he Avas now in the thick of,
might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time
show how hard he found it in the case of Eousseau
to exercise his usual pity for the unfortunate. He
could not forget that the man who was now tasting
persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays;
that he was a false brother, who had fatuously insulted
the only men who could take his part ; that he was a
Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause. ^ On the
whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word,
though not very categorically given,* that he had
nothing to do with the action taken against Rousseau.
That action is quite adequately explained, first by the
inHuence of the resident of France at Geneva, which
we know to have been exerted against the two fatal
books,^ and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic
party to keep out of their town a man whose demo-
cratic tendencies they now knew so well and so justly
^ Burton's Zi/co/^w me, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762.
- The Confessions are not our only autliority for this. See
Streckeisen, ii. 64 ; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762.
3 Voltaire's Corr. (Euv. , l.xvii. 458, 459, 485, etc.
* To D'AIembort, Sept. 1.'), 1762.
' Moultou to Kousseau, StiLokeisen, i. 85, 87.
VOL. II. O
82 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
dreaded.' Moultou, a (xenevese minister, in the full
tide of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of
Emilius, met Voltaire at the house of a lady in Geneva.
All will turn out well, cried the patriarch ; " the
syndics will say M. Eousseau, you have done ill to
write what you have written ; promise for the future
to respect the religion of your country. Jean Jacques
will promise, and perhaps he will say that the printer
took the liberty of adding a sheet or two to his book."
" Never," cried the ardent Moultou; "Jean Jacques
never puts his name to works to disown them after." ^
Voltaire disowned his own books with intrepid and
sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge to
Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly
afterwards, professed an extreme desire to be recon-
ciled with Kousseau, and would talk of nothing else.
"I swear to you," wrote Moultou, "that I could not
understand him the least in the world ; he is a mar-
vellous actor ; I could have sworn that he loved you."^
And thei-e really was no acting in it. The serious
Genevese did not see that he was dealing with " one
all fire and fickleness, a child."
Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not
only the band of professed unbelievers, but also the
tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The doctors of the
Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by
the lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius
as a matter of course. In the same spirit of generoui?
' Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
2 Streckeisen, i. 50. * lb., i. 76
II.
PERSECUTION. 83
emulation, Christopher de Beaumont, " by the divine
compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint Cloud,
peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy
Ghost," had issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those
hateful documents in which bishops, Catholic and
Protestant, have been wont for the last century and
a half to hide ^vith swollen bombastic phrase their
dead and decomposing ideas. The windy folly of
these poor pieces is usually in proportion to the hier-
archic rank of those who promulgate them, and an
archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against
reason and freedom in superlatives of malignant
unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762) is a master-
piece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from
the mandate which was its provocative, we seem to
grasp the hand of a man, after being chased by a
nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never showed
the substantial quality of his character more surely
and unmistakably than in controversy. He had such
gravity, such austere self-command, such closeness of
grip. Most of us feel pleasure in reading the match-
less banter with which Voltaire assailed his theological
enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont
we realise the comparative lowncss of the pleasure
which Voltaire had given us. We understand how it
was that Rousseau made fanatics, while Voltaire only
made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre,
the crosier, the ring, fall into the dust ; the Archbishop
of Paris, the Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France,
the commander of the Holy Ghost, is restored from
84 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes a
human heing. We hear the voice of a man hailing a
man. Voltaire often sank to the level of ecclesiastics.
Rousseau raised the archbishop to his own level, and
with magnanimous courtesy addressed him as an equal.
"Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you?
What common tongue can we use *? How are we to
understand one another 1 And what is there between
me and you 1" And he persevered in this distant lofty
vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of
acerbity. We feel the ever-inspiring breath of seri-
ousness and sincerity. This was because, as we repeat
so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of dreams
as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted
in his character. He did not merely say, as any of
us can say so fluentl}'^, that he craved reality in human
relations, that distinctions of rank and post count for
nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and ought
not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion
and words heedlessly scattered ; that our faith, what-
ever it may be, is the most sacred of our possessions,
organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that our passage
across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be
wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry
disrespect for others. All this was actually his mind.
And hence the little difficulty he had in keeping his
retort to the archbishop, as to his other antagonists,
on a worthy level.
Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless
injustice with which he had been condemned, and of
II.
PERSECUTION. 85
the persecution which Avas inflicted on him by one
government after another, stir in him a blaze of high
remonstrance. " You accuse me of temerity,'"' he
cried ; " how have I earned such a name, when I only
propounded difficulties, and even that with so much
reserve ; when I only advanced reasons, and even that
with so much respect ; when I attacked no one, nor
even named one? And you, my lord, how do you
dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you
speak Avith such scanty justice and so little decency,
with so small respect and so much levity 1 You call
me impious, and of what impiety can you accuse me
— me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except
to pay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor
of man except to persuade all men to love one
another 1 The impious are those who unworthily
profane the cause of God by making it serve the
passions of men. The impious are those who, daring
to pass for the interpreters of divinity, and judges
between it and man, exact for themselves the honours
that are due to it only. The impious are those who
arrogate to themselves the right of exercising the
power of God upon earth, and insist on opening and
shutting the gates of heaven at their o\vn good will
and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels
read in the church. At this horrible idea my blood
is enkindled, and tears of indignation fall from my
eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shall render
an accoimt one day, be very sure, of the use to which
you have dared to put his house. . . . My lord, you
86 ROUSSEAU, CHAP
have publicly insulted me : you are now convicted of
heaping calumny upon me. If you were a private
person like myself, so that I could cite you before an
equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before
it, I with my book, and you with your mandate,
assuredly you would be declared guilty ; you would
be condemned to make reparation as public as the
wrong was public. But you belong to a rank that
relieves you from the necessity of being just, and I
am nothing. Yet yoii who profess the gospel, you,
a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you
know what your own duty is in such a case. Mine
I have done : I have nothing more to say to you,
and I hold my peace. "^
The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in
moral tone. For this is a little curious, that Rousseau,
so diffuse in expounding his opinions, and so unscien-
tific in his method of coming to them, should have
been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the
controversialists of a very controversial time. Some
of his strokes in defence of his first famous assault on
civilisation are as hard, as direct, and as effective as
any in the records of polemical literature. We will
give one specimen from the letter to the Archbishop
of Paris ; it has the recommendation of touching an
argument that is not yet quite universally recognised
for slain. The Savoyard Vicar had dwelt on the
difiiculty of accepting revelation as the voice of God,
on account of the long distance of time between us,
^ Lettre a Christophe de Bcauinont, pp. 163-166,
n.
PERSECUTION. 87
and the questionableness of the supporting testimony.
To which the archbishop thus : — " But is there not
then an infinity of facts, even earUer than those of
the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to
doubt ] By what way other than that of human
testimony has our author himself Icnown the Sparta,
the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and
heroes he extols with such assurance] How many
generations of men between him and the historians
who have preserved the memory of these events?"
First, says Rousseau in answer, " it is in the order of
things that human circumstances should be attested
by human evidence, and they can be attested in no
other way. I can only know that Rome and Sparta
existed, because contemporaries assure me that they
existed. In such a case this intermediate communi-
cation is indispensable. But why is it necessary
between God and me 1 Is it simple or natural that
God should have gone in search of Moses to speak to
Jean Jacques Rousseau 1 Second, nobody is obliged
to believe that Sparta once existed, and nobody will
be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every
fact of which we are not witnesses is only established
by moral proofs, and moral proofs have various
degrees of strength. Will the divine justice hurl me
into hell for missing the exact point at which a proof
becomes irresistible? If there is in the world an
attested story, it is that of vampires ; nothing is
wanting for judicial proof, — reports and certificates
from notables, surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But
88 KOUSSEAU.
CEaP.
wlio l»elieves in vampires, and shall we all l)c damned
for not Ijclieving? Third, iny constant experience and
that of all men is stronger in reference to inodigies than
the testimony of some men."
He then strikes home with a parahlc. The Abb6
Filris had died in the odour of Jansenist sanctity
(1727), and extraordinar}' doings went on at his tomb ;
the lame walked, men and women sick of tlie jialsy
were made whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rous-
seau, that an inhabitant of the Rue St. Jacques speaks
thus to the Archbishop of Paris, " My lord, I know
that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean
do Paris, nor in the miracles which God has been
pleased publicly to woi-k upon his tond) in the sight
of the most eidightened and most populous city in the
world ; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have
just seen the saint in person raised from the dead in
the spot where his bones were laid." The man of the
Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail of such a circum-
stance that could sti'ike a beholder. " I am persuaded
that on hearing such strange news, you will l)egin by
interrogating liim who testifies to its truth, as to his
position, his feelings, his confessor, and other such
points ; and when from his air, as from his speech,
you have perceived that lie is a poor workman, and
when having no confessional ticket to show you, he
has confirmed your notion that he is a Jansenist, Ah,
ah, you will say to him, you are a convulsionary, and
ha\'e seen Saint Paris resuscitated. There is nothing
wonderful in that; you have seen so many other
II.
PKRSECUTION. 89
wonders !" The man would insist that the miracle
had been seen equally by a number of other people,
who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of
soimd sense, good character, and excellent reputation.
Some would send the man to Bedlam, " but you after
a grave reprimand, will be content with saying : I
know that two or tliiee witnesses, good people and of
sound sense, may attest the life or the death of a man,
but I do not know how many more are needed to
establish the resurrection of a Jansenist. Until I find
that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain:
I give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is
something for you to make your broth with. That is
what you would say, and what any other sensible man
would say in your place. Whence I conclude that
even according to you and to every other sensible
man, the moral proofs which are sufficient to establish
facts that are in the order of moral possibilities, are
not sufficient to establish facts of another order and
purely supernatural."^
Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the
Archbishop of Paris was less vexatious than the
swarming of the angrier hive of ministers at his gates.
"If I had declared for atheism," he says bitterly,
" they would at first have shrieked, but they would
soon have left me in peace like the rest. The people
of the Lord would not have kept watch over mo;
everybody would not have thought he was doing me
a high favour in not treating me as a person cut off
* Letlre d Cliristophe de Bemiinont, pp. 130-1.35.
90 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
from communion, and I should have been quits with
all the world. The holy women in Israel would not
have written me anonymous letters, and their charity
would not have breathed devout insults. They would
not have taken the trouble to assure me in all humility
of heart that I was a castaway, an execrable monster,
and that the world would have been well off if some
good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my
cradle. Worthy people on their side would not
torment themselves and torment me to bring me back
to the way of salvation ; they would not charge at me
from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of
their sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I
cursed their importunity, nor to feel Avith gratitude
that they are obeying a call to lay me in my very
o
»1
grave with weariness.
He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion
of his vigilant neighbours. Their character for con-
tentious orthodoxy was well known. It was at
Neuchatel that the controversy as to the eternal
punishment of the wicked raged with a fury that
ended in a civil outbreak. The peace of the town
was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended,
madstrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at
last Frederick promulgated his famous bull: — "Let
the parsons who make for themselves a cruel and bar-
barous God, be eternally damned as they desire and
deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God
gentle and merciful, enjoy the plenitude of hia
^ Lettre ct Christophe de Beaumont, p. 93.
n.
PERSECUTION. 91
mercy. "^ When Rousseau came within the territory,
preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris,
Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express
permission that saved him from a fourth proscription.
The minister at Motiers was of the less inhuman
stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not, with-
out failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen,
neglect the public profession of the faith to which he
had been restored eight years before, attended the
religious services with regularity. He even wrote to
the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and
protesting the sincerity of his union with the reformed
congregation.- The result of this was that the pastor
came to tell him how great an honour he held it to
count such a member in his Hock, and how willing he
was to admit him without further examination to
partake of the communion.^ Rousseau went to the
ceremony Avith eyes full of tears and a heart swelling
with emotion. We may respect his mood as little or
as much as we please, but it was certainly more edify-
ing than the sight of Voltaire going through the same
rite, merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with
fury.
In all other respects he lived a harmless life dur-
ing the three years of his sojourn in the Val do
Travers. As he could never endure what he calls
the inactive chattering of the parlour — people sitting
* Carlyle'a Frederick, Bk. xxi. ch. iv. Rousseau, Corr., iii. 102.
2 Corr., iii 57. Nov. 1762. To M, MoutmoUin.
^ Con/., xii. 206.
92 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
in front of one another with folded hands and no
thing in motion except the tongue — he learnt the
art of making laces ; he used to carry his pillow
about with him, or sat at his own door working like
the women of the village, and chatting with the
passers-hy. He made presents of his work to young
women about to marry, always on the condition that
they should suckle their children when they came to
have them. If a little whimsical, it was a harmless
and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter to think
of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces,
than of noblemen making it the business of their
lives to run after ril)auds. A society clothed in
breeches was incensed about the same time by Rous-
seau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest,
the furred bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There
was nothing very wonderful in this departure from
use. An Armenian tailor used often to visit some
friends at Montmorency. Eousseau knew him, and
reflected that such a dress would be of singular com-
fort to him in the circumstances of his bodily dis-
order.^ Here was a solid practical reason for what
has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned
brain. Rousseau had as good cause for going about
in a caftan as Chatham had for coming to the House
of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a
desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had
something to do with Rousseau's adoption of an
uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like the
1 Conf., xli. 198.
n. PERSECUTION. 93
Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose
that it was so. We, living a lumdred years after,
cannot possibly know whether it was so or not, and
our estimate of Eousseau's strange character would
be very little worth forming, if it only turned on
petty singularities of this kind. The foolish, equivo-
cally gifted with the quality of articulate speech,
may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by
reducing all action out of the common course to a
series of variations on the same motive in others.
Men blessed by the benignity of experience vnW be
thankfid not to waste life in guessing evil about un-
knowable trifles.
During his stay at Metiers Eousseau's time was
hardly ever his own. Visitors of all nations, drawn
either by respect for his work or by curiosity to see
a man who had been prescribed by so many govern-
ments, came to him in throngs. His partisans at
Geneva insisted on sending people to convince them-
selves how good a man they were persecuting. " I
had never been free from strangers for six weeks,"
he writes. "Two days after, I had a Westphalian
gentleman and one from Genoa ; six days later, two
persons from Zurich, who stayed a week ; then a
Genevese, recovering from an illness, and coming for
change of air, fell ill again, and he has only just gone
away." ^ One visitor, Avriting home to his wife of
the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgnmage,
describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch
* Corr., iii. 295. Dec. 25. 1763.
94 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
US with suqirise : — " Tliou hast no idcn, how charm-
ing his society is, what true politeness there is in
his manners, what a dej^th of serenity and cheerful-
ness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a
difierent picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric
creature, always grave and sometimes even abrupt 1
All, what a mistake ! To an expression of great
mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a
vivacity the like of which never was seen. When
you handle any matter iu which he takes an interest,
then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about
him speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture
in him an everlasting grumbler. Not at all ; he
laughs with those who laugh, he chats and jokes
with children, he rallies his housekeeper."^ He was
not so civil to all the world, and occasionally turned
upon his pursuers with a word of most sardonic
roughness." But he could also be very generous.
We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store
on an outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When
I lend (which happens rarely enough), 'tis my con-
stant maxim never to count on repayment, nor to
exact it."^ He received hundreds of letters, some
seeking an application of his views on education to
a special case, others craving further exposition
of his religious doctrines. Before he had been
at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for
the postage of letters, which after all contained
' Quoted in Musset-rathay, ii. 500.
- For instiuice, Corr., iii. 249. ^ lb., iii 364, 38L
ri. PERSECUTION. 95
little more than reproaches, insults, menaces, im-
becilities.^
Not the least curious of his correspondence at this
time is that with the Prince of Wiirtemberg, then
livnng near Lausanne.- The prince had a little
dausrhtcr four months old, and he was resolved that
her upbringing should be carried on as the author of
Emilius might please to direct. Rousseau replied
courteously that he did not pretend to direct the
education of princes or princesses.^ His undaunted
coiTespondent sent him full details of his babe's habits
and faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals,
with the fondness of a young mother or an old nurse.
Rousseau was interested, and took some trouble to
draw up rules for the child's nurture and admoni-
tion. One may smile now and then at the prince's
ingenuous zeal, but his fervid respect and devotion
for the teacher in whom he thought he had found
the wisest man that ever lived, and A\ho had at any
rate spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue
and truth in him, his eagerness to know what Rous-
seau thought right, and his equal eagerness in trying
to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple
1 Corr., iii. 181-186, etc.
* Priuce Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning
duke from 1733 to 1737) ; a younger brother of Charles Eugene,
known as Schiller's Duke of 'Wiirtemberg, who reigned uji to
1793. Fri'derick Eugene, known in the Seven Years' "War, was
another brother. Rousseau's correspondent became reigning
duke in 1793, but only lived a year and a half afterwards.
3 Corr., ill 250. Sept. 29, 1763.
96 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
and methodical way to please his master, his dis-
cipular i)atience when Eousscau told him that his
verses wove poor, or that he was too fond of his wife,
— all this k a little uncommon in a prince, and de-
serves a i)lace among the ample mass of other evid-
ence of the power which Rousseau's pictures of
domestic simplicity and wise and humane education
had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse,
close and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up
into high places. But the trade of philosopher in
such times is perhaps an irksome one, and Eousseau
was the private victim of his public action. His
prince sent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and
his letters, endless with their details of the nursery,
may well have become a little tedious to a worn-out
creature who only wanted to be left alone.^ The
famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought
a man happy who could have the delight of seeing
Kousseau as often as he chose. ^ People forgot
the other side of this delight, and the unlucky
philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from
enemies and the friends whose curiosity makes
them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of glory
partakes of the nature of the pillory or the
stocks.
It is interesting to find the famous English names
of Gil)bon and Boswell in the list of the multitudes
' 'J'ho lu-iucc's letter.s are given in the Streckeiscn collec-
tion, vol. ii.
" Streckei.sen, ii. 202.
n. PERSECUTION. 97
with whom he had to do at this time.^ The former
was now at Lausanne, whither he had just returned
from that memorable visit to England which per-
suaded him that his father would never endure his
alliance with the daughter of an obscure Swiss pastor.
He had just "yielded to his fate, sighed as a lover,
and obeyed as a son." "How sorry I am for our
poor ^lademoiselle Curchod," Avrites Moultou to Rous-
seau ; " Gibbon whom she loves, and to whom she
has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches,
has come to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as
entirely cured of his old passion as she is far from
cure. She has written me a letter that makes my
heart ache." He then entreats Eousseau to use his
influence with Gibbon, who is on the point of start-
ing for Motiers, by extolling to him the lady's worth
and understanding.'- "I hope Mr. Gibbon \vi\\ not
come," replied the sage; "his coldness makes me
think ill of him. I have been looking over his book
again [the Essai sur V etude de la litter at ure, 1761] ; he
runs after brilliance too much, and is strained and
stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I
do not think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod
either."^ ^\^lether Gibbon went or not, we do not
know. He knew in after years what had been said
of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild
pomp that this extraordinary man should have been
* Possiblj' Wilke3 also ; Corr. , iv. 200.
* Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763.
' Corr., iii. 202. June 4, 1763.
VOL. IT. H
98 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
less precipitate in condemning the moral character
and the conduct of a stranger.^
Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson "rolling
his majestic frame in his usual manner '"' on Harwich
beach in 1763, and was now on his travels. Like
many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord
Marischal, and here his indomitable passion for mak-
ing the personal acquaintance of any one Avho was
much talked about, naturally led him to seek so
singular a character as the man who was now at
Motiers. What Rousseau thought of one who was
as singular a character as himself in another direction,
we do not know.^ Lord Marischal warned Rousseau
that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full of
visionary ideas, even having seen spirits — a serious
proof of unsoundness to a man who had lived in the
very positive atmosphere of Frederick's court at
Berlin. " I only hope," says the sage Scot, of the
Scot who was not sage, " that he may not fall into
1 Memoirs of my Life, p. 55, n (Ed. 1862). Neckcr (1732-
1804), whom Mdlle. Carcliod ultimately married, was an eager
admirer of Rousseau. " Ah, how close the tender, humane, and
virtuous soul of Julie, " he wrote to her author, " has brought
me to you. How the reading of those letters gratified me !
liow many good emotions did they stir or fortify ! How many
sublimities in a thousand places in these six volumes ; not the
sublimity that peiches itself in the clouds, but that which
pushes everyday virtues to their highest point," and so on.
Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333.
- Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters, I
believe; once (Corr., iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which
Hume was suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70)
as the bearer of a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262.
M.
PERSECUTION. 99
the hands of people who will turn his head : he
was very pleased with the reception you gave him."^
As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell
to a place where his head was turned, though not
very mischievously. Rousseau was at that time full
of Corsican projects, of which this is the proper place
for us very briefly to speak.
The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica
to assert their independence of the oppressive admin-
istration of the Genoese, which had begim in 1729,
came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli
(1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded
to settle the government of the island. In the Social
Contract Rousseau had said, " There is still in Europe
one country capable of legislation, and that is the
island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with
which this brave people has succeeded in recovering
and defending its liberty, entitle it to the good fortune
of having some \vise man to teach them how to pre-
serve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle
will one day astonish Europe," ^ — a presentiment that
in a sense came true enough long after Rousseau was
gone, in a man who was born on the little island seven
years later than the publication of this passage. Some
of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in
August 1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence
with Rousseau for the purpose of inducing him to draw-
up a set of political institutions and a code of laws.
Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in
» Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765. - Bk. ii. ch. x.
100 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP
the application of ideal systems, and we are assured
that he had no intention of making Rousseau the Solon
of his island, but only of inducing him to inflame the
gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a history of
their exploits.-* Rousseau, however, did not under-
stand the invitation in this narrower sense. He
replied that the very idea of such a task as legisla-
tion transported his soid, and he entered into it with
the liveliest ai-doui". He resolved to quarter himself
with Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in
the island ; in a year he would collect the necessary
information as to the manners and opinions of the
inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would
produce a set of institutions that should be fit for
a free and valorous people." In the midst of this
enthusiasm (May 1765) he urged Boswell to visit
Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with results
which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica
(1768), and in a feverishness of imagination upon the
subject for many a long day afterwards. "Mind
your owTD aflairs," at length cried Johnson sternly
to him, " and leave the Corsicans to theirs ; I wish
you would empty your head of Corsica."^ At the end
of 1765, the immortal hero-worshipper on his return
expected to come upon his hero at Motiers, but finding
that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter in
' Boswcll's Account of Corsica, p. 367.
- The correspondence between lioussean and Buttafuoco lias
been jmblished in the CEuvres ct Corr. Inedites dc J. J. M.,
1861. See pp. 35, 43, etc.
» Boswell's Life, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 186G).
n. PERSECUTION. 101
wonderful French. " You will forget all your cares for
many an evening, while I tell you what I have seen.
I owe you the deepest obligation for sending me to
Corsica. The voyage has done me marvellous good.
It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had
sunk into my soul. ... I am devoted to the Corsicans
heart and soul ; if you, illustrious Eousseau, the
philosopher whom they have chosen to help them by
your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which
they have acquired with so much heroism — if you
have cooled toM-ards these gallant islanders, why then
I am sorry for you, that is all I can say."^
Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been
driven out of Eousseau's mind by personal mishaps.
First, Voltaire or some other enemy had spread the
rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus
of Corsica was a practical joke, and Eousseau's sus-
picious temper found what he took for confirmation
of this in some trifling incidents with which we
' " Je suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec pUie I "
Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from
a Scotch lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conduct-
ing Theresa to England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over.
" This young gentleman," writes Hume, " very good-humoured,
very agreeable, and very mad— has such a rage for literature
that I dread some circumstance fatal to our friend's honour.
You remember the stoiy of Terentia, who was first married to
Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married a
young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some
secret which would convey to him eloquence and genius."
Burton's Life, ii. 307, 308. Boswell mentions that he met
Rousseau in England (Account of Corsica, p. 340), and also gives
Rousseau's letter introducing him to Paoli (p, 266).
102 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
certainly need not concern ourselves.^ Next, a very
real storm had burst upon him which drove him
once more to seek a new place of shelter, other than
an island occupied by French troops. For France
having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assist-
ance of the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the
island from the Genoese senate, with a sort of equity
of redemption (1768) — an iniquitous transaction, as
Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to justice,
humanity, reason, and policy.^ Civilisation would
have been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa
could have availed herself of her equity, and so have
delivered France from the acquisition of the most
terrible citizen that ever scourged a state.^
The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in
1762 had divided Geneva into two camps, and was
followed by a prolonged contention between his parti-
sans and his enemies. The root of the contention
was political rather than theological. To take Rous-
seau's side was to protest against the oligarchic
authority which had condemned him, and the quarrel
about Emilius was only an episode in the long war
between the popular and aristocratic parties. This
^ To Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc. - Corr., vi. 170. Feb. 26, 1770.
^ It may be worth noticing, as a link between historic per-
sonages, that Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a Lettre d
Matteo Bidtafuoco (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom
Rousseau corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the
union of the island to France, was afterwards sent as deputy
to the Constituent, and finally became the bitterest enemy of
Paoli and the patriotic party.
n. PERSECUTION. 103
strife, after coming to a height for the first time in
1734, had abated after the pacification of 1738, but
the pacification was only effective for a time, and the
roots of division were still full of vitality. The law-
fulness of the authority and the regularity of the
procedure by which Eousseau had been condemned,
offered convenient ground for carrying on the dis-
pute, and its warmth was made more intense by the
suggestion on the popular side that perhaps the
religion of the book which the oligarchs had con-
demned was more like Christianity than the religion
of the oligarchs who condemned it.
Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel,
too directly involved in its issues, too constantly in
contact with the people who were engaged in it, not
to feel the angry buzzings very close about his ears.
If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as
he loved to fancy, they would have gone for very
little in the life of the day. But Rousseau never
stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys
with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or
furious moods of the world. Such achievement is
not hard for the creature who is wrapped up in him-
self ; who is careless of the passions of men about
him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and
not because he has measured them, and deliberately
assigned them a place among the elements in which
a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who
is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action
of his fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and
104 ROUSSEAU. CUAP.
self-sufBcience true. The task was too hard for Rous-
seau, though his patience under long persecution far
surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers
of the time. In the spring of 176.3 he dehberately
renounced in all due forms his rights of burgess-ship
and citizenship in the city and republic of Geneva.^
And at length he broke forth against liis Genevese
persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764),
a long Init extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder
to the pleas which his enemies had put forth in Tron-
chin's Letters from the Country. If any one now
cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal
the treatment was, which Rousseau received at the
hands of the authorities of his native city, he may
do so by examining these most forcible letters. The
second part of them may interest the student of
political history by its account of the working of
the institutions of the little republic. We seem to
be reading over again tlie history of a Greek city ; the
growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasing
number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens
in unfair proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual
usurpation of legislative and administrative function
(including especially the judicial) by the oligarchs,
and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic
ends ; then the growth of staseis or violent factions,
followed by metabol6 or overthrow of the established
constitution, ending in foreign intervention. The
Four Hundred at Athens would liave treated any
' OoiT., iii. 190. To tlie First Syndic, May 12, 1763.
II.
PERSECUTION. 105
Social Contract that should have appeared in their
day, just as sternl}'' as the Two Hundred or the
Twenty -five treated the Social Contract that did
appear, and for just the same reasons.
Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of
demonstration. A body of burgesses had previously
availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal right, and
made a technical representation to the Lesser Council
that the laws had been broken in his case. The
Council in return availed itself of an equally legal
right, its droit negatif, and declined to entertain the
representation, without giving any reasons. Unfor-
tunately for Eousseau's comfort, the ferment which
his new vindication of his cause stirred up, did not
end with the condemnation and burning of his mani-
festo. For the parliament of Paris ordered the Letters
from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree
and the same faggot served for that and for Voltaire's
Philosophical Dictionary (April 1765).^ It was also
burned at the Hague (Jan. 22). An observer by no
means friendly to the priests noticed that at Paris it
was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclo-
padists and their flock, who on this occasion raised
the storm and set the zeal of the mai'istrates in motion.^
The vanity and egoism of rationalistic sects can be as
fatal to candour, justice, and compassion as the in-
tolerant pride of the great churciies.
' Grimm's Corr. Lit., iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion oi
his book's conijianion at the stake, see Carr., i^. 442.
- Streckeisen, ii. 526. f^< ••'^" ^x'
(i)><tc.ViC.
106 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more
inconvenient shapes than this. A terrible libel
appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest calumnies.
Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent
it to Paris to be published there with a prefatorj'- note,
stating that it was by a Genevese pastor whom he
named. This landed him in fresh mortification, for
the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined to
accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied
by acrimonious declarations, explanations, protests.^
Then the clergy of Neuchatel were not able any longer
to resist the opportunity of inflicting such torments as
they could, upon a heretic whom they might more
charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting
torments which were so precious to their religious
imagination. They began to press the pastor of the
village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he had
hitherto been on excellent terms. The pastor, though
he had been liberal enough to admit his singular
parishioner to the communion, in spite of the Savoyard
Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the bigotry
of the professional body to Avhich he belonged. He
warned Rousseau not to present himself at the next
communion. The philosopher insisted that he had a
right to do this, until formally cast out by the con-
sistory. The consistory, composed mainly of a body
of peasants entirely bound to their minister in matters
of religion, cited him to appear, and answer such
1 Tliore appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong in
attributing to Vernes the Sentimens des Citoyens.
n.
PERSECUTION. 107
questions as miglit test his loyalty to the faith.
Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of
all that he had written, which he intended to speak
to his rustic judges. The eve of the morning on which
he had to appear, he knew his discourse by heart ;
when morning came he could not repeat two sentences.
So he fell back on the instrument over which he had
more mastery than he had over tongue or memory,
and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in
whom initated egoism was probably by this time
giving ad'ditional heat to professional zeal, was for
fvdminating a decree of excommunication, but there
appears to have been some indirect interference ■\\'ith
the proceedings of the consistory by the king's officials
at Neuchatel, and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back.^
Other weapons were not wanting. The pastor pro-
ceeded to spread rumours among his flock that Rous-
seau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious
of all, that he had written a book containing the
monstrous doctrine that women have no souls. The
pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the honest
villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish
in very flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high
degree of plausibleness to such an opinion, and as the
wretched man went by the door of his neighbours, he
heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now
and again whistled past his ear. His botanising
expeditions were believed to be devoted to search for
> Cvrr., iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August); also
Qcmf., xii. ^45.
J 08 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
noxious herbs, and a man who died in the agonies of
nephritic cohc, was supposed to have been poisoned
by him.' If persons went to the post-office for letters
for him, they were treated with insult.'^ At length
the ferment against him grew hot enough to be serious.
A huge block of stone Avas found placed so as to kill
him when he opened his door; and one night an
attempt was made to stone him in his house. ^ Popular
hate shown Avitli this degree of violence was too much
for his fortitude, and after a residence of rather more
than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he fled
from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew
not where.
In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen
a little island in the lake of Eienne, which struck his
imagination and lived in his memory. Thither he
now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps,
with something of the same instinct as draws a child
towards a beam of the sun. He forgot or was heedless
of the circumstance that the isle of St. Peter lay in the
jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose government
had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving
for a little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extin-
guished though t of j urisdictions and proscriptive decrees.
The spot where he now found peace for a brief
1 Note to N. Auguis's edition, Corr., v. 395.
- Corr., iv. 204.
•* Conf., xii. 2.59. This lapidation li.is .sometimes been
doubted, and treated a,s an invention of Rousseau's morbid
suspicion. Tlie official documents prove that his account was
substantially true (.see Musset-Patliay, ii. 559.)
II.
PERSECUTION. 109
space usually disappoints the modern hunter fur the
picturesque, who after wearying himself with the follies
of a capital seeks the most violent tonic that he can
find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees
only tameness in a pygmy island, that oflfers nothing
sublimer than a high grassy terrace, some cool over-
branching avenues, some mimic vales, and meadows
and vineyards sloping dovra to the sheet of blue water
at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day,
A\'ith tired mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the
sun, in a stillness faintly broken by the timid lapping
of the water in the sedge, or the rustling of swift lizards
across the heated sand, while the Bernese snow giants
line a distant horizon with mysterious solitary shapes,
it is easy to know what solace life in such a scene
might bring to a man distracted by pain of body and
pain and weariness of soul. Rousseau has commem-
orated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect
of all his compositions.^
" I found my existence bo charming, and led a life so
agreeable to my humour, that I resolved here to end my
days. My only source of disquiet was whether I should
be allowed to carry my project out. In the midst of the
presentiments that disturbed me, I would fain have had
them make a perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me
in it for all the rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off
all chance and all hope of leaving it ; to forbid me holding
any communication ^nth the mainland, so that, knowing
» The fifth of the JRlicries. See also Con/., 262-279, and
Carr., iv. '206-224. His stay in the island was from the second
week in September down to the last in October, 1765.
no liOUSSEAU. CHAP.
nothing of what was going on in the world, I might have
forgotten the world's existence, and people might have
forgotten mine too. They only suffered me to pass two
months in tlie island, hut I could have passed two years,
two centuries, and all eternity, without a moment's weari-
ness, though I had not, with my companion, any other
society than that of the steward, his wife, and their
servants. They were in truth honest souls and nothing
more, but that was just what I wanted. . . . Carried
thither in a violent hurry, alone and without a thing, I
after^vards sent for my housekeeper, my books, and my
scanty possessions, of which I had the delight of unpack-
ing Tiothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as they had
come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on end-
in;'- my days, exactly as if it were an inn whence I must
needs set forth on the morrow. All things went so well,
just as they were, that to think of ordering them better
were to spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to leave
my books safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be
without even a case for wi'iting. When any luckless letter
forced me to take up a pen f(jr an answer, I grumblingly
borrowed the steward's inkstand, and hurried to give it
back to him with all the haste I could, in the vain hope
that I should never have need of the loan any more.
Instead of meddling with those weary quires and reams
and piles of old books, I filled my chamber with flowers
and grasses, for I was tlien in my first fervour for botany.
Having given up employment that would be a task to me,
I needed one that would be an amusement, nor cause me
more pains than a sluggard might choose to take. I
undertook to make the Flora pctrinsularis, and to describe
every single plant on the island, in detail enough to occupy
me for the rest of my days. In consequence of this fine
scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took
in company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my
hand and my Systema Naturae under my arm, to visit some
district of the island. 1 had divided it for that pui-pose
n.
PEIISKCUTION. Ill
into small squares, meaning to go through them one after
another in each season of the year. At the end of two or
three hours I used to return laden with an ample harvest,
a provision for amusing myself after dinner indoors, in
case of rain. I spent the rest of the morning in going
with the steward, his wife, and Theresa, to see the labourers
and the harvesting, and I generally set to work along with
them ; many a time when people from Berne came to see
me, they found me perched on a high tree, \\ith a bag
fastened round my waist ; I kept filling it with fruit and
tlien let it down to the ground with a rope. The exercise
I had taken in the morning and the good humour that
always comes from exercise, made the repose of dinner
vastly pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up too
long, and fine weather invited me forth, I could not wait,
but was speedily off to throw myself all alone into a boat,
which, when the water was smooth enough, I used to pull
out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full
length in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to
thesky, I let myself float slowly hither and thither as the
water listed, sometimes for hours together, plunged in a
thousand confused delicious musings, which, though they
had no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that
account a hundred times dearer to me than aU that I liad
found sweetest in what they call the pleasures of life.
Often warned by the going down of the sun that it was
time to return, I found myself so far from the island that
I was forced to row with all my might to get in before it
was pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself
in the midst of the waters, I had a fancy to coast along
the green shores of the island, where the clear waters and
cool shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of my most
frequent expeditious wa.'^ from the larger island to the less ;
there I disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes
in mimic rambles among wild elders, persicaries, vrillows,
and shrubs uf every species, sometimes settling myself on
the top of a sandy knoll, covered with turf, wild thyme.
112 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
flowers, even sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been
sown there in old days, making excellent quarters for
rabbits. They might multiply in peace without either
fearing anything or harming anything. I spoke of this
to the steward. He at once had male and female rabbits
brought from Nei;chatel, and we went in high state, his
wife, (me of his sisters, Theresa, and I, to settle them in
the little islet. The foundation of our colony was a feast-
day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not prouder than I,
as I bore my company and the rabbits in triumph from
our island to the smaller one. . . .
When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent
my afternoon in going up and down the island, gathering
plants to right and left ; seating myself now in smiling
lonely nooks to dream at my ease, now on little terraces
and knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and ravish-
ing prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one
side by the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting
into rich and fertile plains up to the feet of the pale blue
mountains on their far-off edge.
As evening drew on, I used to come down from the
high ground and sit on tlie beach at the water's brink in
some hidden sheltering place. There the murmur of the
waves and their agitation, charmed aU my senses and
drove every other movement away from my soul ; they
plunged it into delicious dreamings, in which I was often
surprised by night. The flux and reflux of the water, its
ceaseless stir swelling and falling at intervals, striking on
ear and sight, made uj) for the internal movements which
my musings extinguished ; they were enough to give me
delight in mere existence, without taking any trouble of
thinking. From time to time arose some passing thought
of the instability of the things of this world, of which the
face of the waters offered an image ; but such light im-
pressions were swiftly effaced in the uniformity of the
ceaseless motion, which rocked me as in a cradle ; it held
me with such fascination that even when called at the
H. PERSECUTION. 113
hour and by the signal appointed, I could not tear myself
away without summoning all my force.
After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to
go all together for a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the
freshness of the air from the lake. We sat down in the
arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old song, and
then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day,
and only cra\Tiig another that should be exactly like it on
the morrow. . . .
All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in
it keeps a form constant and determinate ; our affections,
fastening on external things, necessarily change and pass
just as they do. Ever in front of us or behind us, they
recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future that in
many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing
solid to which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little
more than a pleasure that comes and passes away ; as for
the happiness that endures, I cannot tell if it be so much
as known among men. There is hardly in the midst of
our liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could
tell us with real truth — " / would this instant might last
for ever." And how can we give the name of happiness to
a fleeting state that aU the time leaves the heart unquiet
and void, that makes us regret something gone, or still
long for something to come ?
But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situa-
tion solid enough to comport with perfect repose, and with
the expansion of its whole faculty, without need of calling
back the past, or pressing on towards the future ; where
time is nothing for it, and the present has no ending ;
with no mark for its own duration and without a trace of
succession ; without a single other sense of privation or
delight, of pleasure or pain, of desire or apprehension,
than this single sense of existence — so long as such a state
endures, he who finds himself in it may talk of bliss, not
with a poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as
people find in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness
VOL. IL I
114 KOUSSEAU. CHAP.
full, pei'fect, aiid sufficing, that leaves in the soul no
conscious unfilled void. Such a state was many a day
mine in my solitary musings in the isle of St. Peter, either
lying in my boat as it floated on tlie water, or seated on
the banks of the broad lake, or in other places than the
little isle on the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet
murmuring over a gravel bed.
What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this ?
Nothing outside of one's self, nothing except one's self and
one's own existence. . . . But most men, tossed as they
are by unceasing passion, have little knowledge of such a
state ; they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then
I'etain no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is
too weak to let them feel its charm. It would not even
be good in the present constitution of things, that in their
eagerness for these gentle ecstasies, they shoiild fall into a
disgust for the active life in which their duty is prescribed
to them by needs that are ever on the increase. But a
wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing
here below that is useful and good either for himself or
for other people, may in such a state find for all lost
human felicities many recompenses, of which neither for-
tune nor men can ever rob him.
'Tis true that tliese recompenses cannot be felt by all
souls, nor in all situations. The heart must be in peace,
nor any passion come to trouble its calm. There must be
in the surrounding objects neither absolute repose nor
excess of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement
without shock, without interval. With no movement,
life is only lethargy If the movement be unequal or too
strong, it awakes us ; by recalling us to the objects around,
it destroys the charm of our musing, and plucks us from
within ourselves, instantly to throw us back under the
yoke of fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all
the consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines
one to gloom. It offers an image of death : then the help
of a cheerful imagination is necessary, and presents itself
n. PERSECUTION. 115
naturally enough to those whom heaven has endowed with
such a gift. The movement which does not come from
without then stirs -within us. The repose is less complete,
it is true ; but it is also more agreeable when light and
gentle ideas, without agitating the depths of the soul, only
softly skim the surface. This sort of musing we may taste
whenever there is tranquillity about us, and I have thought
that in the Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object
struck my sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice
pk'iv^urable day.
But it must be said that all this came better and more
happily in a fi-uitful and lonely island, where nothing pre-
sented itself to me save smiling pictures, where nothing
recalh-d saddening memories, where the fellowship of the
few dwellers there was gentle and obliging, ^^'ithout being
exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I
was free to surrender myself all day long to the prompt-
ings of my taste or to the most luxurious indolence. . . .
As I came out from a long and most sweet musing fit,
seeing myself surrounded by verdure and flowers and
birds, and letting my eyes wander far over romantic shores
that fringed a wide expanse of water bright as crystal, I
fitted all these attractive objects into my dreams ; and
when at last I slowly recovered myself and recognised
what was about me, I could not mark the point that cut
off dream from reality, so equally did all tilings unite to
endear to me the lonely retired life I led in this happy
spot I Why can that life not come back to me again 1
Why can I not go finish my days in the beloved island,
never to quit it, never again to see in it one dweller from
the mainland, to bring back to me the memory of all the
woes of every sort that they have delighted in heaping on
my head for all these long yeai-s 1 . . . Freed from the
earthly passions engendered by the tumult of social life,
my soul would many a time lift itself above this atmos-
phere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly intelli-
gences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long taken.'
116 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
The exquisite dream, tluis set to words of most
soothing rnusic, came soon to its end. Tlie full and
perfect sufiicience of life was abruptly disturbed.
The government of Berne gave him notice to quit
the island and their territory within fifteen days.
He represented to the authorities that he was infirm
and ill, that he knew not whither to go, and that
travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to
his life. He even made tlie most extraordinary re-
quest that any man in similar straits ever did make.
" In this extremity," he wrote to their representative,
" I only see one resource for me, and however fright-
ful it may appear, I will adopt it, not only "without
repugnance, but Avith eagerness, if their excellencies
will be good enough to give their consent. It is that
it should please them for me to pass the rest of my
days in prison in one of their castles, or such other
place in their states as they may think fit to select.
I will there live at my own expense, and I will give
security never to put them to any cost. I submit
to be without paper or pen, or any commimication
from without, except so far as may be absolutely
necessary, and through the channel of those who
shall have charge of me. Only let me have left,
with the use of a few books, the liberty to walk
occasionally in a garden, and I am content. Do not
Buppose that an expedient, so violent in appearance,
is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm at
this moment ; I have taken time to think about it,
and it is only after profound consideration that I
n. PERSECUTION. 117
have brought myself to this decision. Mark, I pray
you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution,
my situation is still more so. The distracted life
that I have been made to lead for several years
without intermission would be terrible for a man
in full health ; judge what it must be for a miserable
invalid worn down with weariness and misfortune,
and who has now no wish save only to die in a little
peace. "^
That the request was made in all sincerity wc
may well believe. The difference between being
in prison and being out of it was really not consider-
able to a man who had the previous winter been
confined to his chamber for eight months without a
break." In other respects the world was as cheerless
as any prison could be. He was an exile from the
only places he knew, and to him a land unknown
was terrible. He had thought of Vienna, and the
Prince of Wiirtemburg had sought the requisite per-
mission for him, but the priests were too strong in the
court of the house of Austria.^ Madame d'Houdetot
offered him a resting-place in Normandy, and Saint
Lambert in Lorraine.^ He thoui'ht of Potsdam.
Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. He
wondered if he should have strength to cross the
Alps and make his way to Corsica. Eventually he
made up his mind to go to Berlin, and he went as
^ Corr., iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765.
- lb., iv. 136, etc. Ai)ril 27, 1765.
• Streckeisen-Moultou. ii. 209 212. ■• lb., ii. 654.
118 ROUSSEAU. CHAP. n.
far as Strasburg on his road thither.^ Here he began
to fear the rude climate of the northern capital ; he
changed his plans, and resolved to accept the warm
invitations that he had received to cross over to Eng-
land. His friends used their interest to procure a
passport for him,^ and the Prince of Conti offered
him an apartment in the privileged quarter of the
Temple, on his way through Paris. His own pur-
pose seems to have been irresolute to the last, but
his friends acted with such energy and bustle on his
behalf that the English scheme was adopted, and he
found himself in Paris (Dec. 17, 1765), on his way
to London, almost before he had deliberately realised
what he was doing. It was a step that led him into
many fatal vexations, as we shall presently see.
Meanwhile we may pause to examine the two con-
siderable books which had involved his life in all this
confusion and perplexity.
1 He arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November,
left it about the end of the first week in December, and arrived
in Paris on the 16th of December 1765. A sort of apocr^'phal
tradition is said to linger in the island about Rousseau's last
evening on the island, how after supper he called for a lute,
and sang some passably bad verses. See M. Bougy's J. J.
Uousseau, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)
- Madame de Verdelin to J. J. R. Streckeisen, ii. 532.
The minister even expressed his especial delight at being able
to serve Rousseau, so little seriousness was there now in the
formalities of absolution. Ih. 547.
CHAPTER riL
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
The dominant belief of the best minds of the latter
half of the eighteenth century was a passionate faith
in the illimitable possibilities of human progress.
Nothing short of a general overthrow of the planet
could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement
of human perfectibility. They differed as to the
details of the philosophy of government which they
deduced from this philosophy of society, but the con-
\-iction that a golden era of tolerance, enlightenment,
and material prosperity was close at hand, belonged
to them all Eousseau set his face the other way.
For him the golden era had passed away from our
globe many centuries ago. Simplicity had fled from
the earth. Wisdom and heroism had vanished from
out of the minds of leaders. The spirit of citizen-
ship had gone from those who should have upheld
the social union in brotherly accord. The dream of
human perfectibility which nerved men like Con-
dorcet, was to Rousseau a sour and fantastic mockery.
The utmost that men could do was to turn their eyes
to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to walk
120 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
for a space in the track of the ancient societies. They
would hardly succeed, but endeavour might at least
do something to stay the plague of universal de-
generacy. Hence the fatality of his system. It
placed the centre of social activity elsewhere than in
careful and rational examination of social conditions,
and in careful and rational effort to modify thenx
As we began bj^ saj^ing, it substituted a retrograde
aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery
of law. We can hardly wonder, when we think of
the intense exaltation of spirit produced both by the
perfectibilitarians and the followers of Rousseau, and
at the same time of the political degradation and
material disorder of France, that so ^^olent a contrast
between the ideal and the actual led to a great vol-
canic outbreak. Alas, the crucial difficulty of politi-
cal change is to summon new force -without destroying
the sound parts of a structure which it has taken so
many generations to erect. The Social Contract is
the formal denial of the possibility of successfully
overcoming the difficulty.
" Although man deprives himself in the civil state
of many advantages Avhich he holds from nature, yet
he acquires in return others so great, his faculties
exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend,
his sentiments are ennobled, his v/hole soul is raised
to such a degree, that if the abuses of this new con-
dition did not so often degrade him below that from
which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless
without ceasing the happy moment Avhich rescued
III.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 121
him from it for ever, and out of a stupid and blind
animal made an intelligent being and a man."^ The
little parenthesis as to the freqiicnt degi-adation pro-
duced by the abuses of the social condition, does not
prevent us from recognising in the whole passage a
tolerably complete surrender of the main position
which was taken up in the two Discourses. The
short treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry
into the just foundations and most proper form
of that very political society, which the Discourses
showed to have its foundation in injustice, and
to be incapable of receiving any form proper for
the attainment of the full measure of human happi-
ness.
Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced,
but accepted and defined. Locke's influence has
begun to telL The two principal objects of every
system of legislation are declared to be liberty and
eqiiality. By equality we are warned not to under-
stand that the degrees of power and wealth should be
absolutely the same, but that in respect of power,
such power should be out of reach of any violence,
and be invariably exercised in virtue of the laws ; and
in respect of riches, that no citizen should be wealthy
enough to buy another, and none poor enough to sell
himself. Do you say this equality is a mere chimera 1
It is precisely because the force of things is constantly
tending to destroy equality, that the force of legisla-
tion ought as constantly to be directed towards up-
' Cont. Soc., I. viii.
122 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
holding it.^ This is much clearer than the indefinite
way of speaking which we have already noticed in the
second Discourse. It means neither more nor less
than that equality before the law which is one of the
elemeutar}^ marks of a perfectly free community.
The idea of the law being constantly directed to
counteract the tendencies to violent inequalities in
material possessions among different members of a
society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it cover
and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old seisach-
theia of Solon, voiding ail contracts in which the
debtor had pledged his land or his person : or such
measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and the
Gracchi 1 Or is it to go no further than to condemn
such a law as that which in England gives unwilled
lands to the eldest son ? Vie can only criticise
accurately a general idea of this sort in connection
with specific projects in which it is applied. As it
stands, it is no more than the expression of what the
author thinks a wise principle of public policy. It
assumes the existence of property just as completely
as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could
do ; it gives no encouragement, as the Discourse
did, to the notion of an equality in being without
property. There is no element of commimism in a
principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea,
based on the moral claim of men to have equality of
opportunity. This ideal stamped itself on the minds
^ Co7iL 8oc., W. xi. He liad written iu much the same sense
in his article on Political Economy in the Encyclop:i3dia, p. 34.
III.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 123
of Robespierre and the other revohitionary leaders,
and led to practical results in the sale of the Church
and other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant
a market to buy in. The effect of the economic
change thus introduced happened to work in the
direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now
known that the most remarkable and most permanent
of the consequences of the revolution in the owner-
ship of land was the erection, between the two ex-
treme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of
middle-class freeholders. This state is not equality,
but gradation, and there is undoubtedly an immense
difference between the two. Still its origin is an
illustration on the largest scale in history of the force
of legislation being exerted to counteract an irregu-
larity that had become unbearable.^
Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more
^ Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property,
and took up a position like that of Eonsseau — teaching the poor
contempt for the rich, not envy. " I do not want to touch
your treasures," he cried, on one occasion, "however impure
their source. It is far more an object of concern to me to make
poverty honourable, than to proscribe wealth ; the thatched
hut of Fabricius never need envy the palace of Crassus. I
should be at least as content, for my own part, to be one of the
sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at the public
expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the mire of
royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of
the people, and glittering with the public misery." Quoted in
JIalon's Exposi des Ecoles Socialistes franqaiscs, 15. Babceuf
carried Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural con-
clusion by such propositions as these : "The goal of the revolu-
tion is to destroy inequality, and to re-establish the happiness
124 liOUSSEAU.
OHAP.
extravagant elements of the old thesis, the new specu-
lation was far from being purged of the fundamental
errors that had given such popularity to its prede-
cessors. "If the sea," he says in one place, "bathes
nothing but inaccessible rocks on your coasts, remain
barbarous ichthyophagi ; you v/ill live all the more
tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more
happily." ^ Apart from an outburst like this, the
central idea remained the same, though it was
approached from another side and with difTerent
objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost
none of its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a
slightly changed light. It remained the starting-point
of the right and normal constitution of civil society,
just as it had been the starting-point of thedenimciation
of civil society as incapable of right constitution, and
as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with
the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of
that historic method which traces the present along
a line of ascertained circumstances, and seeks an
improved future in an unbroken continuation of that
line. The opening words, which sent such a thrill
through the generation to which they were uttered
in two continents, " Man is born free, and everywhere
he is in chains," tell us at the outset that we are as
far away as ever from the patient method of positive
of all." "The revolution is not liuished, because tiie rich ab-
sorb all the property, and hold exclusive power : while the poor
toil like born slaves, languish in wretchedness, and are nothing
in the state." Erposi des Ecolcs Socialistes fran<;aises, p. 29
' Cont. Sue, II. xi.
IIL THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 125
observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing
practical maxims from a set of conditions which
never had any other than an abstract and phantas-
matic existence. How is a man born free 1 If he is
born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is
born into a family, he is at the moment of his birth
committed to a state of social relation, in however
rudimentary' a form ; and the more or less of freedom
which this state may ultimately permit to him, depends
upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free
among Romans and Athenians, when both law and
pubhc opinion left a father at perfect liberty to
expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive
the circumstances, the later the period at which he
gains freedom. A child was not born free in the
early days of the Roman state, when the patria poiestas
was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back,
was he bom free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs,
when Abraham had full right of sacrificing his son,
and Jephthah of sacrificing his daughter.
But to speak thus is to speak what we do know.
Rousseau was not open to such testimony. "My
principles," he said in contempt of Grotius, " are not
founded on the authority of poets ; they come from
the nature of things and are based on reason."^ He
does indeed in one place express his reverence for
the Judaic law, and administers a just rebuke to the
philosophic arrogance which saw only successful
impostors in the old legislators.' But he paid no
1 font, Soc.. I. iv. - lb., II. vii.
1 26 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
attention to the processes and usages of which this
\aw was the organic expression, nor did he allow
himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the
social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose
essay on civil government haunts us throughout the
Social Contract, who had taught him that men are
]iorn free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded
the difficulty of the dependence of childhood by
saying that when the son comes to the estate that
made his father a free man, he becomes a free man
too.^ AVhat of the old Roman use permitting a
father to sell his son three times'? In the same
metaphysical spirit Locke had laid down the absolute
proposition that "conjugal society is made by a
voluntary compact between man and woman." " This
is true of a small number of western societies in our
own day, but what of the primitive usages of com-
munal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase, and
the resf? We do not mean it as any discredit to
writers upon government in the seventeenth century
that they did not malce good out of their own con-
sciousness the necessary want of knowledge about
primitive communities. But it is necessary to point
out, first, that they did not realise all the knowledge
within their reach, and next that, as a consequence
of this, their propositions liad a quality that vitiated
all their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that
man is not naturally free was truer than the position
of Locke and Rousseau, and it was so because Filmer
1 Ch. vi. (vol. V. 371 ; edit. 1801). - Ch. vii. (p. 383.)
III.
THE SOCIAL CONTK.VCT. 12^
consulted and appealed to the most authentic of the
historic records then accessible.^
It is the more singular that Rousseau should have
thus deliberately put aside all but the most arbitrary
and empirical historical lessons, and it shows the
extraordinary force with which men may be mastered
by abstract prepossessions, even when they have a
partial knowledge of the antidote ; because Rousseau
in several places not only admits, but insists upon,
the necessity of making institutions relative to the
state of the community, in respect of size, soil,
manners, occupation, morality, character. "It is in
view of such relations as these that we must assign to
each people a particular system, which shall be the
best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which
it is destined."' In another place he calls attention
to manners, customs, above all to opinion, as the part
of a social system on which the success of all the rest
depends ; particular rules being only the arching of
^ Goguet, in Im Origlne dcs Lois, dcs Arts, el des Sciences
(1758), really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out
a notion of the historical method, but the fact that history
itself at that time had never been subjected to scientific ex-
amination made his effort valueless. He accumulates testi-
mony which would be excellent evidence, if only it had been
sifted, and had come out of the process substantially undimin-
ished. Yet even Goguet, who thus carefully followed the
accounts of early societies given in the Bible and other monu-
ments, intersperses abstract general statements about man
being born free and independent (i. 25), and entering society
as the result of deliberate reflection.
- Cont. Soc, II. xi. Also III. viiL
1 28 KOUSSEAU.
CHAP.
the vault, of which manners, though so much tardier
in rising, form a key-stone that can never be disturbed.^
This was excellent so far as it went, but it was one
of the many great truths, which men may hold in
their minds without appreciating their full value. He
did not see that these manners, customs, opinions,
have old roots which must be sought in a historic
past ; that they are connected with the constitution
of human nature, and that then in turn they prepare
modifications of that constitution. His narrow, sym-
metrical, impatient humour unfitted him to deal with
the complex tangle of the history of social growths.
It was essential to his mental comfort that he should
be able to see a picture of perfect order and logical
system at botli ends of his speculation. Hence, he
invented, to begin with, his ideal state of nature, and
an ideal mode of passing from that to the social state.
He swept away in his imagination the whole series of
actual incidents between present and past ; and he
constructed a system which might be imposed upon
all societies indiflerently by a legislator summoned
for that purpose, to wipe out existing uses, laws, and
institutions, and make afresh a clear and undisturbed
beginning of national life. The force of habit was
slowly and insensibly to be substituted for that of the
legislator's authority, but the existence of such habits
previously as forces to be dealt with, and the existence
of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human
nature and social possibility, are facts of which the
' II. xi. Also ch. viii.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 129
author of the Social Contract takes not tlie least
account.
Kousseau knew hardly any history, and the few
isolated pieces of old fact which he had picked up in
his very slight reading were exactly the most unfor-
tiuiate that a student in need of the historic method
could possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations
which are scantily dispersed in his pages, — and we
must remark that they are no more than illustrations
for conclusions arrived at quite independently of them,
and not the historical proof and foundations of his
conclusions, — are nearly all from the annals of the
small states of ancient Greece, and from the earlier
times of the lioman republic. W''e have already
pointed out to what an extent his imagination was
struck at the time of his first compositions by the
tale of Lycurgus. The influence of the same notions
is still paramount. The hopelessness of giving good
laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demon-
strated by the case of Minos, whose legislation failed
in Crete because the people for whom he made laws
were sunk in vices ; and by the further example of
Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians
and Cyrenians, knownng that they were too rich and
could never suffer equality.^ The writer is thinking
of Plato's Laws, when he says that just as nature has
fixed limits to the stature of a well-formed man, out-
side of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so with
reference to the best constitution for a state, there
' II. viii.
vol. ir. K
1 30 ROUSSEAU. CUAP.
arc bounds to its extent, so that it may be neither
too large to be capable of good government, nor too
small to be independent and self-sufficing. The
further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed
it becomes, and in general a small state is proportion-
ally stronger than a large one.^ In the remarks with
which he proceeds to corroborate this position, we
can plainly see that he is privately contrasting an
independent Greek community with the imwieldy
oriental monarchy against which at one critical period
Greece had to contend. He had never realised the
possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman
Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England
which took such enormous dimensions in his time, or
the great confederation of states which came to birth
two years before he died./ He was the servant of his
own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were.
His argument that a state must be of a moderate size
because the rightly shapen man is neither dwarf nor
giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's argument to
the same effect, on the ground that beauty deniandt
size, and there must not be too great nor too small size,
because a ship sails badly if it be either too heavy or
too light."' And when Rousseau supposes the state
to have teu thousand inhabitants, and talks about the
right size of its territory,^ who does not think of the
five thousand and fortv which the Athenian Stranger
prescribed to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper
1 II. ix. - PolMcs, VII. iv. 8, 10.
3 CorU. Sue, 11. X.
in. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, 131
number for the perfectly formed state ? ^ The predic-
tion of the short career which awaits a state that is
cursed with an extensive and accessible seaboard,
corresponds precisely with the Athenian Stranger's
satisfaction that the new city is to be eighty stadia
from the coast. ^ When Rousseau himself began to
think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised
the selection of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic
administration, because it was far from the sea, and
so its inhabitants would long preserve their simplicity
and uprightness.^ And in later years still, when
meditating upon a constitution for Poland, he pro-
pounded an economic system essentially Spartan ; the
people were enjoined to think little about foreigners,
to give themselves little concern about commerce, to
suppress stamped paper, and to put a tithe upon the
land.^
The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region.
We are again referred to Lycurgus ; and to the cir-
cumstance that Greek towns usually confided to a
stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws.
His experience in Venice and the history of his native
town supplemented the examples of Greece. Geneva
summoned a stranger to legislate for her, and " those
who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a
scanty idea of the extent of his genius ; the prepara-
tion of our wise edicts, in which he had so large a
1 Plato's Laws, v. 737. ^ Ih., iv. 705.
^ Projet de Constitution pour la Corse, p. 75.
* Gouvernement de Pologne, ch. xi.
132 EOUSSEAU.
CHAP.
part, do him as imich honour as his Institutes."^
Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see tho
growth of government and laws as a co-ordinate pro-
cess, flowing from the growth of all the other parts
and organs of society, and advancing in more or less
equal step along with them. He could begin with
nothing short of an absolute legislator, who should
impose a system from without by a single act, a
structure hit upon once for all by his individual
wisdom, not slowly wrought out by many minds,
with popular assent and co-operation, at the sugges-
tion of changing social circumstances and need.-
All this would be of very trifling importance in
the history of political literature, but for the extra-
ordinary influence which circumstances ultimately
bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was the
gospel of the Jacobins, and mucli of the action of the
supreme party in France during the first months of
the year 1794 is only fully intelligible when we look
upon it as the result and practical application of
Rousseau's teaching. The conception of the situation
entertained l)y Robespierre ami Saint Just was en-
tirely moulded on all this talk about the legislators
of Greece and Geneva. "The transition of an op-
pressed nation to democracy is like the effort l^y
which nature rose from nothingness to existence.
You must entirely refashion a people whom you wish
' Cont. Sue, II. vii.
- Odj^Hct was much nearer to a true eonccption of this kind ;
HCf, for instance, (Jrigine dcs Lois, i. 46.
lu. TUB SOCIAL CONTRACT. 133
to make free — destroy its prejiuliges, alter its habit?,
limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.
The state therefore must lay hold on every human
being at his birth, and direct his education with power-
ful hand. Solon's weak confidence threw Athens into
fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's severity founded the
republic of Sparta on an immovable basis. "^ These
words, which come from a decree of the Committee
of Public Safety, might well be taken for an excerpt
from the Social Contract. The fragments of the
institutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate
his country, reveal a man with the example of Lycur-
gus before his eyes in every line he wrote. ^ "When
on the eve of the Thermidorian revolution which over-
. ^ Decree of the Committee, April 20, 179-t, reported by Billaud-
Varennes. Compare ch. iv. of Rousseau's ConsidiratUms sur le
G&uvemcment de Pologne.
' Here are some of Saint Just's regulations : — N'o servants,
nor gold or silver vessels ; no child under 16 to eat meat, nor
any adult to eat meat on three days of the deca<le ; beys at the
age of 7 to be handed over to the school of the nation, where
they were to be brought up to speak little, to endure hardships,
and to train for war ; divorce to be free to all ; friendship
ordained a public institution, every citizen on coming to majority
being bound to proclaim his friends, and if he liad none, then
to be banished ; if one committed a crime, his friends were to
be banished. Quoted in Von Sybel's Hist. French Rev., iv. 49.
Wlien Morelly dreamed his dream of a model community in
1754 (see above, vol. i. p. 158) he little supposed, one would
think, that within forty years a man would be so near trying the
experiment in France as Saint Just was. Babceuf is pronounced
by La Harpe to have been inspired by the Code de la Nature,
which La Harjie impudently set down to Diderot, on whom
every great destructive piece was systpmatically fatliercd.
l.'H UOUSSEAU.
OHAP
threw him and his party, he insisted on the necessity
of a dictatorsliip, he was only thinking of the means
l)y which he should at length obtain the necessary
power for forcing his regenerating projects on the
country ; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he
named as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his
projects, and would lend the full force of the temporal
arm to the propagation of ideas which they had ac-
quired together from Jean Jacques, and from the
Greeks to whom Jean Jacques had sent them for
example and instruction.^ No doubt the condition
of France after 1792 must naturally have struck any
one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social
Contract to look beneath the surface of the society
with which the Convention had to deal, as urgently
inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old
order in church and state had been swept awa}', no
organs for the performance of the fimctions of national
life were visible, the moral ideas which had bound
the social elements together in the extinct monarchy
seemed to be permanently sapped. A politician who
had for years been dreaming about Minos and Lycur-
gus and Calvin, especially if he lived in a state with
such a tradition of centralisation as niled in France,
was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the
moment for a splendid repetition on an immense scale
of those immortal achievements. The futility of the
^ I forget where I have read the story of soiae member of the
Convention being very angry because tlie library contained no
copy of the laws which Minos gave to the Cretans.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 135
attempt was the practical and ever memorable illus
tration of the defect of Eousseau's geometrical method.
It was one thing to make laws for the handful of
people who lived in Geneva in the sixteenth century,
united in religious faith, and accepting the same form
and conception of the common good. It was a very
different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-
five millions of a heterogeneously composed nation,
abounding in variations of temperament, faith, laws,
•ind habits and weltering in unfathomable distractions.
The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent
stranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not
until he had set his foot upon their neck ; and even
Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun life like the rest
of his generation by writing Eousseauite essays, made
a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal
shape of the Concordat.
Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity con-
ceived from the point of view of a small territory
with a limited population. " You must not," he says
in one place, ''make the abuses of great states an
objection to a writer who would fain have none but
small ones."^ Again, when he said that in a truly
free state the citizens performed all their services to
the community with their arms and none by money,
and that he looked upon the corv6e (or compulsory
labour on the public roads) as less hostile to freedom
than taxes,^ he showed that he was thinking of a state
1 III. xiii.
- III. XV. He actually recommended the Poles to pay all
13G ROUSSEATT. CHAP,
not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish. This
was not the only defect of his schemes. They assumed
a sort of state of nature in tlie minds of the people
with whom the lawgiver had to deal. Saint Just
made the same assumption afterwards, and trusted to
his military school to erect on these bare plots what-
ever superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A
society that had for so many centuries been organised
and moulded by a jjowcrful and energetic church,
armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the same moral
tendencies in a long series of successive generations,
was not in the naked mental state which the Jacobins
postulated. It was not prepared to accept free divorce,
the substitution of friendship for marriage, the dis-
placement of the family by the military school, and
the other articles in Saint Just's programme of social
renovation. The tAvelve apostles went among people
who were morally swept and garnished, and they
went armed with instruments proper to seize the
imagination of their hearers. All moral reformers
seek the ignorant and simple, poor fishermen in one
scene, labourers and women in another, for the good
reason that new ideas only make way on ground that
is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices.
But France in 1793 was in no condition of this kind.
OjHnion in all its sjiheres was deepened by an old and
powerful organisation, to a degree which made any
public functionaries in kind, and to have the public works
executed on the .system ol' corvee. Gouccrncment de Fologne,
eh. xi.
III. THE SOCIA.L CONTRACT. 137
attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation
appeared to have been abolished, quite hopeless until
the lapse of three or four hundred years had allowed
due time for dissolution. After all it was not until
the fourth century of our era that the work of even
the twelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly.
As for the Lycurgus of whom the French chattered,
if such a personality ever existed out of the region of
myth, he came to his people armed with an oracle
from the gods, just as Closes did, and was himself
regarded as having a nature touched with divinit}-.
No such pretensions could well be made by any French
legislator within a dozen years or so of the death of
Voltaire.
Let us here remark that it was exactly what
strikes us as the desperate absurdity of the assump-
tions of the Social Contract, which constituted the
power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the
hands of men who sur^'eyed a national system wrecked
in all its parts. The Social Contract is worked out
precisely in that fashion whicli, if it touches men at
all, makes them into fanatics. Long trains of reason-
ing, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on
every hand of qualifying propositions and multi-
tudinous limitations, are essential to science, and
produce treatises that guide the wise statesman in
normal times. But it is dogma that gives fervour to
a sect. There are always large classes of minds to
whom anything in the shape of a vigorously compact
system is irresistibly fascinating, and to whom the
138 EOUSSEAU.
CHAP.
qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of a
theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such
persons always come to the front for a season in
times of distraction, when the party that knows its
own aims most definitely is sure to have the best
chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method
charmed their temperament. A man who handles
sets of complex facts is necessarily slow-footed, but
one who has only words to deal with, may advance
with a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusive-
ness, that has a magical potency over men who insist
on having politics and theology drawn out in exact
theorems like those of Euclid.
Eousseau traces his conclusions from words, and
developes his system from the interior germs of
phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he assumes
that analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring
new knowledge about things ; he mistakes the multi-
plication of propositions for the discovery of fresh
truth. Many pages of the Social Contract are mere
logical deductions from verbal definitions : the slightest
attempt to confront them with actual fact would have
shown them to be not only valueless, but wholly
meaningless, in connection with real human nature
and the visible working of human affairs. He looks
into the word, or into his own verbal notion, and
tells us what is to be found in that, whereas we need
•to be told the marks and qualities that distinguish
the object which the word is meant to recall. Hence
arises his habit of setting himself questions, with
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 139
reference to which we cannot say that the answers
are not true, but only that the questions tliemselves
were never worth asking. Here is an instance of
his method of supposing that to draw something
from a verbal notion is to find out somethina; corre-
sponding to fact. " We can distinguish in the magis-
trate three essentially different wills : 1st, the will
peculiar to him as an individual, which only tends to
his own particular advantage ; 2nd, the common ^vill
of the magistrates, which refers only to the advantage
of the prince [i.e. the government], and this we may
name corporate will, which is general in relation to
the government, and particiJar in relation to the state
of which the government is a part ; 3rd, the ^vill of
the people or sovereign will, which is general, as well
in relation to the state considered as a whole, as in
relation to the government considered as part of
the whole." ^ It might be hard to prove that all
this is not true, but then it is unreal and comes to
nothing, as we see if we take the trouble to turn it
into real matter Thus a member of the British
House of Commons, who is a magistrate in Rousseau's
sense, has three essentially different wills : first, as
a man, Mr. So-and-so ; second, his corporate wi\], as
member of the chamber, and this will is general in
relation to the legislature, but particular in relation
to the whole body of electors and peers ; third, his
will as a member of the great electoral body, which
is a general will alike in relation to the electoral
* C'aiU. Soc., III. iL
140 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
body iiiid to the legislature. An English publicist
is perfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind,
if he chooses to do so, and nobody will take the
trouble to deny them. But they are nonsense. They
do not correspond to the real composition of a member
of parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon
any part either of the theory of government in general,
or the working of our own government in particular.
Almost the same kind of observation might be made
of the famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty.
" Sovereignty, being only the exercise of the general
will, can never be alienated, and the sovereign, who
is only a collective being, can only be represented by
himself : the power may be transmitted, but not the
will;"^ sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle,
but in object;" and so forth. We shall have to con-
sider these remarks from another point of view. At
present we refer to them as illustrating the character
of the liook, as consisting of a number of expansions
of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with
the facts of which the words are representatives.
This Avay of treating political theory enabled the
writer to assume an air of certitude and precision,
which led narrow deductive minds completely cap-
tive. Burke poured merited scorn on the application
of geometry to politics and algebraic formulas to
government, but then it was just this seeming de-
monstration, this measured accurac}', that filled Eous-
seau's disciples with a su])reme and undoubting con
' II. i. •■ II. ii.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 141
fidence which leaves the modern student of these
schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness
of Robespierre's ideas on government ceases to astonish
us, when we remember that he had not trained him-
self to look upon it as the art of dealing with huge
groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of
hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed
forces. He had disciplined his political intelligence
on such meagre and unsubstantial argumentation as
the follovt-ing : — " Let us suppose the state composed
of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only be
considered collectively and as a body ; but each per-
son, in his quality as subject, is considered as an in-
dividual unit ; thus the sovereign is to the subject as
ten thousand is to one ; in other words, each member
of the state has for his share onlWthe ten-thousandth
part of the sovereign authority, though he is sub-
mitted to it in all his own entirety. If the people
be composed of a hundred thousand men, the condi-
tion of the subjects does not change, and each of
them bears equally the whole empire of the laws,
while his suffrage, reduced to a hundred-thousandth,
has ten times less influence in drawing them up.
Then, the subject remaining stiU only one, the rela-
tion of the sovereign augments in the ratio of the
number of the citizens. Whence it follows that,
the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty
diminish."^
Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the
' III. i.
142 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
deep charm which theif assurance of expression had
for the narrow and fervid minds of which England
and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Ana-
baptists and Fifth Monarchy men, but which still
haunted France, there were maxims in the Social
Contract of remarkable convenience for the members
of a Committee of Public Safetj^ " How can a blind
multitude," the wi'iter asks in one place, " which so
often does not know its ovm Avill, because it seldom
knows what is good for it, execute of itself an imder-
taking so vast and so difficult as a system of legisla-
tion 1"' Again, "as nature gives to each man an
absolute power over all his members, so the social
pact gives to the body politic an absolute power over
all its members ; and it is this same power which,
when directed by the general will, bears, as I have
said, the name of sovereignty." ^ Above all, the
little chapter on a dictatorship is the very founda-
tion of the position of the Robespierrists in the few
months immediately preceding their fall. " It is
evidently the first intention of the people that the
state should not perish," and so on, with much criti-
cism of the system of occasional dictatorships, as they
were resorted to in old Rome.^ Yet this does not
in itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine
of Prerogative, as a corrective for the slowness and
want of immediate applicability of mere legal pro-
cesses in cases of state emergency ; and it is worth
noticing again and again that in spite of the shriek-
> II. vi. ■■' II. iv. ■■' IV. vi.
in. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 143
ings of reaction, the few atrocities of the Terror are
an almost invisible speck compared with the atrocities
of Christian churclimen and lawful kings, perpetrated
in accordance with their notion of what constituted
public safety. So far as Eousseau's intention goes,
we find in his writings one of the strongest denuncia-
tions of the doctrine of public safety that is to be
found in any of the writings of the century. " Is
the safety of a citizen," he cries, "less the common
cause than the safety of the state ? They may tell
us that it is well that one should perish on behalf
of all. I ^vill admire such a sentence in the mouth
of a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily and for duty's
sake devotes himself to death for the salvation of
his country. But if we are to understand that it is
allowed to the government to sacrifice an innocent
person for the safety of the multitude, I hold this
maxim for one of the most execrable that tyranny
has ever invented, and the most dangerous that can
be admitted."^ It may be said that the Terrorists
did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous
on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes.
You cannot justly draw a capital indictment against
a class. Rousseau, however, cannot fairly be said to
have had a share in the responsibility for the more
criminal part of the policy of 1793, any more than
the founder of Christianity is responsible for the
atrocities that have been committed by the more
ardent worshippers of his name, and justified by stray
' Economie PolUiq^ie, p. 30.
144 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
texts caught up from the gospels. Helv6tias had
said, " All becomes legitimate and even virtuous on
behalf of the public safety." Rousseau wi'ote in the
margin, "The public safety is nothing unless indi-
viduals enjoy security."^ The author of a theory is
not answerable for the applications which may be
read into it by the passions of men and the exigencies
of a violent crisis. Such applications show this much
and no more, that the theory was constructed with
an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human
nature, with too narrow a view of the conditions of
society, and therefore with an inadequate appreciation
of the consequences which the theory might be drawn
to support.
It is time to come to the central conception of the
Social Contract, the dogma which made of it for a
time the gospel of a nation, the memorable doctrine
of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine Rous-
seau was assuredly not the inventor, though the
exaggerated language of some popular writers in
France leads us to suppose that they think of him as
nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the
constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the
friars with the clergy, had engendered faintly demo-
cratic ways of thinking.'' Among others the great
Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine
that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will
of the prince, he says, to be a law, must be directed
' jimavgcs, p. ?,']0.
- See for instauce Green's Uidory of the. Eiuilish People, i. 2G6.
in.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 145
by reason ; law is appointed for the common good,
and not for a special or private good : it follows from
this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a
prince representing the multitude, can make a law.^
A still more remarkable approach to later views was
made by Marsilio of Padua, physician to Lewis of
Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master's side,
in the great contest between him and the pope (1324).
Marsilio in the first part of his work not only lays
down very elaborately the proposition that laws ought
to be made by the ^^ universitas civium" ; he places this
sovereignty of the people on the true basis (which
Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his
original compact), namely, the greater likelihood of
laws being obeyed in the first place, and being good
laws in the second, when they are made by the body
of the persons affected. "No one knowingly does
hurt to himself, or deliberately asks what is unjust,
and on that account all or a great majority must \vish
such law as best suits the common interest of the
citizens."" Turning from this to the Social Contract,
* Summa, xc.-cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's Moral
and Metaphysical Philosophy, i. 627, 628.' Also Franck's
Ee/ormaleurs et Puhlicistes de V Europe, p. 48, etc.
^ Defensor Pacis, Ft. I., ch. xii. This, again, is an example
of Marsilio's position : — " Convenerunt eniin liomiues ad civilem
communicationem propter commodum et vitte sufBcientiam cou-
sequendani.etoppositadeclinandum. Quaeigituroinniuiii tangere
possunt commodnm et incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et
audiri, ut commodum assequi et opposituiii repellere possint. "
The whole chapter is a most interesting anticipation, partly due
to the influence of Aristotle, of the notions of later centuries.
VOL. II. L
1 4 G ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
or to Locke's essay ou Government, the identity in
doctrine and correspondence in dialect may teach us
how Httle true originahty there can be among thinkers
who are in the same stage ; how a metaphysician of
the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the
eighteenth hit on the same doctrine ; and how the
true classification of thinkers does not follow intervals
of time, but is fixed by differences of method. It is
impossible that in the constant play of circumstances
and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same
combinations of form and colour in a philosophic
arrangement of such circumstances and ideas should
not recur. Signal novelties in thought are as limited
as sisrnal inventions in architectural construction. It
is only one of the great changes in method, that can
remove the limits of the old combinations, by bring-
ing new material and fundamentally altering the
point of view.
In the sixteenth century there were numerous
writers who declared the right of subjects to depose
a bad sovereign, but this position is to be distinguished
from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the
great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke
of Spain by the Dutch, we find the Declaration of
Indei:)endence running, " that if a prince is appointed
by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm,
even as a shepherd to the gUvardianship of his flock.
The subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof
of the prince, but the prince for his subjects, without
whom he is no prince." This is obviously divine
m. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 147
right, fundamentally modified by a popular principle,
accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and
to justify after the event a measure which was dictated
by urgent need for practical relief. Such a notion of
the social compact was still emphatically in the semi-
patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be from the
dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood
it. But it plainly marked a step on the way. It was
the development of Protestant principles which pro-
duced and necessarily involved the extreme democratic
conclusion. Time Avas needed for their full expansion
in this sense, but the result could only have been
avoided by a suppression of the Reformation, and we
therefore count it inevitable. Bodin (1577) had de-
fined sovereignty as residing in the supreme legislative
authority, -without further inquiry as to the source or
seat of that authority, though he admits the vague
position which even Lewis xiv. did not deny, that
the object of political society is the greatest good of
every citizen or the whole state. In 1603 a Protest-
ant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name,
published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine
of the sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated,
to the profound indignation both of Jesuits and of
Protestant jurists.^ Rousseau mentions his name ;^
it does not appear that he read Althusen's rather
uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably
have a place in the traditions of political* theorising
^ See Bayle's Diet., s. v. AUhusiua.
* Lettres de la Montoffne, I. vi. 388.
148 R0USSEAT3. CHAr.
current at Geneva, to the s])irit of whose government
it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating episcopacy
against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had
still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant
idea of a law natural, to base civil government on the
assent of the governed, and had laid down such
propositions as these : " Lav/s they are not, which
public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore
human, of what kind soever, are available by consent,"
and so on.^ The views of the Ecclesiastical Polity
were adopted by Locke, and became the foimdation
of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which
popular leaders in our own country drew all their
weapons down to the outlu'eak of the French Revolu-
tion. Grotius (1G25) starting from the princijDle that
the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our
agreements, then proceeded to assume either an
express, or at any rate a tacit and implied, promise
on the part of all who become mem])ers of a commiuiity,
to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of
those to whom authority has been delegated." This
is a unilateral view of the social contract, and omits
the element of reciprocity which in Rousseau's idea
was cardinal.
1 Ecdes. Polity, Bk. i. ; bks. i.-iv., 1594 ; ])k. v., 1597 ; bks. vi.-
viii., 1647, — being forty-seven years after the author's death.
" Goguet {Origine des Lois, i. 22) dwells on tacit conventions
as a kind of engagement to which men commit themselves with
extreme liicility. He was thus rather near the true idea of the
sj)ontaneou.s oiigiu and unconscious acceptance of early institu-
tiuus.
"I. TUE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 149
Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer,
aud the latter affirmed liimself to have treated the
same matters exactly on Locke's principles. Rousseau,
however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as
Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was
the important difference that Locke's essay on Civil
Government was the justification in theory of a
revolution which had already been accomplished in
practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was
by silent reference in the mind of the writer to
Geneva, was yet a speculation in the air. The cir-
cumstances under which it was written gave to the
propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation
which savour of a practical origin and a special case.
Tliey have not the wide scope and dogmatic air and
literary precision of the coiresponding propositions in
Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those concise
phrases which make fanatics. But the essential
doctrine is there. The philosopher of the Revolution
of 1688 probably carried its principles further than
most of those who helped in the Revolution had any
intention to carry them, when he said that " the legis-
lature being only a fiduciary power to act for certain
ends, there remains still in the people a supreme
power to remove or alter the legislative."^ It may
^ Of Civil Goveniment, ch. xiii. See also ch. xi. "This
legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth,
but sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community
liave once placed it ; nor can any edict of anybody else, in what
form soever conceived, or by what power soever backed, have
the force and oblifjation of a law, which has not its sanction
150 KOUSSEAU.
CHAP.
1)6 questioned how many of the peers of that da}*
would have assented to the proposition that the people
— and did Locke mean by the people the electors of
the House of Commons, or all males over twenty-one,
or all householders paying rates'? — could by any
expression of their will abolish the legislative power
of the upper chamber, or put an end to the legislative
and executive powers of the crown. But Locke's
statements are direct enough, though he does not use
so terse a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed
to it.
Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty,
Locke most likely gave to Rousseau the idea of the
origin of this sovereignty in the civil state in a pact
or contract, which was represented as the foundation
and first condition of the civil state. From this
naturally flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual
consent being implied as given by the people to each
new law. We need not quote passages from Locke
to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of
assumption between him and the author of the Social
Contract. They are found in every chapter.^ Such
principles were indispensable for the defence of a
from that legislative which the public has chosen and appointed ;
for without tliis the law could not have that which is absolutely
necessary to its being a law — the consent of the society ; over
whom nobody can have a power to make laws, but by their own
consent, and by authority received from them." If Rousseau
had found no neater expression for his doctrine than this, the
Social Contract would assuredly have been no ex]ilosive.
1 See especially ch. viii.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 151
Revolution like that of 1688, which was always care-
fully marked out by its promoters, as well as by its
eloquent apologist and expositor a hundred years
later, the great Burke, as above all things a revolu-
tion within the pale of the law or the constitution.
They represented the philosophic ailjustment of popu-
lar ideas to the political changes wrought by shifting
circumstances, as distinguished from the biblical or
Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had
prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.
Yet there was in the midst of those contests one
thinker of the first rank in intellectual power, who
had constructed a genuine philosophy of government.
Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of
either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil
War. They were each in the theological order of
ideas, and neither of them sought or was able to
comprehend the application of philosophic principles
to their own case or to that of their adversaries.^
Hebrew precedents and bible texts, on the one hand ;
prerogative of use and high church doctrine, on the
other. Between these was no space for the acceptance
of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the
whole field of a social constitution. Now the influence
of Hobbes upon Rousseau was very marked, and very
singular. There were numerous differences between
the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of
' Hence the antipathy of the clergy, catholic, episcopalian,
and piesbyterian, to which, as Austin has pointed out {Syst. oj
Jurisprudence, i. 283, n. ), Hobbes mainly owes his bad repute.
1 52 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
Malmesbiiry. The one looked on men as good, the
other looked on them as Ijad. The one described the
state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state
of war. The one believed that laws and institutions
had depraved man, the other that they had improved
him.^ But these dift'erences did not prevent the
action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a
curious fusion between the premisses and the temper
of Hobbes and the conclusions of Locke. This fusion
produced that popular absolutism of which the Social
Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin
supremacj^ the practical manifestation. Rousseau
l)orrowed from Hobbes the true conception of sove-
reignty, and from Locke the true conception of the
ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the
two together he made the great image of the sovereign
people. Strike the crowned head from that monstrous
figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, and
you have a frontispiece that will do excellently well
for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of
other obligations, i^ood and bad, which Rousseau
owed to Hobbes, as we shall point out, we may here
mention that of the superior accviracy of the notion of
law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in
Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody
knows, with a definition inextricably confused : "Laws
are necessary relations flowing from the nature of
things, and in this sense all beings have their laws ,
' See Didciot's aitiile on Huhbiame iu llie Encyclopaedia,
iKini., XV. T22.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 153
divinity has its laws, Ihe material world has its laws,
the intelligences superior to men have tluir laws, the
beasts have their laws, man has his laws. . . There
is a primitive reason, and laws are the relations to be
found between that and the different beings, and the
relations of these different beings among one another." '
Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings,
made the proper distinction between a law of nature
and the imperative law of a state, and justly asserted
that the one could teach us nothing worth knomng
about the other.^ Hobbes's phraseology is much less
definite than this, and shows that he had not himself
wholly shaken off the same confusion as reigned in
Montesquieu's account a century later. But then
Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty
was so clear, firm, and comprehensive, as easily to
lead any fairly perspicuous student who followed him,
to apply it to the true meaning of law. And on this
head of law not so much favdt is to be foimd with
Rousseau, as on the head of larger constitutional
theory. He did not look long enough at given laws,
and hence failed to seize all their distinctive qualities;
above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law
is a command and not a contract, and his eyes were
closed to this, because the true view was incompatible
^nth his fundamental assumption of contract as the
base of the social union. ^ But he did at all events
* Esprit dcs Lois, I. i. -' Cont. Soc, II. vi. 50.
' GofHiet has tlie merit of seeing distinctly tliat commaud is
the essence of law. ^^^ •" '^ *" i^/
154 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws
proper, and separated them justly from what he calls
decrees, which we are now taught to name occasional
or particular commands.^ This is worth mentioning,
because it shows that, in spite of his habits of intel-
lectual laxity, Kousseau was capable, where he had a
clear-headed master before him, of a very considerable
degree of precision of thought, however liable it was
to fall into error or deficiency for want of abundant
comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now
proceed to some of the central propositions of the
Social Contract.
1. The origin of society dates from the moment
when the obstacles which impede the preservation of
men in a state of nature are too strong for such forces
as each individual can employ in order to keep himself
in that state. At this point they can only save them-
selves by aggregation. Problem : to find a form of
association which defends and protects with the whole
common force the person and property of each associ-
ate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still
only obeys himself, and remains as free as he was
before. Solution : a social compact reducible to these
words, "Each of us places in common his person and
his whole power under the supreme direction of the
ireueral will ; and we further receive each member as
indivisible part of the whole." This act of association
constitutes a moral and collective body, a public person.
1 Cont. tSof., II. vi. .'Jl-5o. See Austin's Jurisprudence, L
'.(fj, etc. ; also LcUres ecrilca de la Afoiitagnc, I. vi. 3S0, 381.
III. tup: social contract. 155
The practical importance and the mischief of thus
suffering society to repose on conventions which the
human will had made, lay in the corollary that the
human will is competent at any time to unmake them,
and also therefore to devise all possible changes that
fell short of unmaking them. This was the root of
the fatal hypothesis of the dictator, or divinely com-
missioned lawgiver. External circumstance and
human nature alike were passive and infinitely
pliable; they were the material out of which the
legislator was to devise conventions at pleasure, with-
out apprehension as to their suitableness either to the
conditions of society among which they were to work,
or to the passions and interests of those by whom they
were to be carried out, and who were supposed to have
given assent to them. It would be unjust to say that
Rousseau actually faced this position and took the
consequences. He expressly says in more places than
one that the science of Government is only a science
of combinations, applications, and exceptions, accord-
ing to time, place, and circumstance.^ But to base
society on conventions is to impute an element of
arbitrariness to these combinations and applications,
and to make them independent, as they can never be,
of the limits inexorably fixed by the nature of things.
The notion of compact is the main source of all the
worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.
1 See, for instance, letter to Mirabeau {Vami dcs hommcs),
July 26, 1767. Corr., v. 179. The same letter contains liu
criticism on the good despot of the Economists.
15G RoussEAn.
CHAP.
It i.s worth remarking in the liistory of opinion.
that there was at this time in France a httle knot of
thinkers who were nearly in full possession of the
true view of the limits set by the natural ordering of
societies to the power of convention and the function
of the legislators. Five years after the publication of
the Social Contract, a remarkable book was written
by one of the economic sect of the Physiocrats, the
later of whom, though specially concerned with the
material interests of communities, very properly felt
the necessity of connecting the discussion of wealth
with the assumption of certain fundamental political
conditions. They felt this, because it is impossible to
settle any question al)out wages or profits, for instance,
until you have first settled whether you are assuming
the principles of liberty and property. This writer
with great consistency found the first essential of all
social order in conformity of positive law and institu-
tion to those qualities of himian nature, and their
relations with those material instruments of life,
which, and not convention, were the true origin, as
they are the actual grounds, of the perpetuation of
our societies.^ This was wiser than Kousseau's con-
^ VOrdrc Nalarel ct Esscnticl des Sod6t6s Folitiqucs (1767).
I>y Mercier de la Riviore. One episode in llie life of Mereier
lie la Iliviere is worth reeoniiting, as closely connected with the
sulijcct we arc discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied
to Ivousseaii, Catherine of Russia, in consecjuence of her admir-
ation for Riviere's book, sixnimoneil hini to Russia to assist her
in making law.s. "Sir," said tlje Czarina, "could 3'ou point
out to rue the best means for the good government of a state V'
in. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 157
ception of the lawgiver as one who should change
human nature, and take away from man the forces
that are natuially his own, to replace them by others
comparatively foreign to him. ^ Rousseau once wrote,
in a letter about RiWere's book, that the great problem
in politics, which might be compared with the quad-
rature of the circle in geometry, is to find a form of
government which shall place law above man.- A
more important problem, and not any less difficult for
the political theoriser, is to mark the boimds at which
the authority of the law is powerless or mischievous
in attempting to control the egoistic or non-social
parts of man. This problem Rousseau ignored, and
"Madame, there is only one way, and that is being just; in
otlier words, in keeping order and exacting obedience to the
laws." " But on what base is it best to make the laws of an
empire repose ?" " There is only one base, Madame : the nature
of things and of men." "Just so ; but when you wish to give
laws to a people, what are the rules which indicate most surely
such laws as are most suitable?" "To give or make laws,
Madame, is a task that God has left to none. Ah, who is the
man that should think himself capable of dictating laws for
beings that he does not know, or knows so ill ? And by what
right can he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed
in his hands?" " To what, then, do you reduce the science of
government?" " To studying carefully ; recognising and setting
forth the laws which God has graven so manifestly in tlie very
organisation of men, when he called them into existence. To
wish to go any further would be a great misfortune and a most
destructive undertaking." "Sir, I am very pleiised to have
heard what you have to say ; I wish you good day." Quoted
from Thiebault's Souvenirs dc Berlin, in M. Dairc's edition of
the Physiocratcs, ii. 432.
» Con/^ Hoc, II. vii. » Corr., v. 181,
158 ROUSKEAU. CHAP.
that he shouhl do so was only natural in one who
believed that man had bound himself by a convention,
strictly to suppress his egoistic and non-social parts,
and who based all his speculation on this pact as
against the force, or the paternal authority, or the
will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers
founded the social union.
2. The body thus constituted by convention is the
sovereign. Each citizen is a member of the sovereign,
standing in a ^definite relation to individuals qiia in-
dividuals ; he is also as an individual a member of
the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from
the first point of view he is a component element.
The sovereign and the body politic are one and the
same thing. ^
Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine
enough has already been said. Its general truth as
a description either of what is, or what ought to be
and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there
is any occasion to carry on here. We need only point
out its place as a kind of intermediate dissolvent for
which the time was most ripe. It breaks up the
feudal conception of political authority as a property
of land-ownership, noble birth, and the like, and it
associates this authority widely and simply with the
bare fact of participation in any form of citizenship
in the social union. The later and higher idea of
every share of political power as a function to be
discharged for the good of the whole body, and not
* CoTVl. Soc, I. v., vi., vii.
in. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 159
merely as a right to be enjoyed for the advantage of
its possessor, was a form of thought to ^yhich Rousseau
did not rise. That does not lessen the effectiveness
of the blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudal-
ism, and which is its main title to commemoration in
connection with his name.
The social compact thus made is essentially different
from the social compact which Hobbes described as
the origin of what he calls commonwealths by insti-
tution, to distinguish them from commonwealths by
acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest
or resting on hereditary rule. " A commonwealth,"
Hobbes says, " is said to be instituted when a multi-
tude of men do agree and covenant, every one with
ever}' one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of
men shall be given by the major part the right to
present the person of them all, that is to say, to be
their representative ; every one . . . shall authorise
all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly
of men, in the same manner as if they were his o\m,
to the end to live peaceably among themselves, and
be protected against other men."^ But Rousseau's
compact was an a^ tJ>^ fl330c^iation am o ng ; cquala, wh o-
also remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act
oT~surrender on the part of the many to one or a
number. The first was the constitution of civil society,
the second was the erection of a government. As
nobody now believes in the existence of any such
compact in either one form or the other, it would be
^ Leviathan, II., ch. xviiL vol. iii. 159 (Molesworth's edition).
160 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP
superfluous to inquire which of the two is the less in-
accurate. All we need do is to point out that there
was this dilTei-enco. Rousseau distinctly denied the
existence of any element of contract in the erection
of a government ; there is only one contract in the
state, he said, and it is that of association.^ Locke's
notion of the compact which was the beginning of
every political society is indefinite on this point; he
speaks of it indifferently as an agreement of a body
of free men to unite and incorporate into a society,
and an agreement to set up a government.- Most of
us would suppose the two processes to be as nearly
identical as may be ; Rousseau drew a distinction, and
from this distinction he derived furtlier differences.
Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the
history of the ideas of the revolution, of one of the
most prominent of them all, that of Fraternity. If
the whole structure of society rests on an act of
partnership entered into by equals on behalf of them-
selves and their descendants for ever, the nature of
the union is not what it would be, if the members of
the union had only entered it to place their liberties
at the feet of some superior power. Society in the
one case is a covenant of subjection, in the other
a covenant of social brotherhood. This impressed
itself deeply on the feelings of men like Robespierre,
who were never so well pleased as when they could
find for their sentimentalism a covering of neat political
logic. The same idea of association came presently
' Coiit. Soc, III. xvi. - Civil Governmcnl , cli. viii. g 09.
til. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 161
to receive a still more remarkable and momentous
extension, wlien it -was translated from the language
of mere government into that of the economic organisa-
tion of communities. Rousseau's conception went no
further than political association, as distinct from
subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the
front place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity,
and presented all the relations of men with one
another as fixed by the same bond. Men had entered
the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators,
not merely for purposes of government, but for pur-
poses of mutual succour in all its aspects. This
naturally included the most important of all, material
production. They were not associated merely as
equal participants in political sovereignty ; they were
equal participants in all the rest of the increase made
to the means of human happiness by united action.
Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal
association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to
the wider sphere of industrial force.
It is perhaps worth notice that another famous
revolutionary term belongs to the same source. All
the associates of this act of union, becoming members
of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as par-
ticipating in the sovereign authority. ^ The term was
in familiar use enough among the French in their
worst days, but it was Rousseau's sanction which
marked it in the new times with a sort of sacramental
stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the
' I. vi. Especially the footnote.
VOL. TL il
162 ROUSSEAU. ciiAP.
name of the first of the two classes which constituted
the active portion of the republic of Geneva, and the
only class whose members were eligible to the chief
magistracies.
3. We next have a group of propositions setting
forth the attributes of sovereignty. It is inalienable. ^
It is indivisible.
These two propositions, which play such a part in
the history of some of the episodes of the French
Revolution, contain no more than was contended for
by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times
by Austin. When Hobbes says that "to the laws
which the sovereign maketh, the sovereign is not
subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws he
were subject to himself, which v/ere not subjection
but freedom," his notion of sovereignty is exactly that
expressed by Rousseau in his unexplained dogma of
the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau
means no more by the dogma that sovereignty is
indivisible, than Austin meant when he declared of
the doctrine that the legislative sovereign powers and
the executive sovereign po\\ers belong in any society
to distinct parties, that it is a supposition too palpably
false to endure a moment's examination. '-^ The way in
which this account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty
was understood during the revolution, twisted it into
a condemnation of the dreaded idea of Federalism.
It might just as well have been interpreted to con-
demn alliances between nations ; for the properties of
' Cont. Soc, II. L ^ Syst. of J^iris^iriidence, i. 256.
m. thp: social contract. 1C3
sovereignty are clearly independent of the dimensions
of the sovereign unit. Another efl'ect of this doctrine
was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly of the
balanced parliamentary system, which the followers
of Montesquieu would fain have introduced on the
English model "Whether that was an evil or a good,
publicists vnW long continue to dispute.
4. The general will of the sovereign upon an
object of common interest is expressed in a law. Only
the sovereign can possess this law-making power,
because no one but the sovereign has the right of
declaring the general -will. The legislative power
cannot be exerted by delegation or representation.
The English fancy that they are a free nation, but
they are grievously mistaken. They are only free
during the election of members of parliament ; the
members once chosen, the people are slaves, nay, as
people they have ceased to exist.^ It is impossible
' Cont. Soc, III. XV. 137. It was not long, however, before
Rousseau found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. The
champions of the Council at Geneva compared the droit tUgatif,
in the exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to the
representations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. ii. p. 105)
to the right of veto possessed by the crown in Great Britain.
Rousseau seized upon this egregious blunder, which confused
the power of refusing assent to a proposed laA-, with the power
of refusing justice under law already passed. He at once found
illustrations of the differenic, first in the case of the printers of
No. 45 of the North Briton, who brought actions for false
imprisonment (1763), and next in the proceedings against
Wilkes at the same time. If Wilkes, said Rousseau, had
written, printed, published, or said, one-fourth against the
Lesser Council at Geneva of what he said, wrote, printed, and
1G4 ROUSSEAU. CUAP,
for the sovereign to act, except when the people are
assembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as
unforeseen events may call for, there must be fixed
periodical meetings that nothing can interrupt or
postpone. Do you call this chimerical 1 Then you
have forgotten the Roman comitia, as veil as such
gatherings of the people as those of the Macedonians
and the Franks and most other nations in their
[)rimitive times. What has existed is certainly
possible. ^
It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his
subject should have contented himself with going
back to Macedonia and Rome, instead of pointing to
the sovereign states that have since become confederate
with his native republic. A historian in our own
time has described with an enthusiasm that equals
that of the Social Contract, how he saw the sovereign
people of Uri and the sovereign pef>ple of Appenzell
[lublislied openly in London against the court and the govern-
ment, hi' would have been heavily punished, and most likrly
put to death. And so fortli, until he has proved very pungently
liow dilfertnt (k'grees of fivfdoni are enjoyed in Geneva and in
England. Lettres icritcs de la Montngne, ix. 491-500. When
he wrote this he was unaware that the Triennial Act had long
been replaced by the Septennial Act of the 1 Geo. I. On find-
ing out, as he did afterwards, that a parliament could sit for
seven years, he thought as meanly of our liberty as ever.
Considerations sur Ics gouverncment de Polognc, ch. vii. 253-260.
In liis J'rojct de Constitution pour la Corse, p. 113, he says that
"the English do not love libiTty for itself, but because it is
ino.st favourable to money-making."'
1 IJI., xi.. xii., and xiii.
ill. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 165
discharge the duties of legislation and choice of
executive, each in the majesty of its corporate person. ^
That Rousseau was influenced by the free sovereignty
of the states of the Swiss confederation, as well as by
that of his own city, we may well believe. "Whether
he was or not, it must always be counted a serious
misfortune that a writer who was destined to exercise
such power in a crisis of the history of a great nation,
should have chosen liis illustrations from a time and
from societies so remote, that the true conditions of
their political system could not possibly be undemood
witli any approach to reality, while there were, within
a few leagues of his native place, communities where
the system of a sovereign public in his own sense was
actually alive and flomishing and at work. From
them the full meaning of . his theories might have
been practically gathered, and whatever useful lessons
lay at the bottom of them might have been made
plain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough
that the effect of the French Revolution was the sup-
pression, happily only for a time, of the only govern-
ments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite
apKJstle of the Revolution was a reality. The con-
stitution of the Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad
a blow to the sovereignty of peoples in a true sense,
as the old house of Austria or Charles of Burgundy
could ever have dealt. That constitution, more-
over, was directly opposed to the Social Contract
in setting up what it called representative demo
' Mr. Freeuiau's Growth of the English Constilutum, c. L
166 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
cracy, for representative democracy was just what
Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a
delusion.
The only lesson which the Social Contract con-
tained for a statesman bold enough to take into his
hands the reconstmction of France, undoubtedly
pointed in the direction of confederation. At one
place, where he became sensible of the impotence
which his assumption of a small state inflicted on his
whole speculation, Rousseau said he would presently
show how the good order of a small state might be
united to the external power of a great people.
Though he never did this, he hints in a footnote that
his plan belonged to the theory of confederations, of
which the principles were still to be established.^
When he gave advice for the renovation of the
wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all
things that they should apply themselves to extend
and perfect the system of federate governments, " the
only one that unites in itself all the advantages of
great and small states. " ^ A very few years after the
appearance of his book, the great American union of
sovereign states arose to point the political moral.
The French revolutionists missed the force alike of
' Co7it. Soc, III. XV. 140. A small manuscript containing
his ideas on confederation was given by Rousseau to the Count
d'Antraigues (afterwards an imigri), who destroyed it in 1789,
lest its arguments should be used to sap the royal authority.
See extract from his pamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition
of the Social Contract, pp. xxiii, xxiv.
- Gauvernement de Fvlogne, v. 246.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 167
the practical exuiiii)le abroad, and of the theory of
the book which they took for gospel at home. How-
far they were driven to this by the urgent pressure
of foreign war, or whether they would have followed
the same course without that interference, merely in
obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism
rthich had sunk so much deeper into French character
than people have been Avilling to admit, we cannot
tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Eousseau's
immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of
centralised authority where it had been broken off
by the ruin of the monarchy. They caught at the
letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost its
spirit They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's
scheme, nameh', that for order and freedom and just
administration the unit should not be too large to
admit of the participation of the persons concerned
in the management of their ov\ti public affairs. If
they had realised this and applied it, either by trans-
forming the old monarchy into a confederacy of
sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping modi-
fication of the old centralised scheme of government,
they mjght have saved France.^ But, once more,
men interpret a political treatise on principles which
^ Of course no such modification as that proposed by Comte
[PolUique Positive, ir. 421) would come within tlie scope of the
doctrine of the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen
Intendances into which Comte divides France, is to be nilcd by
a chief, "always appointed and removed by the central power."
There is no room for the sovereignty of the people liere, even in
things parochiaL
168 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
either come to them by tradition ; or else spring
suddenly up from roots of passion.^
5. The government is the minister of the sovereign.
It is an intermediate body set up between sovereign
and subjects for their mutual correspondence, charged
with the execution of the laws and the maintenance
of civil and political freedom. The members com-
prising it are called magistrates or kings, and to the
whole body so composed, whether of one or of more
than one, is given the name of prince. If the whole
power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate,
from whom all the rest hold their authority, the
government is called a monarchy. If there are more
persons simply citizens than there are magistrates,
this is an aristocracy,^ If more citizen magistrates
than simple private citizens, that is a democracy.
The last government is as a general rule best fitted
for small states, and the first for large ones — on the
principle that the number of the supreme magistrates
ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens.
But there is a multitude of circumstances which may
furnish reasons for exceptions to this general rule.
^ There was one extraordinary instance during the revolution
of attempting to make popular government direct on Rousseau's
principle, in the scheme (1790) of which Danton was a chief
supporter, for reorganising the municipal administration of
Paris. The assemblies of sections were to sit permanently ;
their vote was to be taken on current questions ; and action was
to follow the aggregate of their degrees. See Von Sybel's Hist.
Fr. Eav. i. 275 ; M. Louis Blanc's History, Bk. III. ch. ii.
- 'J'his was also Bodin's definition cf an aristocratic state ;
".si minor pars civium ceteris imperat."
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 169
This common definition of the three forms of
governments according to the mere number of the
participants in the chief magistracy, though adopted
by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate
and uninstructive, without some further qualification.
Aristotle, for instance, furnishes such a qualification,
when he refers to the interests in wliich the govern-
ment is carried on, Avhether the interest of a small
body or of the whole of the citizens.^ Montesquieu's
well-known division, though logically faidty, still has
the merit of pointing to conditions of difierence among
forms of government, outside of and apart from the
one fact of the number of the sovereign. To divide
governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics,
monarchies, and despotisms, was to use two principles
of division, first the number of the sovereign, and next
something else, namely, the difference between a con-
stitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he re-
turned to the first principle of division, and separated
a republic into a government of all, which is a
democracy, and a government by a part, which is
aristocracy.^ Still, to have introduced the element
of law-abidingncss in the chief magistracy, whether of
one or more, was to have called attention to the fact
that no single distinction is enough to furnish us with
a conception of the real and vital differences which may
exist between one form of government and another.'^
' rolitics. III. vi.-vii, ' Esjyril dcs Lois, II. i. ii.
' Rousseau gave the name of tyrant to a usurper of royal
authoritj' in a kingdom, and desjwt to n usurper of the sovereign
170 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
The important fact about a government lies quite
as much in the qualifying epithet which is to be affixed
to any one of the three names, as in the name itself.
We know nothing about a monarchy, until we have
been told whether it is absolute or constitutional ; if
absolute, whether it is administered in the interests
of the realm, like that of Prussia under Frederick the
Great, or in the interests of the ruler, like that of an
Indian principality under a native prince ; if consti-
tutional, whether the real power is aristocratic, as in
Great Britain a hundred years ago, or plutocratic, as
in Great Britain to-day, or popular, as it may be here
fifty years hence. And so with reference to each of
the other two forms ; neither name gives us any in-
struction, except of a merely negative kind, until it
has been made precise by one or more explanatory
epithets. What is the common quality of the old
Roman republic, the republics of the Swiss confedera-
tion, the republic of Venice, the American republic,
the republic of Mexico ? Plainly the word republic
has no further eflfect beyond that of excluding the
idea of a recognised dynasty.
Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criti-
cism than other writers on political theory, for the
authority (i.e. Tvpauvos iu the Greek sense). The former might
govern according to the laws, but the latter placed himself above
the laws {Co7iL Soc, III. x.) This corresponded to Locke's
distinction: "As usurpation is the exercise of power which
another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of a power
beyond riglit, which nobody can have a right to." Civil Gov.,
ch. xviii
m. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 171
reason that he distiniriiishes the constitution of the
state from the constitution of the government. The
first he settles definitely. The whole body of the
people is to be sovereign, and to be endowed alone
with what he conceived as the only genuinely legisla-
tive power. The only question which he considers
open is as to the form in which the delegated executive
authority shall be organised. Democracy, the im-
mediate government of all by all, he rejects as too
perfect for men ; it requires a state so small that each
citizen knows all the others, manners so simple that
the business may be small and the mode of discussion
easy, equality of rank and fortime so general as not
to allow of the overriding of political equality by
material superiority, and so forth. ^ Monarchy labours
under a number of disadvantages which are tolerably
obvious. " One essential and inevitable defect, which
must always place monarchic below republican govern-
ment, is that ill the latter the public voice hardly
ever promotes to the first places any but capable and
enlightened men who fill them with honour ; whereas
those who get on in monarchies, are for the most part
small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in
whom the puny talents which are the secret of reach-
ing substantial posts in courts, only serve to show
their stupidity to the public as soon as they have
made their way to the front. Tlie people is far less
likely to make a blunder in a choice of this sort, than
the prince, and a man of true merit is nearly as rare
' 111. iv.
172 ROUSSEAU. CHAP,
in the ministry, as a foc)l at the head of the govern-
ment of a republic."^ There remains aristocracy.
Of tliis there are three sorts : natural, elective, and
hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive
folk, while the third is the worst of all governments.
The second is the best, for it is aristocracy properly
so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue of elec-
tion, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all
the other grounds of public esteem and preference,
l)ecome so many new guarantees that the administra-
tion shall be wise and just. It is the best and most
natural order that the wisest should govern the multi-
tude, provided you are sure that they will govern the
multitude for its advantage, and not for their own.
If aristocracy of this kind requires 0!:e or two virtues
less than a popular executive, it also demands others
which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the
rich and content in the poor. For this form comports
with a certain inequality of fortune, for the reason
that it is well that tlic administration of public afiairs
should be confided to those who are best able to give
their whole time to it. At the same time it is of
importance that an opposite choice slaould occasionally
teach the people that in the merit of men there are
more momentous reasons of preference than wealth.^
Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronounced English
liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few
days once in seven years when the elections to parlia-
ment take i)lacc. Yet tliis scheme of an elective
1 111. VI. - III. V.
111. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 173
ari.stocracy was in truth a ver}" near approach to the
English foi-m as it is theoretically presented in our
own day, with a suffrage gradually becoming imiversal.
If the suffrage were universal, and if its exercise took
place once a year, our system, in spite of the now
obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy and
nominal monarch}', would be as close a realisation of
the scheme of the Social Contract as any representa-
tive system permits. If Eousseau had further de-
veloped his notions of confederation, the United States
would most have resembled his type.
6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect
of religion'? Certainly not that prescribed by the
policy of the middle ages. The separation of the
spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by Jesus
Christ, and developed by his followers in the course
of many subsequent generations, was in Rousseau's
eyes most mischievous, because it ended in the sub-
ordination of the temporal power to the spiritual, and
that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even
the kings of England, though they style themselves
heads of the church, are really its ministers and
servants.^
The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignor-
ance of history, and need not be discussed, any more
than his proposition on which he lays so much stress,
that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor
truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed
upon another world, they must necessarily be indiffer-
• CoiU. Soc, IV. viii
174 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
ent to the success or failure of such enterprises as
they may take up in this.-^ In readin;; the Social
Contract, and some other of the author's ^\Titings
besides, we have constantly to interpret the direct,
positive, categorical form of assertion into something
of this kind— "Such and such consequences ought
logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or
the definition of a principle, or from such and such
motives." The change of this moderate form of pro-
visional assertion into the unconditional statement
that such and such consequences have actually fol-
lowed, constantly lands the author in propositions
which any reader who tests them by an appeal to the
experience of mankind, written and unwritten, at
j)nce discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau him-
self took less trouble to verify his conclusions by such
^-^ \ an appeal to experience than any writer that ever
\ lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be
'" made on the above section is that the rejection of the
Christian or ecclesiastical division of the powers of
the church and the powers of the state, is the strongest
illustration that could be found of the debt of Rous-
seau's conception of a state to the old pagan concep-
tion. It was the main characteristic of the polities
which Christian monotheism and feudalism together
succeeded in replacing, to recognise no such division
as that between church and state, pope and emperor.
Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he ad-
justed it in a certain degree to the spirit of his own
1 Cont. Soc, IV. viii. 197-201.
in. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 175
lime, and imposed certain philosophical limitations
upon it. His scheme is as follows.
Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may
be considered as of three kinds. First, natural
religion, without temple, altar, or rite, the true and
pure theism of the natural conscience of man. Second,
local, civil, or positive religion, ^Wth dogmas, rites,
exercises ; a theology of a primitive people, exactly
co-extensive with all the rights and all the duties of
men. Third, a religion like the Christianity of the
Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws, two
chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory
duties, and prevents them from being able to be at
once devout and patriotic. The last of these is so
evidently pestilent as to need no discussion. The
second has the merit of teaching men to identify duty
to their gods with duty to their country ; under this
to die for the land is martyrdom, to break its laws
impiety, and to subject a culprit to public execration
is to devote him to the anger of the goda But it is
bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because
it makes a people sanguinary and intolerant. The
first of all, which is now styled a Christian theism,
having no special relation with the body politic, adds
no force to the laws. There are many particular ob-
jections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its
not being a kingiiom of this world, and this above all,
that Christianity only preaches servitude and depend-
ence.^ ^Vhat then is to be done? The sovereiim
' This Ls not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, that
17G KOUSSEAU.
CUAP.
must estaV)lish a purely civil profession of faith. It
will consist of the following positive dogmas : — the
existence of a divinitj', powerful, intelligent, benefi-
cent and foreseeing ; the life to come ; the happiness
of the just, the chastisement of the wicked ; the
sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These
articles of belief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion
exactly, but as sentiments of social )ility. If an}' one
declines to accept them, he ought to be exiled, not
for being impious', but for being unsociable, incapable
of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing his
life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognis-
ing these dogujas, carries himself as if he did not
believe them, let him be punished by death, for he
has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied before
the laws.^
Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to
its climax that reaction against the absorption of the
state in the church which had first taken a place in
literature in the controversy between legists and
canonists, and had fouud its most famous illustration
Christiauity bids you reiulur unto Cresar the things that are
Caesar's, but seems to discourage any inquiry wlietlier C;i;sar is
an usurper or a lawful ruler.
^ Cont. Soc. IV. viii. 200. As we have already seen, he
had entreated Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a
oivil profession of faith. See v(d. i. :j'26.
In the New Heloisa (V. v. 117, v.) Rousseau expresses his
opinion tlmt "no true believer could be intolerant or a perse-
cutor. //' / 2ccrc a magistrate, avA if the law pronounced the
penaltij of death against atheists, I would bc(ji?i by burning as
such v^hoerer should come to infortn against another."
"I. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 177
iu the De Monarchic of the great poet of Catholicism.
The division of two co-equal realms, one temporal, the
other spiritual, was replaced in the Genevese thinker
by what he admitted to be " pure Hobbism." This,
the rigorous subordination of the church to the state,
was the end, so far as France went, of the speculative
controversy which had occupied Europe for so many
iges, as to the respective powers of pope and emperor,
of positive law and law divine. The famous civil
constitution of the clergy (1790), which was the ex-
pression of Rousseau's principle as formulated by his
disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the revolu-
tionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose
most melodramatic episode had been the scene in the
courtyard of Canossa.
Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all
who should not believe in God, or a future state, or
in rewards and punishments for the deeds done in
the body, and putting to death any who, after sub-
scribing to the required profession, should seem no
longer to hold it, has naturally created a very lively
horror in a tolerant generation like our own, some of
whose finest spirits have rejected dehberately and
finally the articles of belief, without which they could
not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state.
It seemed to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic
above all things for humanity and infinite tolerance,
these being the prizes of the long conflict which they
hoped they were completing, to be a return to the
horrors of the Holy Office. Men were as shocked us
VOL. II. N
178 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
the modern philosopher is, when he finds the greatest
of the followers of Socrates imposing in his latest piece
the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be fol-
lowed in case of obduracy by death, on one who
should not believe in the gods set up for the state by
the lawmaker.^ And we can hardly comfort ourselves,
as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws which no
city ever yet received, and " fed his fancy with mak-
ing many edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they
who otherwise admire him, Avish had been rather
buried and excused in the genial cups of an academic
night-sitting."^ Rousseau's ideas fell among men who
were most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In
the winter of 1793 two parties in Paris stood face to
face ; the rationalistic, Voltairean party of the Com-
mune, named improperly after Hubert, but whose
best member was Chaumette, and the sentimental,
Rousseauite party, led by Robespierre. The first
had industriously desecrated the churches, and con-
summated their revolt against the gods of the old
time by the public Avorship of the Goddess of Reason,
who was prematurely set up for deity of the new
time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries of
the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested
against atheism as the crime of aristocrats. Presently
the atheistic party succumbed. Chaumette was not
directly implicated in the proceedings which led to
their fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring
1 Plato's Laws, Bk. x. 909, etc.
'•^ Arcopagitica, p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)
III.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 179
with HiMiert, Clootz, and the rest, "to destroy all
notion of Divinity and base the government of France
on atheism." " They attack the immortality of the
soul," cried Saint Just, " the thought which consoled
Socrates in his dying moments, and their dream is to
raise atheism into a worship." And this was the
offence, technically and officially described, for which
Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine
(April 1794), strictly on the principle which had
been laid down in the Social Contract, and accepted
by Kobespierre.^
/ It would have been odd in any writer less firmly
'possessed with the infallibility of his own dreams than
Rousseau was, that he should not have seen the im-
possibility in anything like the existing conditions of
human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith
to the three or four articles which happened to con-
stitute his own belief. Having once granted the
general position that a citizen may be required to
l)rofess some religious faith, there is no speculative
principle, and there is no force in the world, which
can fix any bound to the amount or kind of religious
faith which the state has the right thus to exact.
Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city
who did not believe in God, a future state, and divine
reward and retribution. But then Calvin thought a
man dansrerous who did not believe both that there
'O"
* See a speech of his, which is Rousseaw's "civil faith " done
into ihetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's Ilist. de la R6v. Fran-
caise, Bk. x. c. xiv.
180 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
is only one God, and also that there are three Gods.
And so Chaumette went to the scaflbld, and Servetus
to the stake, on the one common principle that the
civil magistrate is concerned with heresy. And
Hubert was only following out the same doctrine in a
mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on
preventing the publication of a book in which the
author professed his belief in a God. A single step
in the path of civil interference with opinion leads
you the whole way.
The history of the Protestant churclies is enough
to show the pitiable futilit}^ of the proviso for religious
tolerance with which Rousseau closed his exposition.
" If there is no longer an exclusive national religion,
then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates
other creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary
to the duties of the citizen. But whoever dares to
say, Out of the church, no salvation, ought to be banished
from the state." The reason for which Henr}' iv.
embraced the Roman religion — namely, that in that
he might be saved, in the opinion alike of Protestants
and Catholics, whereas in the refojTned faith, though
he was saved according to Protestants, yet according
to Catholics he was necessarily damned, — ought to
have made every honest man, and especially every
prince, reject it. It was the more curious that Rous-
seau did not see the futility of drawing the line of
tolerance at any given set of dogmas, however simple
and slight and acceptable to himself they might be,
because he in\'ited special admiration for D'Argenson's
in. TIIE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 181
excellent maxim that " in the republic everybody is
perfectly free in what does not hurt others."^ Surely
this maxim has very little significance or value, unless
we interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion,
l>ecause no opinion whatever can hurt others, imtil it
manifests itself in act, including of course speech,
which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted that over
and above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might
hold what opinions he pleased, in entire freedom from
the sovereign's cognisance or jurisdiction ; " for as the
sovereign has no competence in the other world, the
fate of subjects in that other world is not his aflair,
provided they are good citizens in this." But good
citizenship consists in doing or forbearing from certain
actions, and to punish men on the inference that
forbidden action is likely to follow from the rejection
of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of adherence
to such opinions on the same principle, is to concede
the whole theory of civil intolerance, however little
Rousseau may have realised the perfectly legitimate
apphcations of his doctrine. It was an unconscious
compromise. He was thinking of Calvin in practice
and Hobbes in theory, and he was at the same time
influenced by the moderate spirit of his time, and the
comparatively reasonable character of his personal
belief. He praised Hobbes as the only author who
had seen the right remedy for the conflict of the
spiritual and temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to
* ConsidircUions sur U gouvemement ancien et prisent de la
Francf (1764). Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.
182 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
unite the two heads of the eagle, and reducing all to
political unity, without which never will either state
or government be duly constituted. But Hobbes was
consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits
to the religious prescriptions which a sovereign might
impose, for "even when the civil sovereign is an
infidel, every one of his own subjects that resisteth
him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are
the laws of nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the
apostles, that admonisheth all Christians to obey their
princes. . . . And for their faith, it is internal and
invisible : they have the licence that Naaman had,
and need not put themselves into danger for it ; but
if they do, they ought to expect their reward in
heaven, and not complain of their lawful sovereign."^
All this flowed from the very idea and definition of
sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes,
as we have already seen. Such consequences, how-
ever, stated in these bold terms, must have been
highly revolting to Rousseau ; he could not assent to
an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,
Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous.
He failed to see the folly of trying to unite the old
notions of a Christian commonwealth with what was
fundamentally his own notion of a commonwealth after
the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics,
which he took for his model, of their national and
official polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty
remnant of theism slightly tinged with Christianity.
1 Leviathan, ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 183
Then he practically accepted llobbes's audacious
bidding to the man who should not be able to accept
the state creed, to go courageously to martyrdom,
and leave the land in peace. For the modern
principle, which was contained in D'Argenson's saying
previously quoted, that the civil power does best
absolutely and unreservedly to ignore spirituals, he
was not prepared either by his emancipation from
the theological ideas of his youth, or by his observa-
tion of the working and tendencies of systems, which
involved the state in some more or less close relations
^^^th the church, either as superior, equal, or subor-
dinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental
independence ending exactly where the speciUative
curiosity of the time is most intent to begin.
Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with
some of the propositions belonging to another method
of approaching the philosophy of government, that
have for their key-note the conception of expediency
or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to
the observed and recorded experience of mankind.
According to tliis method, the ground and origin of
society is not a compact ; that never existed in any
known case, and never was a condition of obligation
either in primitive or developed societies, either
between subjects and sovereign, or between the equal
members of a sovereign body. The true ground is
an acceptance of conditions which came into existence
by the sociability inlierent in man, and were developed
by man's spontiincous search after convenience. The
184 KOUSSEAU. OUAP.
statement that wliilc the constitution of man is the
work of nature, that of the state is the work of art,^
is as misleading as the opposite statement that
governments are not made but grow.^ The truth
lies between them, in such propositions as that insti-
tutions owe their existence and development to
deliberate human effort, working in accordance with
circumstances naturally fixed both in human character
and in the external field of its activity. The obedience
of the subject to the sovereign has its root not in
contract but in force,— the force of the sovereign to
punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be
put to death if he shall commit a murder, for the
reason alleged by Kousseau, namely, as a means of
protecting his own life against murder.^ There is
no consent in the transaction. Some person or
persons, possessed of sovereign authority, promul-
gated a command that the subject should not commit
murder, and appointed penalties for such commission
and it was not a fictitious assent to these penalties,
but the fact that the sovereign was strong enough to
enforce them, which made the command valid.
Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of
the sovereign people by a majority ; what binds a
member of the minority to obedience ? Rousseau's
answer is this : — When the law is proposed, the
^ Com. Soc, 111. xi. liorrowccl from Hobbes, wlio said,
"Magnus ille Leviatliau ciua; tivitas appellatur, opiticiuni .iiti'
est."
- Mackiutosli's. ^ Cojit. .Sue, II. v.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 185
question put is not whether they approve or reject
the proposition, but whether it is conformable to the
general will : the general will appears from the votes :
if the opinion contrary to my own \rins the day, that
only proves that I was mistaken, and that what I
took for the general will was not really so.^ We can
scarcely imagine more nonsensical sophistry than this.
The proper answer evidently is, that either experience
or calculation has taught the citizens in a popular
government that in the long run it is most expedient
for the majority of votes to decide the law. In other
words, the inconvenience to the minority of submit-
ting to a law which they dislike, is less than the
inconvenience of fighting to have their own Avay, or
retiring to form a separate community. The minority
submit to obey laws which were made against their
will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of
undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved
in this submission. The same explanation partially
covers what is unfortunately the more frequent case
in the history of the race, the submission of the
majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one
or more. In both these cases, however, as in the
general question of the source of our obedience to
the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience
is as shght in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in
the rest of the field of our moral motives. It is
covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised
by the multitudinous growths of use, by the many
' IV. ii.
186 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by
physical apathy of race, and all other conditions that
interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of jjure
reason over human conduct. Eousseau, expounding
his conception of a normal political state, was no
doubt warranted in leaving these complicating condi-
tions out of account, though to do so is to rob any
treatise on government of much of its possible value.
The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his
political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon
the substantial ground of propositions about human
nature, which the average of experience in given
races and at given stages of advancement has shoAvn
to be true within those limits. There are places in
his writings where he reluctantly admits that men
are only moved by their interests, and he does not
even take care to qualify this sufficiently.-^ But
throusrhout the Social Contract we seem to be con-
templating the erection of a machine which is to
work without reference to the only forces that can
possibly impart movement to it.
The consequence of this is that Eousseau gives us
not the least help towards the solution of any of the
problems of actual government, because these are
naturally both suggested and guided by considerations
of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had
never really settled the ends for which government
sxists, beyond the construction of the symmetrica]
^ For instance, Gouvemement dc la I'ologne, ch. xi. p. 305.
Aud Corr., v. 180.
fll.
THK SOCIAL CONTRACT. 187
machine of government itself. He is a geometer, not
a mechanician ; or shall we say that he is a mechani-
cian, and not a biologist concerned with the conditions
of a li%'ing organism. The analogy of the body politic
to the body natural was as present to him as it had
been to all other writers on society, but he failed to
seize the only useful lessons which such an analogy
misrht have taught him — diversitv of structure, difler-
ence of function, development of strength by exercise,
gi'owth by nutrition — all of which might have been
serviceably translated into the dialect of political
science, and might have bestowed on his conception
of political society more of the features of reality.
We see no room for the free play of divergent forces,
the active rivalry of hostile interests, the regulated
conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can
never be extinguished, except in moments of driving
crisis, by the most sincere attachment to the common
causes of the land. Thus the modern question which
is of such vital interest for all the foremost human
societies, of the union of collective energy with the
encouragement of individual freedom, is, if not wholly
untouched, at least wholly imillumined by anything
that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on enter-
ing a society exchanges his natural liberty for civil
liberty which is limited by the general ^A'ill,' is to
give lis a phrase, where we seek a solution. To say
that if it is the opposition of private interests which
made the establishment of societies necessary, it ia
' Cont. Soc, I. viii.
1 88 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
the accord of those interests which makes them
possible,^ is to utter a truth which feeds no practical
curiosity. The opposition of private interests remains,
in spite of the yoke which their accord has imposed
upon it, but which only controls and does not suppress
such an opposition. \Yhat sort of control 1 What
degree "i What bounds ?
So again let us consider the statement that the
instant the government usurps the sovereignty, then
the social pact is broken, and all the citizens, restored
by right to their natural liberty, are forced but not
morally obliged to obey."^ He began by telling his
readers that man, though born free, is now everywhere
in chains ; and therefore it would appear that in all
existing cases the social pact has been broken, and
the citizens living under the reign of force, are free
to resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong
enough to do so. This declaration of the general duty
of rebellion no doubt had its share in generating that
fervid eagerness that all other peoples should rise
and throw ofi' the yoke, which was one of the most
astonishing anxieties of the French during their revo-
lution. That was not the worst equality of such a
doctrine. It made government impossible, by basing
' C'ont. SdC, IT. i.
-' fb., III. X. " Let every individual who may usurp
the sovereii;nty be iustantly put to death by free men."
Robespierre's D6claration des droits de Vhomme, § 27. " When
tlie government violates tiie rights of the people, insurrection
becomes for the people the most .sacred of rights and the most
indis})ensable of duties." § 35.
111. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 189
the right or duty of resistance on a question that
could not be reached by positive evidence, but must
always be decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an
arbitrarily imagined document. The moderate pro-
position that resistance is lawful if a government is a
bad one, and if the people are strong enough to over-
throw it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose
they can provide a less bad one in its place, supplies
tests that are capable of application. Our own writers
in favour of the doctrine of resistance partly based
their arguments upon the historic instances of the Old
Testament, and it is one of the most striking contribu-
tions of Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that
it sent people in an admiring spirit to the history of
the most rebellious nation that ever existed, and so
provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective
for the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel.
But these writers have throughout a tacit appeal to
expediency, as writers might always be expected to
have, who were really meditating on the possibility of
their principles being brought to the test of practice.
There can be no e\'idence possible, Arith a test so vague
as the fact of the rupture of a compact whose terms
are authentically kno\\Ti to nobody concerned. Speak
of bad laws and good, -vvise administration or unwise,
just government or unjust, extravagant or economical,
civically elevating or demoralising ; all these are ques-
tions which men may apply themselves to settle with
knowledge, and with a more or less definite degree of
assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out
190 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
whether sovereignty has been usurped, and the social
compact broken'? Was there a usurpation of sove-
reignty in France not many years ago, when the
assumption of i)0wer by the prince was ratified by
many millions of votes 'I
The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the
social compact and restoration of natural Hberty,
occurs when the members of the government usurp
separately the power which they ought only to exercise
in a body.^ Now this description applies very fairly
to the famous episode in our constitutional history,
connected with George the Third's first attack of
nradness in 1788. Parliament cannot lawfully begin
business Avithout a declaration of the cause of summons
from the crown. On this occasion parliament both
met and deliberated without communication from the
crown. What was still more important was a vote of
the parliament itself, authorising the passing of letters
patent under the great seal for opening parliament by
commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill,
This was a distinct usurpation of regal authority.
Two members of the government (in Rousseau's sense
of the term), namely tlie liouses of parliament, usurped
the power which they ought only to have exercised
along with the crown.-' The Whigs denounced the
proceeding as a fiction, a forgery, a phantom, but if
they had been readers of the Social Contract, and if
' Cont. Sor., 111. x.
- See May's Constihdional Hist, of Evgland, cli. iii. ; and
Lord Stanhope's Life of Pitt, vol. ii. ch. xiL
III. THE SOCIAL CONTIUCT. 191
they had hcen bitten by its dogmatic temper, they
would have declared the compact of union violated,
and all British citizens free to resume their natural
rights. Not even the bitter virulence of faction at
that time could tempt any politician to take up such
a line, though within half a dozen 3'ears each of the
democratic factions in France had worked at the over-
throw of every other in turn, on the very principle
which Rousseau had formulated and Robespierre had
made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid reason
for annihilating a government, no matter under what
circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing
it by a better, nor how enormous the peril to the
national well-being in the process. The true opposite
to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of
passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but
the right and duty of throwing oflf any government
which inflicts more disadvantages than it confers
advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevit-
ably to substitute a long series of struggles after
phrases and shadows in the new era, for the equally
futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic succession
which have been the great curse of the old. Men die
for a phrase as they used to die for a family. The
other theory, which all English politicians accept in
their hearts, and so many commanding French politi-
cians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first
expounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by
Paley.^ Of course the greatest, widest, and loftiest
' III the 6th book of the Moral Philosophy [11 Sb), ch. iii..
192 ROUSSEAU. CHA?
exposition of the bearings of expediency on govern-
ment and its conditions, is to be found in the magni-
ficent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them
suggested by absolutist violations of the doctrine in
our own affairs, and some of them by anarchic viola-
tion of it in the aflairs of France, after the seed sown
by Rousseau had brought forth fruit.
We should, however, be false to our critical prin-
ciple, if we did not recognise the historical effect of a
speculation scientifically valueless. There has been
no attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the
practical mischievousness of the Social Contract, But
there is another side to its influence. It was the
match which kindled revolutionary fire in generous
breasts throughout Europe. Not in France merely,
but in Germany as well, its phrases became the
language of all who aspired after freedom. Schiller
spoke of Rousseau as one who " converted Christians
into human beings," and the Bobbers (1778) is as if
it had been directly inspired by the doctrine that
usurped sovereignty restores men to their natural
rights. Smaller men in the violent movement which
seized all tlie youth of Germany at that time, followed
the same lead, if they happened to have any feel-
ing about the political condition of their enslaved
countries.
and elsewhere. In the ])ieface he relers to the efTect which
Rousseau's iiolitical theory was supjiosecl to have had in the
civil convulsions of Geneva, as one of the reasons which encour-
a'^cd him to publish his own book.
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 193
There was alike in France and Germany a craving
for a return to nature among the whole of the young
generation.^ The Social Contract supplied a dialect
for this longing on one side, just as the Emilius
supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people
did not understand or did not like, they left out.
They did not perceive its direction towards that
" perfect Hobbism," which the author declared to be
the only practical alternative to a democracy so austere
as to be intolerable. They grasped phrases about the
sovereignty of the people, the freedom for Avhich
nature had destined man, the slavery to which tyrants
and oppressors had brought him. Above all they
were struck by the patriotism which shines so brightly
in every page, like the fire on the altar of one of those
ancient cities which had inspired the writer's ideal.
Yet there is a marked difference in the channels
along which Rousseau's influence moved in the two
countries. In France it was drawn eventually into
the sphere of direct politics. In Germany it inspired
not a great political movement, but an immense
literary revival. In France, as we have already said,
the patriotic flame seemed extinct. The ruinous
disorder of the whole social system made the old love
of country resemble love for a phantom, and so much
of patriotic speech as survived was profoundly hollow
* One side of this was the passion for geographical explora-
tion which took possession of Europe towards the middle of the
eigliteenth century. See the Life of Eumboldl, i. 28, 29. (Eng.
Trans, by Lassell.)
VOL. IL O
194 ROUSSEAU.
CIIAf.
Even II man like Turgot was not so much a patriot
as a passionate lover of improvement, and with the
whole scliool of which this great spirit was the noblest
and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had
replaced the naiTower sentiment which had inflamed
antique heroism. Rousseau's exaltation of the Greek
and Roman types in all their concentration and
intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His
theoiy made the native land what it had been to
the citizens of earlier date, a true centre of existence,
round which all tlie interests of the community, all
its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with
entire singleness of convergence, just as religious faith
is the centre of existence to a church. It was the
virile and patriotic energy thus evoked which pre-
sently saved France from partition.
We complete the estimate of the positive Avorth
and tendencies of the Social Contract by addiiig to
this, which was for the time the cardinal service, of
rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction
from tlie doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the
great truth, that a nation witli a civilised polity does
not consist of an order or a caste, but of the great
Ijody of its members, the army of toilers Avho make
the most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for
the continuous nutrition of the social organisation.
As Condorcet put it, and he drew inspiration partly
from the intellectual school of Voltaire, and partly
from the social school of Rousseau, all institutions
ought to have for tlieir aim the physical, intellectual,
III. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 195
and moral amelioration of the poorest and most
numerous class. ^ This is the People. Second, there
gradually followed from the important place given by
Eousseau to the idea of equal association, as at once
the foundation and the enduring bond of a community,
those schemes of Mutualism, and all the other shapes
of collective action for a common social good, which
have possessed such commanding attraction for the
imagination of large classes of good men in France
ever since. Hitherto these forms have been sterile
and deceptive, and they must remain so, until the
idea of special function has been raised to an equal
level of importance with that of united forces working
together to a single end.
In these ways the author of the Social Contract
did involuntarily and unconsciously contribute to the
growth of those new and progressive ideas, in which
for his own part he lacked all faith. Prae-Newtonians
knew not the wonders of which Newton was to find
the key ; and so we, grown weary of waiting for the
master intelligence who may effect the final combina-
tion of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new
social era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent
ear to the arid sophisters who assume that the last
word of civilisation has been heard in existing arrange-
ments. But we may perhaps take courage from
^ Rousseau'8 influeuce on Condorcet is seen in the latter'a
maxim, which has found such favour in the eyes of socialLst
writers, that " not only equality of right, but equality of fact,
is the goal of the social art. "
lOCi ROUSSEAU. <-iiAP. III.
liistovy to hope tluxt generations will come, to whom
our system of <liatrihutin,u- among a few the privileges
and delights that are ])r(jcured hy the toil of the
many, will :^eem jnst as wasteful, as morally hideous,
and as scifMitifically indefensible, as that older system
which impoverished and depopulated empires, in
order that a despot oi- a caste migiit have no least
wish un^ratilied, for which the lives or the hard-won
treasure of others could sutlicc.
CHAPTER IV.
EMILYS.
One whose most intense conviction was faith in the
goodness of all things and creatures as they are first
produced by nature, and so long as they remain
unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man,
was in some degree bound to show a way by which
this evil process of sophistication might be brought to
the lowest possible point, and the best of all natural
creatures kept as near as possible to his high original.
Rousseavi, it is true, held in a sense of his own the
doctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however,
has never made people any more remiss in the search
after a virtue, which if they ought to have regarded
it as hopeless according to strict logic, is still indis-
pensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing
that man had fallen was so coloured at once by that
expansion of sanguine emotion which marked his
century, and by that necessity for repose in idyllic
perfection of simplicity which marked his own tem-
perament, that enthusiasm for an imaginary human
creature effectually shut out the dogma of his fatal
depravation. " How difficult a thing it is," Madame
198 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP,
d'Epinay once sairl to him, " to bring up a child."
"Assuredly it is," answered Rousseau; "because the
father and mother are not made by nature to bring it
up, nor the child to be brought up."^ This cynical
speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of
spleen. It was a contradiction to his one constant
opinion that nature is all good and bounteous, and
that the inborn capacity of man for reaching true
happiness knows no stint.
In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what
man is, and what can be made of him. Here, as in
all the rest of his work, he only obej'ed the tendencies
of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by
the spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young ; for
with the young lies fidfilment. Such epochs are ever
pressing with the question, how is the future to be
shaped ^ Our answer depends on the theory of human
disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always
optimistic. Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands
of men have been alike in conduct and speculation,
by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two mutually
contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt,
and society is the work of man. Yet man, who has
engendered this corrupted birth, is good and whole.
The strain in the argument may be pardoned for the
hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Roixsseau
into harmony with the eager eftbrt of the time to pour
young character into finer mould, and made him the
most powerful agent in giving to such efforts both
^ 3Iem. de Mdmc, d'Ejunaij, ii. 276, 27S.
IV. EMILIUS. 199
fervour and elevation. While others were content
with the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts,
he breathed into them the spirit of life, and enforced
them with a vividness of faitli that clothed education
witli the augustness and unction of religion. The
training of the young soul to virtue was surrounded
mth something of the awful holiness of a sacrament ;
and those who laboured in this sanctified field were
exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were pro-
mised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from
the rank of drudges to a place of highest honour
among the ministers of natui'e.
Everybody at this time was thinking about educa-
tion, partly perhaps on account of the suppression of
the Jesuits, the chief instructors of the time, and a
great many people were writing about it. The Abbe
do Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as
on all the greater departments of human interest.
Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations upon the
bringing up of the young. ^ Madame de Grafigny did
the same in a less grave shape.- She received letters
from the precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the
same natural and sensible precepts which ten years
later were commended with more glowing eloquence
in the pages of Emilius.' Grimm had an elaborate
scheme for a treatise on education.* Helv^tius followed
' Leilres A moii Fila (175»), aud Lcs Utmveraationa d'EmilU
(1783).
- Lettres Piruviennes. ^ (£uv., ii. 785-794.
* Corr. Lit., iii. 65.
200 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
his exploration of tlie composition of the liunian mind,
by a treatise on the training proper for the intellectual
and moral faculties. Education by these and other
writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had
been known to ages controlled hj ecclesiastical col-
legians. It slowly came to be thought of in connection
with the family. The improvement of ideas upon
education was only one phase of that great general
movement towards tlie restoration of the family,
which was so striking a spectacle in France after the
middle of the century. Education nov/ came to com-
prehend the whole system of the relations between
parents and their children, from earliest infancj^ to
maturity. The direction of this wider feeling about
such relations tended strongly towards an increased
closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continu-
ous suifusion of tenderness and long attachment.
All this was part of the general revival of naturalism.
People began to reflect that nature was not likely to
have designed infants to Ijc suckled by other women
than their own mothers, nor that they should be
banished from the society of those who are most
concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful hearth
and wise aflcctionate converse of home, to the frigid
discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable
monition of strangers.
Then the risiu"' rebellion oirainst the church and
its faith {)erh;ips contributed something towards a
movement which, if it could not brealc the religious
monopoly of iiisl-nicli'ni, must at least introduce the
\_
IV. KMILIUS. 201
parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for
influence over the ideas, habits, and aftections of Iiis
children. The rebellion was aimed against the spirit
as well as the manner of the established system. The
church had not fundamentally modified the significance
of the dogma of the fall and depravity of man ; educa-
tion was still conceived as a process of eradication and
suppression of the mystical old Adam. The new
current flowed in channels far away from that black
folly of superstition. j\Ien at length ventured once
more to look at one another ^vith free and generous
gaze. The veil of the temple was rent, and the false
mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made
plain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one
another as guilty victims cowering under a divine
curse. They stood erect in consciousness of manhood.
The palsied conception of man, -svith his large dis-
course of reason looking before and after, his lofty
and majestic patience in search for new forms of
beauty and new secrets of truth, his sense of the
manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the universe,
above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love
for his comrades in the great struggle, and his high
sorrow for his own wrong-doing, — the palsied and
crushing conception of this excellent and helpful
being as a poor worm, ^Tithing under the vindictive
and meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the
large heavens, only to be appeased by sacerdotal inter-
vention, was fading back into those regions of night,
■vhence the depth of human misery and the ^©Jjsc^wi-
«.•-■. f
202 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
tion of human intelligence had once permitted its
escape, to luiug evilly over the western world for a
season. So vital a change in the point of view quickly
touched the theory and art of the upbringing of the
young. Education began to figure less as the suppres-
sion of the natural man, than his strengthening and
development ; less as a process of rooting out tares,
more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding in
promise of richness. What had been the most drearily
mechanical of duties, v/as transformed into a task that
surpassed all others in interest and hope. If man be
born not bad but good, under no curse, but rather the
bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the
entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil
and the peril, is made cheerful with the sunshine and
warmth of the great folded possibilities of excellence,
happiness, and well-doing.
Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in poli-
tics, was the pioneer of French thought. In education
there is less room for scientific originality. The sage
of a j)arish, provided only she began her trade with
an open and energetic mind, may here pass philo-
sophers. Locke was nearly as sage, as homely, as
real, as one of these strenuous women. The honest
plainness of certain of his ])rescriptions for the preser-
vation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat
too near the earth. His manner throughout is marked
IV. EMILIUS. 203
by the stout wisdom of the practical teacher, who is
content to assume good sense in his hearers, and feels
no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest.
He gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy,
instructed, upright, well-mannered young English
squire, who shall be rightly fitted to take his own life
sensibly in hand, and procure from it a fair amount
of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the
people with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise
is one of the most admirable protests in the world
against efteminacy and pedantry, and parents already
moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to
their sons, will hardly find another book better suited
to their ends. Besides Locke, we must also count
Charron, and the amazing educator of Gargantua, and
Montaigne before either, among the writers whom
Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase
which attends the dropping of the good ideas of other
men into fertile minds.
There is an immense class of natures, and those
not the lowest, which the connection of duty with
mere prudence does not caiTy far enough. They only
stir when somethintr has moved their feeliiiLf for the
ideal, and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow
day into association with the spaciousness and height
of spiritual things. To these Rousseau came. For
both the tenour and the wording of the most striking
precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke.
But what was so realistic in him becomes blended in
Rousseau with all the power and richness and beauty
204 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
of an ideal tliat can move the most generous parts of
human character. The child is treated as the minia-
ture of humanity ; it thus touches the whole sphere
of our sympathies, warms our curiosity as to the
composition of man's nature, and becomes the very
eye and centre of moral and social aspirations.
Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by
elaborating his conception of the kind of human
creature which it is worth while to take the trouble
to rear, and the only kind which pure nature A\ill
help you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being
a manual for parents, contains the lines of a moral
type of life and character for all others. The old
thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour. The
artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use,
the feeble maxims of indolence, convention, helpless
dependence on the aid or the approval of others, are
routed at the first stroke. The old regimen of ac-
cumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with
body and soul, by the new system of liberty and
nature. In saying this we have already said that the
exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through
Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every
trace of the much-vaunted military and public train-
ing has yielded before the attractive thought of tender
parents and a wisely ruled home. Public instruction,
we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no
longer such a thing as country, and therefore there
can no longer be citizens. Only domestic education
can now help us to rear the man according to nature,
rv, EMILIUS. 205
— the man who knows best among us how to bear tlie
mingled good and ill of our life.
The artificial society of the time, with its aspira-
tions after a return to nature, was moved to the most
energetic enthusiasm by Eousseau's famous exhorta-
tions to mothers to nourish their own little ones.
Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the
adoption of this practice. So too had Buffon. But
Morelly's voice had no resonance, Buffon's reasons
were purely physical, and children were still sent out
to nurse, until Eousseau's more passionate moral
entreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these
tender mothers," he exclaimed, "who, when thej'
have got rid of their infants, surrender themselves
gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what
sort of usage the child in the village is recei'vdng,
fastened in his swaddling band 1 At the least inter-
ruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail like
a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains
thus crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs.
Every child found in this position had a face of purple ;
as the violent compression of the chest would not
allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the head,
and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just
because it had not strength enough to cry out."^ But
in Eousseau, as in Beethoven, a harsh and rugged
passage is nearly always followed by some piece of
exquisite and touching melody. The force of these
indignant pictures was heightened and relieved by
^ Emile, I. 27.
20G KOUSSEAU.
CHAP.
moving appeal to all the tender joys of maternal
solicitude, and thoughts of all that this solicitude
could do for the happiness of the home, the father,
and the young. The attraction of domestic life is
pronounced the best antidote to the ill living of the
time. The bustle of children, which you now think so
importunate, gradually becomes delightful ; it brings
father and mother nearer to one another; and the
lively animation of a family added to domestic cares,
makes the dearest occupation of the wife, and the
sweetest of all his amusements to the husband. If
women will only once more become mothers again,
men Avill very soon become fathers and husbands.^
The physical effect of this was not altogether
wholesome. Rousseau's eloquence excited women to
an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the duty of
suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denun-
ciation of the gaieties of Paris could not extinguish
the love of amusement.
Quill (juo<l libelli Stoici inter .sericos
•Jacere pulvillos aiuant ?
Si) young motliers tried as well as they could to
satisfy both desires, and their l)abes were brought
to tliem at all unseasonable hours, while they were
1 It is int'Tt'sting to recall a similar movement in the Roman
society of the second century of our era. See the advice of
Favorinns to mothers, in Anlus Gellius, xii. 1. JI. Boissier,
contrasting the solicitude of Tacitus and llarcus Aurelius for
the infant young with the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in
llic time of Seneca men discussed in the schools the educational
theories of Rousseau's Eiuilius. {La Rclig. llomaiiie, ii. 202.)
IV.
EMILIUS. 20';
full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or
play, and there received the nnrtnre which, but for
Kousseau, they would have drawn in more salutary
sort from a healthy foster-mother in the country.
This, however, was only an incidental drawback to
a movement which was in its main lines full of ex-
cellent significance. The importance of giving free-
dom to the young limbs, of accustoming the body
to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surround-
ing youth ■\vith light and cheerfulness and air, and
even a tiny detail such as the propriety of substitut-
ing for coral or ivory some soft substance against
wliich the growing teeth might press a way without
irritation, all these matters are handled with a fervid
reality of interest that gives to the tedium of the
nursery a genuine touch of the poetic. Swathings,
bandages, leading-strings, are condemned Avith a
wannth like that with which the author had de-
nounced comedy.^ The city is held up to indignant
reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had
been in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest
energies of the adult life. Every child ought to be
born and nursed in the country, and it would be all
the better if it remained in the country to the last
day of its existence. You must accustom it little
by little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as
toads and snakes ; also in the same gradual manner
to the sound of alarming noises, beginning with
* See also liis diatribe against whalebone ami tiglit-lacirif;
for girls, V. 27.
208 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from
pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to
soothe it ; your caresses will not lessen the anguish
of its colic, while the child will remember what it
has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its own
way. The nurse may amuse it 1>y songs and lively
cries, but she is not to din useless words into its
ears ; the first articulations that come to it should
he few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and only
referring to objects which may be shown to the child.
"Our unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words
that we do not understand, begins earlier than we
.suppose." Let there be no haste in inducing the
child to speak articulately. The evil of precipita-
tion in this respect is not that children use and hear
words without sense, but that they use and hear
them in a diflerent sense from our own, without our
perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus
early, have an influence, even after they are cured,
over the tiun of the mind for the rest of the crea-
ture's life. Hence it is a good thing to keep a child's
vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should have
more words than ideas, and should say more than it
can possibly realise in thought.''
In moral as in intellectual hal)its, the most perilous
interval in human life is that between birth and the
age of twelve. The great secret is to make the early
education purely negative ; a process of keeping the
heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the in-
1 Emllc, I. 93, etc.
IV. EMILIUS. 209
telligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take
for first, secoiul, and third precept, to follow nature
and leave her free to the performance of her own
tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be no idea
of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says
Rousseau, no moral discussion. Locke's maxim in
favour of constantly reasoning with children was a
mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which
is only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest
in development, and yet it is this which we are to
use to develop those which come earliest of all.
Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn
the finished work into an instrument. " In speaking
to children in these early years a language which
they do not comprehend, we accustom them to cheat
themselves with words, to criticise what is said to
them, to think themselves as wise as their masters,
to become disputatious and mutinous." If you for-
get that nature meant children to be children before
growing into men, you only force a fruit that has
neither ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad ;
you will have youthful doctors and old infants.
To all this, however, there is certainly another
side which Rousseau was too impetuous to see. Per-
fected reason is truly the tardiest of human endow-
ments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the
process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the
beginning is made, the earlier will be the ripening.
To know the grounds of right conduct is, we admit,
a different thing from feeling a disposition to practise
VOL Ti. p
210 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP,
it. But nobody will deny tlie expediency of an in-
telligent acquaintance with the reasons why one sort
of conduct is bad, and its opposite good, even if such
an acquaintance can never become a substitute for
the spontaneous action of thoroughl}^ formed habit.
For one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man's
life that demand the exercise of reason, to settle the
special application of principles which may have
been acquired without knowledge of their rational
foundation. In such cases, which are the critical
and testing points of character, all depends upon the
possession of a more or less justly trained intelligence,
and the habit of using it. Now, as we have said, it
is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls
such attention to the early age at which mental in-
fluences begin to operate. Why should the gradual
formation of the master habit of using the mind be
any exception ?
Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of
educational systems. Verbal lessons seem as if they
ought to be so deeply effective, if only the will and
the throng of various motives which guide it, instantly
followed impression of a truth upon the intelligence.
And they are, moreover, so easily communicated,
saving the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking
in shaping his own character, after such a pattern
as shall silently draw all within its influence to pur-
suit of good and honourable things. The most valu-
able of Rousseau's notions about education, though
he by no means consistently adhered to them, was
IT. EMiLros. 211
his urgent contempt for this fatuous substitution of
spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the deeper
language of example, and the more living instruction
of visible circumstance. The vast improvements that
have since taken place in the theory and the art of edu-
cation all over Eiu^ope, and of which he has the honour
of being the first and most widely influential promoter,
may all be traced to the spread of this -wise principle,
and its adoption in various forms. The change in
the up-bringing of the young exactly corresponds to
the change in the treatment of the insane. We may
look back to the old system of endless catechisms,
apophthegms, moral fables, and the rest of the para-
phernalia of moral didactics, with the same horror
with which we regard the gags, strait -waistcoats,
chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before
the intervention of PineL
It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion
on this most important of all subjects, that spontane-
ousness is the first quality in connection with right
doing, which you can develop in the young, and this
spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associat-
ing it with the approval of those to whom the child
looks. Sympathy, in a word, is the true foundation
from which to build up the structure of good habit.
The young should be led to practise the elementary
parts of right conduct from the desire to please,
because that is a securer basis than the conclusions
of an embryo reason, applied to the most complex
conditions of action, while the grounds on which
212 EOUSSEAU.
OHAP
action is justified or condemned may be made plain
in the fulness of time, when the understanding is
better able to deal with the ideas and terms essential
to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each
without sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that
the child shall grow up Avith firm and promptly act-
ing habit ; second, that it shall retain respect for
reason and an open mind. The latter may be ac-
quired in the less immature years, but if the former
be not acquired in the earlier times, a man grows up
with a drifting unsettledness of will, tliat makes his
life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or help-
less for want of ready conclusions.
The first idea which is to be given to a child, little
as we might expect such a doctrine from the author
of the Second Discourse, is declared to be that of
property. And he can only acquire this idea by
having something of his own. But how are we to
teach him the significance of a thing being one's own"?
It is a prime rule to attempt to teach nothing by a
verbal lesson ; all instruction ought to be left to
expeiience. ^ Therefore you must contrive some piece
of experience which shall bring this notion of property
vividly into a child's mind ; the following for instance.
Emilius is taken to a piece of garden ; his instructor
digs and dresses the ground for him, and the boy
takes possession by sowing some beans. " We come
every day to water them, and see them rise out of
the groimd with transports of joy. I add to this joy
i Bmile, II. 141.
rv. EMILIUS. 213
by saying, This belongs to you. Then exphxining the
term, I let him feel that he has put into the ground
this time, labour, trouble, his person in short; that
there is in this bit of ground something of himself
which he may maintain against every comer, as he
might withdraw his own arm from the hand of
another man who would fain retain it in spite of him."
One day Emilius comes to his beloved garden, watering-
pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and despair that
all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground
has been turned over, and that the spot is hardly
recognisable. The gardener comes up, and explains
with much warmth that he had sown the seed of a
precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long
before Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and
that therefore it was his land ; that nobody touches the
garden of his neighbour, in order that his own may
remain untouched ; and that if Emilius wants a piece
of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the
owner half the produce.^ Thus, says Rousseau, the
boy sees how the notion of property naturally goes
back to the right of the first occupant as derived from
labour. We should have thought it less troublesome,
as it is certainly more important, to teach a boy the
facts of property positively and imperatively. This
rather elaborate ascent to origins seems an exaggerated
form of that very vice of over-instructing the growing
reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned
so short a time befure.
^ Emile, II. 156-1 uO.
214 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
Again, there is tlic very strong objection to con-
veying lessons by artificially contrived incidents, that
children are nearly always extremely acute in sus-
pecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet Rous-
seau recurs to them over and over again, evidently
taking delight in their ingenuity. Besides the illus-
tration of the origin and significance of property,
there is the complex fancy in which a juggler is made
to combine instruction as to the properties of the
magnet with certain severe moral truths. ^ The tutor
interests Emilius in astronomy and geography by a
wonderful stratagem indeed. The poor youth loses
his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and
weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to
a series of inferences from the position of the sun and
so forth, which convince him that his home is just
over the hedge, where it is duly found to be. ^ Here,
again, is the way in which the instructor proposes to
stir activity of limb in the young Emilius. "In
walking with him of an afternoon, I used sometimes
to put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he particularly
liked ; we each of us ate one. One day he perceived
that I had three cakes ; he could easily have eaten
six ; he promptly despatches his own, to ask me for
the third. Nay, I said to him, I could well eat it
myself, or we would divide it, but I would rather see
it made the prize of a running match between the
two little boys there." The little boys run their
race, and the winner devours the cake. This and
» Emik, III. 33S-345. - III. 358, etc.
IV. EMILIUS. 215
subsequent repetitions of the performance at first
only amused Emilius, but he presently began to
reflect, and perceiving that he also had two legs, he
began privately to try how fast he could run. AVhen
he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his
tutor for the third cake, and on being refused,
insisted on being allowed to compete for it. The
habit of taking exercise was not the only advantage
gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further
stratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and
practise visual compass, and so forth. ^ If we con-
sider, as we have said, first the readiness of children
to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction is con-
cerned, and next their resentment on discovering
artifice of that kind, all this seems as little likely to
be successful as it is assuredly contrary to Eousseau's
general doctrine of leaving circumstances to lead.
In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature
of spontaneousness in the processes of education was
essentially inadequate, and that it was so, arose from
a no less inadequate conception of the right influence
upon the growing character, of the great principle of
authority. His dread lest the child should ever be
conscious of the pressure of a will external to its own,
constituted a fundamental weakness of his system.
The child, we are told with endless repetition, ought
always to be led to suppose that it is following its
own judgment or impulses, and has only them and
their consequences to consider. But Rousseau could
^ Emile, II. 263-267.
216 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
not help seeing, as he meditated on the actual
development of his Emilias, that to leave him thus to
the training of accident would necessarily end in
many fatal gaps and chasms. Yet the hand and will
of the parent or the master could not be allowed to
appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the
secret preparation of artificial sets of circumstances,
alike in work and in amusement. Jean Paul was
wiser than Jean Jacques. " Let not the teacher after
the work also order and regulate the games. It is
decidedly better not to recognise or make any order
in games, than to keep it up with difficulty and send
the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic bellows and
air-pumps to the little flowers."^
The spontaneousness which we ought to seek,
does not consist in promptly willing this or that,
independently of an authority imposed from without,
but in a self-acting desire to do what is right \inder
all its various conditions, including what the child
finds pleasant to itself on the one hand, and what it
has good reason to suppose will be pleasant to its
parents on the other. " You must never," Kousseau
gravely warns us, " inflict punishment upon children
as punishment ; it should always fall upon them as a
natural consequence of their ill -behaviour."- But
why should one of the most closely following of all
these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden
from sight, namely, the effect of ill -behaviour upon
the contentment of the child's nearest friend 1 Why
' Lcvana, ch. iii. § 54. - Emile, II 163.
IV. KMILIUS. 217
are the effects of conduct upon the actor's own physical
well-being to be the only effects honoured with the
title of being natural^ Surely, while we leave to
the young the widest freedom of choice, and even
habitually invite them to decide for themselves be-
tween two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards
to state our approval or disapproval of their decision,
so that on the next occasion they may take this anger
or pleasure in others into proper account in their
rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty than it
seems, of the consequences of what they are about to
do. One of the most important of educating influ-
ences is lost, if the young are not taught to place the
feelings of others in a front place, when they think
in their own simple way of what Avill happen to them
from yielding to a given impulse. Rousseau was
quite right in insisting on practical experience of
consequences as the only secure foundation for self-
acting habit ; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this
experience by the exclusion from it of the effects of
perceiving, resisting, accepting, ignoring, all will and
authority from without. The great, and in many
respects so admirable, school of Rousseauite philan-
thropists, have always Ijcen feeble on this side, alike
in the treatment of the young by their instructors,
and the treatment of social offenders by a government.
Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities
which are associated with affectionate respect for a
more fully informed authority. Tn a world where
necessity stands for so much, it is no inconsiderable
218 ROUSSEAU. CHAP,
gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy
terms in our earliest days. If in another sense the
will of each individual is all-powerful over his own
destinies, it is best that this idea of firm purpose and
a settled energy that will not be denied, should grow
up in the young soul in connection vnth a riper
wisdom and an ampler experience than its own ; for
then, when the time for independent action comes,
the force of the association will continue. Finally,
although none can be vicariously wise, none sage by
proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet
is it not a puerile wastefulness to send forth the young
all bare to the ordeal, while the armour of old experi-
ence and tempered judgment hangs idle on the wall 1
Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from
generation to generation, that the area of right con-
duct in the world is extended. Such instruction
must with youth be conveyed by military word of
command as often as by philosophical persuasion of
its worth. Nor is the atmosphere of command other
than bracing, even to those who are commanded. If
education is to be mainly conducted by force of
example, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever
to have before its eyes as living type and practical
exemplar the pale figure of parents without passions,
and without a will as to the conduct of those who are
dependent on them. Even a slight excess of anger,
impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less
demoralising to the impressionable character than
the constant sight of a man artificially impassive.
IV, EMILIUS. 219
Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men to try to
lay aside their masks ; yet the moilel instructor whom
he has created for us is to be the most artfully and
elaborately masked of all men ; unless he happens to
be naturally without blood and Avithout physiognomy,
Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods
which imprisoned the young spirit in injunctions and
over-solicitous monitions, yet did none the less in his
own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse, which
with its regulated temperature and artificially con-
trived access of light and air, was in many respects
as little the method of nature, that is to say it gave
as little play for the spontaneous working and groAvth
of the forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that
regimen of the cloister which he so profoundly ab-
horred. Partly this was the result of a ludicrously
shallow psychology. He repeats again and again
that self-love is the one quality in the youthful
embryo of character, from which you have to work.
From this, lie says, springs the desire of possessing
pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on
which the lever of experience rests. Not only so,
but from this same unslumbering quality of self-love
you have to develop regard for others. The child's
first affection for his nurse is a result of the fact that
she serves his comfort, and so down to his passion in
later years for his mistress. Now this is not the place
for a discussion as to the ultimate atom of the com-
plex moral sentiments of men imd \vomen, nor for an
examination of the question whether the faculty of
220 koussf.au.
CHAP,
sympathy lias or has not an origin independent of
self-love. However that may be, no one will deny
that sympathy appears in good natures extremely
early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the
very first. Here is the only adequate key to that
education of the atTections, from their rudimentary
expansion in the nursery, until they include the com-
plete range of all the objects proper to them.
One secret of Eousseau's omission of this, the most
important of all educating agencies, from the earlier
stages of the formation of character, was the fact
which is patent enough in every page, that he was
not animated by that singular tenderness and almost
mystic affection for the young, which breathes through
the writings of some of his German followers, of
Richter above all others, and which reveals to those
who are sensible of it, the hold that may so easily be
gained for all good purposes upon the eager sympathy
of the youthful spirit. The instructor of Emilius
speaks the words of a wise onlooker, sagely meditating
on the ideal man, rather than of a parent who is
living the life of his child through with him. Rous-
seau's interest in children, though perfectly sincere, was
still aesthetic, moral, reasonable, rather than that pure
flood of full-hearted feeling for them, which is perhaps
seldom stirred except in those who have actually brought
up children of their own. He composed a vindication
of his love for the young in an exqiiisite piece ;^ but it
has none of the yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.
^ Tiiu Ninth rromenadc [Reveries, 309).
rv. EMIUUS. 221
IL
Etliication lacing the art of preparing the young to
grow into instruments of happiness for themselves
and others, a writer who undertakes to speak about
it must naturally have some conception of the kind
of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen
enough of Rousseau's own life to know what sort of
ideal he would be likely to set up. It is a healthier
epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make happiness
safe in case that circumstances should frown. The
man who has lived most is not he who has counted
most years, but he who has most felt life.^ It is
mere false wisdom to throw ourselves incessantly out
of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, ever to
pursue without ceasing a future which flees in pro-
portion as we advance, to try to transport ourselves
from whence we are not, to some place where we
shall never be.^ He is happiest who suffers fewest
pains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest
pleasiu-es. Then we have a half stoical strain. The
felicity of man here below is only a negative state, to
be measured by the more or less of the ills he under-
goes. It is in the disproportion between desires and
faculties that our misery consists. Happiness, there-
fore, lies not in diminishing our desires, nor any more
in extending our faculties, but in diminishing the
exce.ss of desire over faculty, and in bringing power
and will into perfect balance.^ Excepting health,
1 EmiU, I. 23. » H. 109. » II. 111.
222 ROUSSEAU. CHAP,
strength, respect for one's self, all the goods of this
life reside in opinion ; excepting bodily pain and
remorse of conscience, all our ills are in imagination.
Death is no evil ; it is only made so by half-knowledge
and false wisdom. "Live according to nature, be
patient, and drive away physicians ; you will not
avoid death, but you will only feel it once, wliile they
on the other hand would bring it daily before your
troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of
prolonging your days, only hinders you from enjoying
them. Suffer, die, or recover ; but al)ove all things
live, live up to your last hour." It is foresight, con-
stantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true
source of our miseries.^ man, confine thy existence
within thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable.
Thy liberty, thy power, reach exactly as far as thy
natural forces, and no further ; all the rest is slavery
and illusion. The only man who has his own will is
he who does not need in order to have it the arms of
another person at the end of his own."
The training that follows from this is obvious.
The instructor has carefully to distinguish true or
natural need from the need which is only fancied,
or which only comes from superabundance of life.
Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has noth-
ing in his room to distinguish it from that of a
peasant.^ If he is taken to a luxurious banquet, he
is l)idden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to reflect
austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands
1 Emile, II. 113-117 " II. 121. s n 143^
rr. EMILIUS. 223
have been employed in preparing it.^ His preference
for gay colours in his clothes is to be consulted,
because this is natural and becoming to his age, but
the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it if
rich, behold a sophisticated creature.'^ The curse of
the world is inequality, and inequality springs from
the multitude of wants, which cause us to be so much
the more dependent. What makes man essentially
good is to have few wants, and to abstain from com-
paring himself with others ; what makes him essen-
tially bad, is to have many wants, and to cling much
to opinion.^ Hence, although Emilius happened to
have both wealth and good birth, he is not brought
up to be a gentleman, with the prejudices and help-
lessness and selfishness too naturally associated with
that abused name.
This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with
its corollary of self-sufficience, contains in itself the
great maxim that Emilius and every one else must
learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty
in the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak,
every idle citizen is a knave. And every boy must
learn a real trade, a trade with his hands. It is not
so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of
knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the preju-
dices which despise it. Labour for glory, if you have
not to labour from necessity. Lower yourself to the
condition of the artisan, so as to be above your own.
In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over
' Emile, III. 382. = n 227. » IV. 10.
221 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
it. All tilings well considered, the trade most to be
preferred is that of carpenter ; it is clean, useful, and
capable of being carried on in the house ; it demands
address and diligence in the workman, and though
the form of the work is determined by utility, still
elegance and taste are not excluded.^ There are few
prettier pictures than that where Sophie enters the
workshop, and sees in amazement her young lover at
the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair
loosely fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and
a mallet in the other, too intent upon his work to
perceive even the approach of his mistress."
When the revolution came, and princes and nobles
wandered in indigent exile, the disciples of Rousseau
pointed in unkind triumph to the advantage these
unfortunate wretches would have had if they had
not been too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism
to follow the prudent example of Emilius in learning
a craft. That Rousseau should have laid so much
stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might
cause even a king to be grateful one day that he had
a trade at the end of his arms, is sometimes quoted
as a proof of his foresight of troublous times. This,
however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances
of such vicissitudes amonir the ancients, the Kinir of
Syracuse keeping school at Corinth, or Alexander,
son of Perseus, becoming a Roman scrivener, ho
actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender,
wandering from court to court in search of succour
» E„dle, III. 394. "^ V. 199.
IT.
ELMILIUS. 225
and receiving only rebuffs ; and he may Tvell have
kno-wTi that after the troubles of 1738 a considerable
number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had
gone into exile, rather than endure the humiliation
of their party. ^ Besides all this, the propriety of
being able to earn one's bread by some kind of toil
that would be useful in even the simplest societies,
flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of
the aims of life and the worth of character. He did,
however, say, " We approach a state of crisis and an
age of revolutions," which proved true, but he added
too much when he pronounced it impossible that the
great monarchies of Europe could last long.- And
it is certain that the only one of the great monarchies
which did actually fall would have had a far better
chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert
in the trade of king as he was in that of making locks
and bolts.
1 The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of
princes in Candide.
2 Emile, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage,
as far as it goes, is that in the Confessions (xi. 136) : — "The
disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault
of the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the
continual dissensions of the administration, divided as it was
among two or three ministers at open war with one another, and
who for the sake of hurting one another dragged the kingdom
into ruin ; the general discontent of the people, and of all the
orders of the state ; the obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman,
who, always sacrificing her better judgment, if indeed she had
any, to her tastes, dismissed the most capable from office, to
make room for her favourites .... all this prospect of a
coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter elsewhere."
VOL. II. Q
226 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain
social notions, of which Eousseau had the distinction of
being the most powerful propagator. As has so often
been said, his contemporaries were willing to leave
social questions alone, provided only the government
would suffer the free expression of opinion in litera-
ture and science. Rousseau went deeper. His moral
conception of individual life and character contained
in itself a social conception, and he did not shrink
from boldly developing it. The rightly constituted
man suffices for himself and is free from prejudices.
He has arms, and knows how to use them ; he has
few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured
in the most absolute freedom, he can think of no
worse ill than servitude. He attaches himself to the
beauty which perishes not, limiting his desires to his
condition, learning to lose whatever may be taken
away from him, to place himself above events, and
to detach his heart from loved objects without a
pang.^ He pities miserable kings, who are the bonds-
men of all that seems to obey them ; he pities false
sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their
empty renown ; he pities the silly rich, martyrs to
their own ostentation.^ All the sympathies of such
a man therefore naturally flow away from these, the
great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic's life
perforce. "It is the common people who compose
the human race ; what, is not the people is hardly
worth taking into account. Man is the same in all
1 Smile, V. 220, ^ ly. 85.
rv. K^r^LIUS. 227
ranks ; that being so, the ranks wliich are most
numerous deserve most respect. Before one who
reflects, all ci^al distinctions vanish : he marks the
same passions and the same feelings in the clown as
in the man covered with reputation; he can only
distinguish their speech, and a varnish more or less
elaborately laid on. Study people of this humble
condition ; you will perceive that under another sort
of language, they have as much intelligence as you,
and more good sense. Respect your species : reflect
that it is essentially made up of the collection of
peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were
cut off" from among them, they would scarcely be
missed, and the world would go none the worse." ^ As
it is, the universal spirit of the law in every country
is invariably to favour the strong against the weak,
and him who has, against him who has not. The
many are sacrificed to the few. The specious names
of justice and subordination serve only as instruments
for violence and arms for iniquity. The ostentatious
orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in
truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the
others.^
* Emile, IV. 38, 39. Hente, we suppose, the famous reply
to Lavoisier'a request that his life might be spared from the
guillotine for a fortnight, in order that he might complete some
experiments, that the Republic has no need of chemists.
" IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France
from 1784 to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then
afloat, writes in words that seem as if they were borrowed from
Roiiss«»an : — " I am convinced that those societies (aa the Indians)
228 ROUSSEAU. c'l'^P-
This was carrying on the work which had ah'eady
been begun in the New Heloisa, as we have seen, but
in the Emilias it is pushed with a gravity and a
directness, that could not be imparted to the picture
of a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The
only writer who has approached Rousseau, so far as
I know, in fulness and depth of expression in pro-
claiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind
crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant
civiHsation with its handful of occupants, is the
author of the Book of the People. Lamennais even
surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his pathos;
his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere
and as touching ; and there is in them, instead of the
an-er and bitterness of the older author, righteous as
that was, a certain heroism of pity and devoted
sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from
resentment into divine moods of compassion and re-
solve, and stir us like a tale of noble action.^ It was
which live without government, enjoy in their general mass an
infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live nnder
European governments. An.ong the former pubhc opinion la
in the state of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws
ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of govern-
ing they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves and
sheep. I do not exaggerate ; this is a true picture of Europe.
Tucker s Life of Jefferson, I -Ib^. , . t,
1 Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. _ In
the Essay on Indifference ho often appeals to him as the vuidi-
cator of the religious sentiment (e.g. i. 21 52, iv. 37 o, etc.
Ed 1837). The same influence is seen still more markedly in
the Words of a Believer (1835), when dogma had departed, and
tZs left with a kind of dual deism, thus being less estranged
IV.
EMILIUS. 229
Rousseau, however, who first sounded the note of
wliicli the religion that had once been the champion
and consoler of the common people, seemed long to
have lost even the tradition. Yet the teaching was
not constructive, because the ideal man was not made
truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of
the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of
nature. He marries, and then he and his wife seem
only fitted to lead a life of detachment from the
interests of the world in which they are placed.
Social or political education, that is the training
which character receives from the medium in which
it grows, is left out of account, and so is the correla-
tive process of preparation for the various conditions
and exigencies which belong to that medium, until
it is too late to take its natural place in character.
Nothing can be clumsier than the way in which
Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence and
nature of his relations with, his fellows. And the
reason of this was that he had never himself in the
course of his ruminations, willingly thought of
Emilius as being in a condition of active social rela-
tion, the citizen of a state.
III.
There appear to be three dominant states of mind,
with groups of faculties associated with each of them,
from Rousseau than in the first days {e.g. § xix. "Tous
naissent 6gaux," etc., § xxL, etc.) The Book of the People is
thoroniijhly Ronsseauite.
230 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
which it is the business of the instructor firmly to
establish in the character of the future man. The
first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth ;
for the conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific
reason, comprehending also a constant anxiety to
take all possible pains that such conclusions shall be
rightly drawn. Connected with this is the discipline
of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from the
simple habit of correct observation, down to the
highly complex habit of weighing and testing the
value of evidence. This very important branch of
early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own
which we have already often referred to, cared little
about, and he throws very little light upon it, be-
yond one or two extremely sensible precepts of the
negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon
and forcing an apparent progress too rapidly. The
second fundamental state in a rightly formed char-
acter is a deep feeling for things of the spirit which
are unknown and incommensurable ; a sense of awe,
mystery, sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at
its beginning and its end. Here is the Religious side,
and what Rousseau has to say of this we shall pre-
sently see. It is enough now to remark that Erailius
was never to hear the name of a God or supreme
being until his reason was fairly ripened. The third
state, which is at least as difficult to bring to healthy
perfection as either of the other two, is a passion for
Justice.
The little use which Rousseau made of this
IV. EMILIUS. 231
momentous and much-embracing word, which names
the highest peak of social virtue, is a very striking
circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his
sense of the relations of men with one another was
not virile enough to comprehend the deep austerer
lines which mark the brow of the benignant divinity
of Justice. In the one place in his writings where
he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of
idea, which was perhaps as much due to intellectual
confusion as to lack of moral robustness. He says
excellently that " love of the human race is nothing
else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the
virtues, justice is that which contributes most to the
common good of men." While enjoining the discipline
of pity as one of the noblest of sentiments, he warns
us against letting it degenerate into weakness, and
insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it
when it accords with justice.^ But that is all. What
constitutes justice, what is its standard, what its
source, what its sanction, whence the extraordinary
holiness with which its name has come to be invested
among the most highly civilised societies of men, we
are never told, nor do we ever see that our teacher
had seen the possibiHty of such questions being asked.
If they had been propounded to him, he would, it is
most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient
mystery of the natural law. This was the current
phrase of that time, and it was meant to embody a
hypothetical experience of perfect human relations in
' EmiU, IV. 105.
232 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP,
an expression of the widest generality. If so, this
would have to be impressed upon the mind of Emilius
in the same way as other mysteries. As a matter of
fact, Emilius was led through pity up to humanity,
or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he
was left without a further guide to define the marks
of truly social conduct.
This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable
from Rousseau's tenacity in keeping society in the
background of the picture of life which he opened to
his pupil. He said, indeed, " We must study society
by men, and men hy society ; those who would treat
politics and morality apart will never understand
anything about either one or the other." ^ This is
profoundly true, but we hardly see in the morality
whicli is designed for Emilius the traces of political
elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded pre-
sentation of society as a whole, it is scarcely possible
to implant the idea of justice with any hope of large
fertility. You may begin at a very early time to
develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love,
a notion of equity and a respect for it, but the vast
conception of social justice can only find room in a
character that has been made spacious by habitual
contemplation of the height and breadth and close
compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind
man to man, and of the share, integral or infinitesi-
mally fractional, that each has in the happiness or
woe of other souls. And this contemplation should
1 Emile, IV. 63.
IV.
EMILIUS. 233
begin when we prepare the foundation of all the
other maturer habits. Youth can hardly recognise
too soon the enormous unresting machine which bears
us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too
soon that its force and direction depend on the play
of human motives, of which our own for good or evil
form an inevitable part when the ripe years come.
To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius,
or with the capricious negligence in which the majority
are left to grow to manhood, the society into which
they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They
are to make such way through it as they can, with
egotism for their only trusty instrument This
egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most
part, or it may be a delicately adjusted and fastidi-
ously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In
either case is no perception that the gross outer
contact of men with another is transformed by
worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common
excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It
is our business to fix and root the habit of thinking
of that moral union, into which, as Kant has so
admirably expressed it, the pathological necessities of
situation that first compelled social concert, have been
gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the
primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory
of education brings first into prominence ; as if know-
ledge of origins were indispensable to a right attach-
ment to the transformed conditions of a maturersystem.
It has been said that Rousseau foimds all morality
234 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
upon personal interest, perhaps even more specially
than Helv6tius himself. The accusation is just.
Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of
that social conscience, which animates a man with all
the associations of duty and right, of gratitude for
the past and resolute hope for the future, in face of
the great body of which he finds himseK a part. " I
observe," says Eousseau, "that in the modern ages
men have no hold upon one another save through
force and interest, while the ancients on the other
hand acted much more by persuasion and the affec-
tions of the soul." ^ The reason was that with the
ancients, supposing him to mean the Greeks and
Romans, the social conscience was so much wider in
its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of
duty Avhich is supposed to come under the sacred
power of conscience in the more complex and less
closely contained organisation of a modern state.
The neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those
times comprehended all the members of his state.
The neighbours of the modem preacher of duty are
either the few persons with whom each of us is brought
into actual and palpable contact, or else the whole
multitude of dwellers on the earth, — a conception
that for many ages to come will remain with the
majority of men and women too vague to exert an
energetic and concentrating influence upon action, and
will lead them no further than an uncoloured and
nerveless cosmopohtanism. ,
1 Emile, IV. 273.
lY. E>ULIUS. 235
WTiat the young need to have taught to them in
this too little cultivated region, is that they are born
not mere atoms floating independent and apart for a
season through a terraqueous medium, and sucking
up as much more than their share of nourishment as
they can seize ; nor citizens of the world with no
more definite duty than to keep their feelings towards
all their fellows in a steady simmer of bland com-
placency ; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity
whose boundaries are not set down in maps, members
of a church the handwriting of whose ordinances is
not in the hieroglyphs of idle mystery, nor its hope
and recompense in the lauds beyond death. They
need to be taught that they owe a share of their
energies to the great struggle which is in ceaseless
progress in all societies in an endless variety of forms,
between new truth and old prejudice, between love
of self or class and solicitous passion for justice,
between the obstructive indolence and inertia of the
many and the generous mental activity of the few.
This is the sphere and definition of the social conscience.
The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all
lands, — here is the church militant in which we should
early seek to enrol the young, and the true state to
which they should be taught that they owe the duties
of active and arduous citizenship. These are the
struggles with which the modern instructor should
associate those virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent
patience, outspoken energy, readiness to assert our-
selves and readiness to efface ourselves, willingness to
236 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men of
old knew how to show for their 2;ods or their sovereim.
But the ideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism ; to
possess his own soul in patience, with a suppressed
intelligence, a suppressed sociality, without a single
spark of generous emulation in the courses of strong-
fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after
so much as one great forlorn cause.
" If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels
of the famous ancients, to desire to be another rather
than himself, were this other Socrates, were he Cato,
you have missed the mark ; he who begins to make
himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he
forgets himself altogether."^ But if a man only
nurses the conception of his own personality, for the
sake of keeping his own peace and self-contained
comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the best
thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest
his example should infect others with the same base
contagion. Excessive personality when militant is
often wholesome, excessive personality that only hugs
itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean
things. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of
moral enthusiasm is fatally tarnished by the cold
damp breath of isolation, and the very book which
contained so many elements of new life for a state,
was at bottom the apotheosis of social despair.
' Eniik, IV. 83.
IV.
EMILIUS. 237
IV.
The great agent iu fostering the rise to vigour and
uprightness of a social conscience, apart from the yet
more powerful instrument of a strong and energetic
public spirit at work around the gi'owing character,
must be found in the study of history rightly directed
with a view to this end. It is here, in observing the
long processes of time and appreciating the slowly
accumulating sum of endeavour, that the mind
gradually comes to read the great lessons how close
is the bond that links men together. It is here that
he gradually begins to acquire the habit of consider-
ing what are the conditions of wise social activity, its
limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the capacity of
collective achievement, and of what sort is the signifi-
cance and purport of the little span of time that cuts
oft' the yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.
Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching
of history to young children, on the ground that the
essence of history lies in the moral relations between
the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms
and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the
intellectual grasp of the very young. ^ He might
have based his objections equally well upon the im-
possibihty of little children knowing the meaning of
the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a
' Emile, II. 185. See the previous page for some equally
prudent observations on the folly of teaching geography to little
children.
238 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
historical manual, or realising the relations between
events in bare point of time, although childhood may
perhaps be a convenient period for some mechanical
acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history
was to appear very late in the educational course,
when the youth was almost ready to enter the world.
It was to be the finishing study, from which he should
learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher
moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man,
in a safer way than through actual intercourse with
society. Society might make him either cynical or
frivolous. History would bring him the same infor-
mation, without subjecting him to the same perils.
In society you only hear the words of men ; to know
man you must observe his actions, and actions are
only unveiled in history.^ This view is hardly worth
discussing. The subject of history is not the heart
of man, but the movements of societies. Moreover,
the oracles of history are entirely dumb to one who
seeks from them maxims for the shaping of daily
conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims,
caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of
those with whom the occasions of life bring us into
contact.
It is true that at the close of the other part of his
education, Emilius was to travel and there find the
comment upon the completed circle of his studies. -
But excellent as travel is for some of the best of those
who have the opportunity, still for many it is value-
» Em lie IV. 68. ^ V. 231, etc.
rr. EMILIUS. 239
less for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great
majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To
trust so much us Rousseau did to the effect of travel-
ling, is to leave a large chasm in education unbridged.
It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rous-
seau's notions about history as an instrument for
conveying moral instruction, a few of them are so
good, others are so characteristically narrow. " The
worst historians for a young man," he says, "are
those -who judge. The facts, the facts ; then let him
judge for himself. If the author's judgment is for
ever guiding him, he is only seeing -with the eye of
another, and as soon as this eye fails him, he sees
nothing." Modem history is not fit for instruction,
not only because it has no physiognomy, all our men
being exactly like one another, but because our
historians, intent on brilliance above all other thinss.
^ think of nothing so much as painting highly coloured
portraits, which for the most part represent nothing
at all.^ Of course such a judgment as this implies
an ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history,
which, considering that he was living in the midst of
a singular revival of historical study, is not easy to
pardon. If we are to look only to perfection of form
and arrangement, it may have been right for one
living in the middle of the last century to place the
ancients in the first rank without competitors. But
the author of the Discourse upon literature and the
arts might have been expected to look beyond com-
' ^mile, IV. 71.
240 ROUSSEAU.
CUAP.
position, and the contemporary of Voltaire's Essai sur
les Mceurs (17541-757) might have been expected to
know that the profitable experience of the human
race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic.
Among the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides
to be the true model, because he reports facts without
judging, and omits none of the circumstances proper
for enabling us to judge of them for ourselves — though
how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has
omitted, I am unable to divine. Then come Caesar's
Commentaries and Xenophon's Retreat of the Ten
Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits
and without maxims, but abounding in details the
most capable of interesting and pleasing, would
perhaps be the best of historians, if only these details
did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy is
unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhe-
torician. Tacitus is the book of the old ; you must
have learnt the art of reading facts, before you can
be trusted with maxims.
The drawback of histories such as those of Thucy-
dides and Caesar, Rousseau admits to be that they
dwell almost entirely on war, leaving out the true life
of nations, which belongs to the unwritten chronicles
of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection
that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual
and progressive causes which led to them. "They
often find in a battle lost or won the reason of a
revolution, which even before the battle was already
incNitable. War scarcely does more than bring into
IV. EMILIUS. 241
full light events determined by moral causes, which
historians can seldom penetrate."^ A third complaint
against the study which he began by recommending
as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is
that it does not present men but actions, or at least
men only in their parade costume and in certain
chosen moments, and he justly reproaches writers
alike of history and biography, for omitting those
trifling strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal
the true physiognomy of character, "Eemain then
for ever, without bowels, without nature; harden
your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency,
and make yourselves despicable by force of dignity." ^
And so after all, by a common stroke of impetuous
inconsistency, he forsakes history, and falls back upon
the ancient biographies, because, all the low and
familiar details being banished from modern style,
however true and characteristic, men are as elabor-
ately tricked out by our authors in their private lives
as they were tricked out upon the stage of the world.
V.
As women are from the constitution of things the
educators of us all at the most critical periods, and
mainly of their own sex from the beginning to the
end of education, the writer of the most imperfect
treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly
avoid saying something on the upbringing of women.
1 Emile, IV. 73. » IV. 77.
voi* II. a
242 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
Such a writer may start from one of three points of
view ; he may consider the woman as destined to be
a wife, or a mother, or a human being ; as the com-
panion of a man, as the rearer of the young, or as an
independent personahty, endowed with gifts, talents,
possibilities, in less or greater number, and capable,
as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst
or the best uses. Of course to every one who looks
into life, each of these three ideals melts into the
other two, and we can only think of them effectively
when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appre-
ciation of the conditions of human progress by observ-
ing the function wliich he makes most prominent. A
man's whole thought of the worth and aim of Avoman-
hood depends upon the generosity and elevation of
the ideal which is silently present in his mind, while
he is specially meditating the relations of woman as
wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable of
thinking of them as human beings, independently of
these two functions, he is sure to have comparatively
mean notions in connection with them in respect of
the functions which he makes paramount.
Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing
fashion in Avhich he developed the theory of indi-
vidualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on man
being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead
of the man of art and manufacture, might have led us
to expect that when he came to speak of women, he
would suffer equity and logic to have their way, by
pjiving equally free room in the two halves of the
""• KMILIUS.
213
human race, for the development of natural force and
capacity. If, as he begins by saying, he wishes to
bring up Emilias, not to be a merchant nor a physician
nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special
callmg, but to be first and above all a man, why should
not Sophie too be brought up above all to be a human
being, in whom tiie special qualifications of wifehood
and motherhood may be developed in their due order?
EmiUus ,3 a man first, a husband and a father after-
wards and secondarily. How can Sophie be a com-
panion for him, and an instructor for their children
unless she likewise has been left in the hands of
nature, and had the same chances permitted to her
as were given to her predestined mate ? A-ain the
pictures of the New Heloisa would have led na to
conceive the ideal of womanly station not so much
in the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem
and sober affection to her husband, but havin- for
her chief functions to be the gentle guardian of her
httle ones, and the mild, firm, and prudent adminis-
trator of a cheerful and well-ordered household In
the la^t book of the Emihus, which treats of the
education of girls, education is reduced within the
compass of an even narrower ideal than this We
are confronted ^vith the oriental conception of womea
Every principle that has been followed in the edu-
cation of Emilius is reversed in the education of
women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among
men, is among women its high throne. The whole
education of women ought to be relative to men • to
244 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
please them, to be useful to tliem, to make themselves
loved and honoured by them, to console them, to
render their lives agreeable and sweet to them, —
these are the duties which ought to be taught to
women from their childhood. Every girl ought to
have the religion of her mother, and every wife that
of her husband. Not being in a condition to judge
for themselves, they ought to receive the decision of
fathers and husbands as if it were that of the church.
And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it
is not so much a matter of explaining to them the
reasons for belief, as for expounding clearly to them
what to believe. Although boys are not to hear of
the idea of God until they are fifteen, because they
are not in a condition to apprehend it, yet gii'ls who
are still less in a condition to apprehend it, are there-
fore to have it imparted to them at an earlier age.
"Woman is created to give way to man, and to suffer
his injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness,
mildness, and complaisance. Her orders are caresses,
and her threats are tears. Girls must not only be
made laborious and vigilant ; they must also very early
be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint.
This misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from
their sex, and if ever they attempt to escape from it,
they will only suifer misfortunes still more cruel in
consequence.^
After a series of oriental and obscurantist proposi-
tions of this kind, it is of little purpose to tell us that
« 'Emile. V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.
rv. EMILIUS. 24.')
women have more intelligence and men more genius ;
that women observe, while men reason ; that men will
philosophise better upon the human heart, while
women will be more skilful in reading it.^ And it is
a mere mockery to end the matter by a fer\id assur-
ance, that in spite of prejudices that have their origin
in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what
is worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than
it is to men, and that there is nothing which under
the guidance of nature may not be obtained from them
as well as from ourselves.^ Finally there is a complete
surrender of the obscurantist position in such a
sentence as this : " I only know for either sex two
really distinct classes ; one the people who think, the
other the people who do not think, and this difference
comes almost entirely from education. A man of the
first of these classes ought not to marry into the other;
for the greatest charm of companionship is wanting,
when in spite of liaving a wife he is reduced to think
by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that pro-
vides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing
for a father of a family who loves his home, to be
obliged to shut himself up within himself, and to have
no one about him who understands him. Besides,
how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to
bring up her children ?"' Nothing could be more
excellentlv urged. But how is a woman to have
habits of reflection, when she has been constantl}'
brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage,
1 Einilf. V. 78. • V. 122. ' V 129. 130.
246 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
trained always to consider her first business to be the
pleasing of some man, and her instruments not reason-
able persuasion but caressing and crying ?
This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like
nearly all his most serious errors, to Rousseau's want
of a conception of improvement in human affairs. If
he had been filled with that conception as Turgot,
Condorcet, and others were, he would have been
forced as they Avere, to meditate upon changes in the
education and the recognition accorded to women, as
one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack
of this, he contributed nothing to the most imjiortant
branch of the subject that he had undertaken to
treat. He Avas always taunting the champions of
reigning systems of training for boys, with the
vicious or feeble men whom he thought he saw on
every hand around him. The same kind of answer
obviously meets the cuiTent idea, which he adopted
with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type
of the relations between men and women. That type
practically reduces marriage in ninety-nine cases out of
every hundred to a dolorous parodj'^ of a social partner-
ship. It does more than any one other cause to keep
societies back, because it prevents one half of the
members of a society from cultivating all their natural
energies. Thus it produces a waste of helpful quality
as immeasurable as it is deplorable, and besides rearing
these creatures of mutilated faculty to be the intellec-
tually demoralising companions of the remaining half
of their own generation, makes them the mothers and
rv. EMILIUS. 247
the earliest and most influential instructors of the
whole of the generation that comes after. ^ Of course,
if anv one believes that the existing arransrements of
a western community are the most successful that we
can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not
complain of Eousseau. If not, then it is only reason-
able to suppose that a considerable portion of the
change will be effected in the hitherto neglected and
subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of
the family, which Rousseau and others among his
contemporaries rightly sought after as one of the most
pressing needs of the time, was essentially impossible,
so long as the typical woman was the adornment of a
semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between
the frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the
impertinent ideal of a Parisian gallant. Condorcet
and others made a grievous mistake in defending the
free gratification of sensual passion, as one of the
conditions of happiness and making the most of our
lives. ^ But even this was not at bottom more fatal
to the maintenance and order of the family, than
Kousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in
strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to
the family as the true school of high and equal
companionship, and the fruitful seed -ground of
^ Well did Jean Paul say, " If we regard all life as an educa-
tional institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influ-
enced by all the nations he has seen than by his nui-se," —
Lctana.
' Tableau dcs Progris de V Esprit Humain. (Euv., vi. pp.
2fi4, 523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]
248 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP
Avise activities and new hopes for each fresh gener-
ation.
This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary ten-
dencies. Fortunately for the revohition of thirty
years later, which illustrated the gallery of heroic
women with some of its most splendid names, his
power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger
tendencies in the general spirit of the age. The
aristocracy of sex was subjected to the same destructive
criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same feeling
for justice which inspired the demand for freedom
and equality of opportunity among men, led to the
demand for the same freedom and equalit}^ of oppor-
tunity between men and women. All this was part
of the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked
with undi.^gmsed bitterness. It broke inconveniently
in upon his quietest visions. He had no conception,
with his sensuous brooding imagination, never wholly
purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of
women whom French history so often produced in
the seventeenth century, and who were not wanting
towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which
devotion went with force, and austerity with SAveetness,
and divine candour and transparent innocence A^ath
energetic loyalty and intellectual uprightness and a
firmly set will. Such thoughts were not for Rousseau,
a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for
none of us any more. When we turn to modern
literature from the pages in which F^nelon speaks of
the education of girls, who does not feel that the
IV, EiOLroS. 249
world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineflable
essence has passed out from our hearts ?
The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the
education of women, but an idyll. We have already
seen the circumstances under which Rousseau com-
posed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the
midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the
orange -flower poured around him, and in continual
ecstasy. As an idyll it is delicious ; as a serious con-
tribution to the hardest of problems it is naught The
sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it
be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of
deep tragic irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's
most energetic adversary could have desired. The
Sophie who has been educated on the oriental principle,
has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the
blameless Emilius, her lord.^
VI.
Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing
upon education is not to be lightly coimted. Its value
lies, as has been said of the New Helo'isa, in the spirit
which animates it and communicates itself ^Nith vivid
force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books
in the history of literature, and of such books the
worth resides less in the parts than in the whole. It
touched the deeper things of character. It filled
parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of
their task. It cleared away the accumidation of
* Emile et Sovhit i
250 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
cloggiug prejudices and obscure inveterate usage,
which made education one of the dark formalistic
arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the
tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected
the substitution of growth for mechanism. A strong
current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity, self-
reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its
eloquence was the most powerful adjuration ever
addressed to parental affection to cherish the young
life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was the
charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate
effect of Eniilius in France was mainly on the religious
side. It was the Christian religion that needed to
be avenged, rather than education that needed to be
amended, and the press overflowed with replies to
that profession of faith which we shall consider in
the next chapter. Still there was also an immense
quantity of educational books and pamphlets, which
is to be set down, first to the suppression of the Jesuits,
the great educating order, and the vacancy which they
left ; and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a
movement from which the book itself had originally
been an outcome.^ But why try to state the in-
fluence of Emilius on France in this way 1 To strike
the account truly would be to write the history of
the first French Revolutiom^ All mothers, as Michelet
^ For an account of some of these, see Grimm's Corr. Lit.,
iil 211, 252, 347, etc. Also Corr. Ined., p. 143.
- For the early date at which Rousseau's power began to
meet recognition, see D'Alembeit to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.
IV. EMILITJS. 251
says, were big with Emilius. " It is not without good
reason that people have noted the children bom at
this glorious moment, as animated by a superior
spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the gener-
iition of revolutionary Titans : the other generation
not less hardy in science. It is Danton, Vergniaud,
Desmoulins ; it is Ampere, La Place, Cuvier, Geoffroy
Saint Hilaire."^
In Germany Emilius had great power. There it
fell in with the extraordinary movement towards
naturalness and freedom of which we have already
spoken." Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau
of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then
beloved Caroline of the " divine Emilius," and he
never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his inspirer and
his master.^ Basedow (1723), that strange, restless,
and most ill -regulated person, was seized with an
almost phrenetic enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational
theories, translated them into German, and repeated
them in his works over and over again with an inces-
sant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed
from Basedow in being a fervent Christian of soft
mystic faith, was thrown into company with him in
1774, and grew equally eager vriih him in the cause
of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.*
* Louis XV. et xvi. , p. 226.
* .See above, vol. ii. p. 193.
* Hettner, iii. iiL, 2, p. 27, s.v. HerJer.
* The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's
name is most commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius.
" It is supposed that physiognomy is only a development o(
252 ROUSSEAU. CfHAP
Pestalozzi (1746-1827), the most systematic, popular,
and permanently successful of all the educational re-
formers, borrowed his spirit and his principles mainly
from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension
and more intelligent exactitude to their application.
Jean Paul the Unique, in the preface to his Levana,
or Doctrine of Education (1806), one of the most ex-
cellent of all books on the subject, declares that among
previous works to which he owes a debt, " first and
last he names Rousseau's Emilius ; no preceding work
can be compared to his; in no previous work on
education was the ideal so richly combined with the
actual," and so forth.^ It was not merely a Goethe,
a Schiller, a Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new
thoughts. The smaller men, such as Fr, Jacobi,
Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The
worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched
every degree of intelligence.^
In our own country Emilius was translated as soon
as it appeared, and must have been widely read, for
a second version of the translation was called for in a
very short time. So far as a cnrsory survey gives
features already marked by nature. For my part, I should
think that besides this development, the features of a man's
countenance form themselves insensibly and take their expres-
sion from the frequent and habitual wearing into them of cer-
tain affections of the soul. These affections mark themselves
in the countenance, nothing is more certain ; and when they
grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it."
IV. 49, 50.
1 Author's Preface, x.
"^ See an excellent page in M. Joret's Herder, 322.
IV.
EMIUUS. 253
one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of
education is not very perceptible. That subject did
not yet, nor for some time to come, excite much
active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations
on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to
have attracted more attention. Reference has already
been made to Paley.^ Adam Ferguson's celebrated
Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has
many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.^
Kames's Sketches of the History of Man (1774)
abounds still more copiously in references to Emilius,
sometimes to controvert its author, more often to cite
him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's
crude notions about women are cited with special
acceptance.^ Cowper was probably thinking of the
Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic lines in
the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and
set him free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue
apostate man.* Nor should we omit what was counted
so important a book in its day as Godwin's Enquiry
concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps
more French in its spirit than any other work of
equal consequence in our literature of politics, and in
1 See above, vol. ii. p. 191. » E.g. pp. 8, 19S, 204, 205.
3 E.g. Bk. I. § 5, p. 279. § 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion
concerning the female sex).
* Yv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol ii, p. 41,
71.) that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to
the Deist as "an Orpheus and omnipotent in song," coincides
with Rousseau's comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to "the
divine Orpheus singing the first hymn" {Emile., IV. 205).
254 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
its composition the author was avowedly a student of
Rousseau, as well as of the members of the material-
istic school.
In fine we may add that Emilius was the first
expression of that democratic tendency in education,
which political and other circumstances gradually
made general alike in England, France, and Germany;
a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process
concerning others besides the rich and the well-bom.
As has often been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke,
F6nelon, busy themselves about the instruction of
young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the
world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by
the education of circumstance. Since the middle of
the eighteenth century this monopolising conception
has vanished, along with and through the same general
agencies as the corresponding conception of social
monopoly. Rousseau enforced the production of a
natural and self-sufficing man as the object of educa-
tion, and showed, or did his best to show, the infinite
capacity of the young for that simple and natural
cultivation. This easily and directly led people to
reflect that such a capacity was not confined to the
children of the rich, nor the hope of producing a
natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had
every external motive placed around them for being
neither natural nor self-sufficing.
Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but
admitted that it contained fifty pages which he would
have bound in morocco. These, we may be sure, con-
rv. EMILIUS, 255
cemed religion ; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's
profession of faith which stirred France far more
than the upbringing of the natural man in things
temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent document
which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as
the expression of the religious opinion that best befits
the man of nature — a document most hyperbolically
counted by some French enthusiasts for the spiritualist
philosophy and the religion of sentiment, as the noblest
monument of the eighteenth century.
y
CHAPTER Y.
THE SAVOYARD VIUAR,
The band of dogmatic atheists who met round
D'Holbach's dinner -table indulged a shallow and
futile hope, if it was not an ungenerous one, when
they expected the immediate advent of a generation
with whom a humane and rational philosophy should
displace, not merely the superstitions which had
grown around the Christian dogma, but every root
and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of this
kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the
hold which Christianity had taken of the religious
emotion in western Europe, and of the durableness of
those conditions in human character, to which some
belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of
good attributes brings solace and nourishment. A
movement like that of Christianity does not pass
through a group of societies, and then leave no trace
behind. It springs from many other sources besides
that of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The
stream of its influence must continue to flow long
after adherence to the letter has been confined to
the least informed portions of a community. The
y. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 257
Encyclopaedists knew that they had sapped religious
dogma and shaken ecclesiastical organisation. They
forgot that religious sentiment on the one hand, and
habit of respect for authority on the other, were both
of them still left behind. They had convinced them-
selves by a host of persuasive analogies that the
universe is an automatic machine, and man only an
industrious particle in the stupendous whole ; that a
final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelli-
gence ; and that to make emotion in this or any other
respect a test of objective truth and a ground of
positive belief, is to lower both truth and the reason
which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagina-
tion is as active in man as his reason, and that a
craving for mental peace may become much stronger
than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianity
had given to this craving in western Europe a definite
mould, which was not to be effaced in a day, and one
or two of its lines mark a permanent and noble
acquisition to the highest forces of human nature.
There will have to be wrought a profounder and more
far-spreading modification than any which the French
atheists could effect, before all debilitating influences
in the old creed can be effaced, its elevating influences
finally separated from them, and then permanently
preserved in more beneficent form and in an associa-
tion less questionable to the understanding.
Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can
ever suffice. There must be a coincidence of many
silently oppugnant forces, emotional, scientific, and
VOL. II. S
258 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
material. And, above all, there must be the slow
steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall
retain all the elements of moral beauty that once
gave light to the old belief that has disappeared, and
must still possess a living force in the new.
Here we find the good side of a religious reaction
such as that which Rousseau led in the last century,
and of Avhich the Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith
was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was in
many respects, and especially in the check which it
gave to the application of positive methods and con-
ceptions to the most important group of our beliefs,
yet it had what was the very signal merit under the
circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious
emotions alive in association with a tolerant, pure,
lofty, and living set of articles of faith, instead of
feeding them on the dead superstitions which were
at that moment the only practical alternative. The
deism of Rousseau could not in any case have acquired
the force of the corresponding religious reaction in
England, because the former never acquired a compact
and vigorous external organisation, as the latter did,
especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the
most remarkable of its developments. In truth the
vague, fluid, purely subjective character of deism dis-
qualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of any
great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom
the sublimation of individualism. But in itself it was
a far less retrogressive, as well as a far less powerful,
movement. It kept fewer of those dogmas which
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 259
gradual change of intellectual climate had reduced
to the condition of rank superstitions. It presei'ved
some of its own, which a still further extension of the
same change is assuredly destined to reduce to the
same condition ; but, nevertheless, along with them
it cherished sentiments which the world will never
willingly let die.
The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine,
which is of course to be distinguished from the
services rendered to ciWlisation in early times by the
Christian church, has been the contribution to the
active intelligence of the west, of those moods of
holiness, awe, reverence, and silent worship of an
Unseen not made with hands, which the Christianis-
ing Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric
which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so
enduring, with its magnificent whole and its minutely
reticulated parts of belief and practice, this gradual
creation of a new temperament in the religious
imagination of Western Europe and the countries
that take their mental direction from her, is perhaps
the only portion that will remain distinctly visible,
after all the rest has sunk into the repose of histories
of opinion. AVhfjther this be the case or not, the
fact that these deeper moods are among the richest
acquisitions of human nature, will not be denied
either by those who think that Christianity associates
them with objects destined permanently to awake
them in their loftiest form, or by others who believe
that the deepest moods of which man is capable, must
260 ROUSSEAU.
CRAP.
ultimately ally themselves with something still more
purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised deities
of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's
deism, while intercepting the steady advance of the
rationalistic assault and divertins; the current of
renovating energy, still did something to keep alive
in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the
slowly expiring system which men have the best
reasons for cherishing.
Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism
with as much precision as it allows. It was a special
and graceful form of a doctrine which, though sus-
ceptible, alike in theory and in the practical history
of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties of
significance, is commonly designated by the name of
deism, without qualification. People constantly speak
as if deism only came in with the eighteenth century.
It would be impossible to name any century since
the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces
could not be found within the dominion of Christi-
anity of a belief in a supernatural power apart from
the supposed disclosure of it in a special revelation.^
A pra^ter-christian deism, or the principle of natural
religion, was inevitably contained «in the legal con-
ception of a natural law, for how can we dissociate
the idea of h\w from the idea of a definite lawgiver 1
^ See Hallam's Literature of Europe, Pt. I. ch. ii. § 64.
Again (for the 16tli century), Pt. II. ch. ii. § 53. See also
for mention of a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's
Dictionan% .?. v. Viret.
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 261
The very scholastic disputations themselves, by the
sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reason-
ing faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these
novelties were not always of a kind which orthodox
views of the Christian mysteries could have sanc-
tioned. It has been said that religion is at the
cradle of every nation, and philosophy at its grave ;
it is at least true that the cradle of philosophy is the
open grave of religion. Wherever there is argumen-
tation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people
begin to reason, a shadow has already fallen across
faith, though the reasoners might have shrunk with
hon'or from knowledge of the goal of their work,
and though centuries may elapse before the shadow
deepens into eclipse. But the church was strong
and alert in the times when free thought vainly
tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom,
while the prolonged and tempestuous discussion be-
tween the old church and the reformed bodies, as
well as the manifold variations among those bodies
at strife ^vith one another, stimulated the gro^^'th of
religious thought in many directions that tended
away from the exclusive pretensions of Christianity
to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feel-
ing which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition
between the soul of man and its sovereign creator
and inspirer, gradually worked towards the dethrone-
ment of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in
whom the moral timidity of a dark and stricken age
262 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
had once sought shade from the too dazzhng bright-
ness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting. The
assertion of the rights and powers of the individual
reason within the limits of the sacred documents,
began in less than a hundred years to grow into an
assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those
limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for
independent judgment, in interpreting or supplement-
ing the records of revelation, gradually impaired the
traditional authority both of the records themselves,
and of the central doctrines which all churches had
in one shape or another agreed to accept. The Trini-
tarian controversy of the sixteenth century must have
been a stealthy solvent. The deism of England in
the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime
agent in introducing in its negative, colourless, and
essentially futile shape into his own country, had its
main eifect as a process of dissolution.
All this, however, down to the deistical move-
ment which Rousseau found in progress at Geneva
in 1754,^ was distinctly the outcome in a more or
less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic
spirit, and not of the religious spirit. The sceptical
side of it with reference to revealed religion, pre-
dominated over the positive side of it with reference
to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which
there were one or two extraordinary outbursts dur-
ing the latter part of the middle ages, to mark the
mystical influence which Platonic studies uncorrected
1 See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 263
by science always exert over certain temperaments,
had been full of religiosity, such as it was. These
had all passed away with a swift flasL There were,
indeed, mystics like the author of the immortal Be
Imitaiione, in whom the special qualities of Christian
doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood
of devout aspiration towards the perfections of a
single Being. But this was not the deism with
which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism
on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism,
in its formal acceptation, was either an idle piece of
vaporous sentimentality, or else it was the first intel-
lectual halting-place for spirits who had travelled out
of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and
lacked strength for the continuance of their onward
journey. In the latter case, it was only another
name either for the shrewd rough conviction of the
man of the world, that his universe could not well
be imagined to go on without a sort of constitutional
monarch, reigning but not governing, keeping evil-
doers in order by fear of eternal punishment, and
lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable
doctrines of property, the gradation of rank and
station, and the other moral foundations of the social
structure. Or else it was a name for a purely philo-
sophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the
basis of a religion, but accepted with decorous satis-
faction as the alternative to a religion ; not seized
upon as the mainspring of spiritual life, but held up
as a shield in a controversy.
264 KOUSSEAU.
CUAP.
The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained
to Emilius in his profession of faith was pitched in
a very different tone from this. Though the Vicar's
conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round
Avith rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn
from the evidences of will and intelli2;ence in the
vast machinery of the universe, yet it was essentially
the product not of reason, but of emotional expansion,
as every fundamental article of a faith that touches
the hearts of many men must always be. The Savo-
yard Vicar did not believe that a God had made the
great world, and rules it with majestic poAver and
supreme justice, in the same way in which he believed
that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the
third side. That tliei'e is a mysterious being penetrat-
ing all creation with force, was not a proposition to
be demonstrated, but only the poor description in
words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life
than words can ever carry us. Without for a single
moment falling ofl' into the nullities of pantheism,
neither did he for a single moment suffer his thought
to stiff'en and grow hard in the formal lines of a theo-
logical definition or a systematic credo. It remains
firm enough to give the religious imagination con-
sistency and a centre, yet luminous enough to give
the spiritual faculty a vivifying consciousness of
freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a
number of affirmations, and is constantly held with
honest strenuousness by multitudes of men and
women who are unfitted by natural temperament
/
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAK. 265
for knownng what the glow of religious emotion
means to the human soul, — for not every one that
saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of heaven.
The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a
creed, and so has few affirmations; it was a single
doctrine, melted in a glow of contemplative trans-
port. It is impossible to set about disproving it,
for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against
the idleness of logomachy, and insists that the existr
ence of the Divinity is traced upon every heart in
letters that can never be effaced, if we are only con-
tent to read them with lowliness and simplicity.
You cannot demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an
aspiration. How reason, asks the Savoyard Vicar,
about that which we cannot conceive 1 Conscience
is the best of all casuists, and conscience aflSrms the
presence of a being who moves the universe and
ordains all things, and to him we give the name of
God.
"To this name I join the ideas of intelligence,
power, will, which I have united in one, and that of
goodness, which is a necessary consequence flowing
from them. Lut I do not know any the better for
this the being to whom I have given the name ; he
escapes equally from my senses and my understanding;
the more I think of him, the more I confound myself.
I have full assurance that he exists, and that he exists
by himself. I recognise my own being as subordinate
to his and all the things that are known to me as being
absolutely in the same case. I perceive God every-
266 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
where in his works ; I feel him in myself; I see him uni-
versally around me. But when I fain would seek where
he is, what he is, of what substance, he glides away
from me, and my troubled soul discerns nothing."^
" In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contem-
plate his infinite essence, the less do I conceive it.
But it is, and that suffices me. The less I conceive
it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say
to him, bemg of beings, I am because thou art ; to
meditate ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to
raise myself to my veritable source and fount. The
worthiest use of my reason is to make itself as naught
before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it is
the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low
before the awful majesty of thy greatness."^
Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so
long been flying like fiery shafts against the far
Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent Christ of the
later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the
orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate,
and leaden refutations that could not refute, may
Avell have turned with ardour to listen to this har-
monious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a region
toAvards which their hearts yearned with untold
aspiration, but from which the spirit of their time
had shut them off" with brazen barriers. It was the
elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was
the restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one
must turn to such a book as Helv6tius's, which was
1 Emile, IV. 163. ^ ly. 183-185.
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 267
supposed to reveal the whole inner machinery of the
heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece of
mechanism principally moved from without, not as a
conscious organism, receiving nourishment and direc-
tion from the medium in which it is placed, but
reacting with a life of its own from ^Wthin. It was
this free and energetic inner life of the individual
which the Savoyard Vicar restored to lawful recogni-
tion, and made once more the centre of that imaginative
and spiritual existence, without wliich we live in a
universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by
night A writer in whom learning has not extinguished
enthusiasm, compares this to the advance made by
Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by
turning thought confidently upon itself; aud he
declares that the Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipa-
tion of sentiment what the Discourse upon Method
was for the emancipation of the understanding. ^
There is here a certain audacity of panegyric ; still the
fact that Rousseau chose to link the highest forms of
man's ideal life with a fading projection of the lofty
image which had been set up in older days, ought
not to bhnd us to the excellent energies which, not-
withstanding defect of association, such a vindication
of the ideal was certain to quicken. And at least the
lines of that high image were nobly traced.
' M. Henri Martin's Ilist. de France, .xvi. 101, where there
is an interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly
a successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence
into acientitic form.
268 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair
weather? Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper
and artistic setting, imagined the Savoyard Vicar as
leading his youthful convert at break of a summer
day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po
flowed between fertile banks ; in the distance the
immense chain of the Alps crowned the landscape ;
the rays of the rising sun projected long level
shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and
accented with a thousand lines of light the most
magnificent of panoramas.^ This was the fitting
suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power
and hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead
which the man of peace after an interval of silent
contemplation proceeded to expound. Eousseau's
sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense ;
it did not afflict the firmness of intelligence ; nor did
it silence the diviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once
more, the heavens in which such a deity dwells are
too high, his power is too impalpable, the mysterious
air which he has poured around his being is too
awful and impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of
such majesty to reach more than a few contemplative
spirits, and these only in their hours of tranquillity
and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, to
brinir comfort and refreshment to the mass of travail-
ing men, or to invest duty with the stern ennobling
quality of being done, " if I have grace to use it so.
as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye."
1 E7nilc, IV. 135.
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 269
The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the
subhraity of his own conception. He meditated on
the order of the universe with a reverence too pro-
found to allow him to mingle with his thoughts
meaner desires as to the special relations of that
order to himself. "I penetrate all my faculties," he
said, " with the divine essence of the author of the
world ; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and
bless all his gifts, but I do not pray to him. What
should I ask of him "i That for me he should change
the course of things, and in my favour work miracles 1
Could I, who must love above all else the order
established by his ^risdom and upheld by his provi-
dence, presume to wish such order troubled for my
sake'! Nor do I ask of him the power of doing
righteousness ; why ask for what he has given me 1
Has he not bestowed on me conscience to love what
is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom to choose it 1
If I do ill, I have no excuse ; I do it because I will
it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek
from him what he seeks from me ; it is to wish no
longer to be human, it is to wish something other
than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil."^ We
may admire both the logical consistency of such self-
denial and the manliness which it would engender in
the character that were strong enough to practise it.
But a divinity who has conceded no right of petition
is still further away from our hves than the divinities
of more popular creeds.
1 Jimile, IV. 204.
270 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of
egotism and complacency''. It does not incorporate
in the very heart of the religious emotion the pitiful-
ness and sorrow which Christianity first clothed with
associations of sanctity, and which can never hence-
forth miss their place in any religious system to be
accepted by men. Why is this 1 Because a religion
that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a hidden
corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that
the most touching and impressive half, of the most
conspicuous facts of human life. Rousseau was fuller
of the capacity of pity than ordinar}^ men, and this
pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it
did not enter into the composition of his religious
faith, and this shows that his religious faith, though
entirely free from suspicion of insincerity or ostenta-
tious assumption, v.^as like deism in so many cases,
whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratui-
tously adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a
profound inner craving and resistless spiritual neces-
sity. He speaks of the good and the wicked with
the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic
theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern
it is to him whether the wicked are punished with
eternal torment or not, though he concludes more
graciously with the hope that in another state the
wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a
bliss no less than his own.^ But the divine pitifulness
1 Emilc, IV. ISl, 182. In a letter to Yernes (Feb. 18,
1758. Corr., u. 9) he expresse.s his suspicion that pos.'^ibly the
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAR, 271
which we owe to Christianity, and which ^vill not be
the less eagerly cherished by those who repudiate
Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is
he that is without sin among us? Rousseau answered
this glibly enough by some formula of metaphysics,
about the human will haWng been left and constituted
free by the creator of the world ; and that man is the
bad man who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny,
force of circumstances, are all so many names for the
protests which the frank sense of fact has forced from
man against this miserably inadequate explanation
of the foundations of moral responsibility.
Whatever these foundations may be, the theories
of grace and fate had at any rate the quality of con-
necting human conduct Avith the will of the gods.
Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme
Being upon man, at the very moment when it could
have saved him from the guilt that brings misery, —
that is at the moment when conduct begins to follow
the preponderant motives or the will, — did thus effectu-
ally cut off the most admirable and fertile group of
our sympathies from all direct connection with religious
sentiment. Toiling as manfully as we may through
the wilderness of our seventy years, we are to reserve
our deepest adoration for the being who has left us
souls of the wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that
being and feeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In
this letter he asks also, with the same magnanimous security
as the Savoyard Vicar, "of what concern the destiny of the
wicked can he to him."
272 KOUSSEAU. CHAP.
there, with no other solace than that he is good and
just and all-powerful, and might have given us comfort
and guidance if he would. This was virtually the
form which Pelagius had tried to impose upon Chris-
tianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of
men, thirsting for consciousness of an active divine
presence, had then under the lead of Augustine so
energetically cast away from them. The faith to
which they clung while rejecting this great heresy,
though just as transcendental, still had the quality of
satisfying a spiritual want. It Avas even more readily
to be accepted by the human intelligence, for it
endowed the supreme power with the father's excel-
lence of compassion, and presented for our reverence
and gratitude and devotion a figure who drew from
men the highest love for the God whom they had not
seen, along with the warmest pity and love for their
brethren whom they had seen.
The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity
was one of reverential scepticism. " The holiness of
the gospel," he said, " is an argument that speaks to
my heart and to which I should even be sorry to find
a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers
with all their pomp ; how puny they are by the side
of that ! Is there here the tone of an enthusiast or
an ambitious sectary 1 What gentleness, what purity,
in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching,
what loftiness in his maxims ! Assuredly there was
something more than human in such teaching, such a
character, such a life, such a death. If the life and
y. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 273
death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and
death of Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that
the history of the gospels is invented at pleasure 1
My friend, that is not the fashion of invention ; and
the facts about Socrates are less attested than the
facts about Christ.^ Yet with all that, this same
gospel abounds in things incredible, which are repug-
nant to reason, and which it is impossible for any
sensible man to conceive or admit. What are we to
do in the midst of all these contradictions 1 To be
ever modest and circumspect, my son ; to respect in
silence what one can neither reject nor understand,
and to make one's self lowly before the great being
who alone knows the truth. "^
"I regard all particular religions as so many
salutary institutions, which prescribe in every country
a uniform manner of honouring God by public worship.
I believe them all good, so long as men serve God
fittingly in them. The essential worship is the wor-
ship of the heart. God never rejects this homage,
under whatever form it be offered to him. In other
days I used to say mass with the levity which in time
infects even the gravest things, when we do them too
often. Since acquiring my new principles I celebrate
it with more veneration ; I am overwhelmed by the
' A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with
the Christ of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of
Jan. 15, 1769 {Corr., vi. 59, 60), to M , accompanied by a
violent denigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic
prejudice of the time.
-' Emik, IV. 241, 242.
VOL. II. T
274 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by
the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives
so Httle what pertains to its author. When I approach
the moment of consecration, I collect myself for per-
forming the act with all the feelings required by the
church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive
to annihilate my reason before the supreme intelli-
gence, saying, 'Who art thou, that thou shouldest
measure infinite power ?' " ^
A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly
a powerful solvent of every system of exclusive dogma.
If the one essential to true worship, the worship of
the heart and the inner sentiment, be mystic adoration
of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon
books, propliecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike
into the second place among things that may be law-
ful and may be expedient, but that can never be
exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to
virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better
answer has ever been given to the exclusive pretensions
of sect, Christian, Jewish, or Mahometan, than that
propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with such energy,
closeness, and most sarcastic fire.- It was turning an
unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all
varieties of theological infallibilists, to prove to them
that if you insist upon acceptance of this or that
special revelation, over and above the dictates of
natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant,
but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching
1 Etnile. IV. 243. ^ IV. 210-236.
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 275
inquiry and comparison, that they may spare no pains
in an alVair of such momentous issue in proving to
themselves that this, and none of the competing
revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.
"Then no other study ^^^ll be possible but that of
religion : hardly shall one who has enjoyed the most
robust health, employed his time and used his reason
to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of
years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be
quite sure what to believe, and it will be a marvel if
he finds out before he dies, in what faith he ought to
have lived." The superiority of the sceptical parts
of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those
of the Letters from the JMountain to which we referred
previously, over the biting mockeries which Voltaire
had made the fashionable method of assault, lay in
this fact The latter only revolted and irritated all
serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of
honest concern, while the former actually appealed
to their religious sense in support of his doubts ; and
the more intelligent and sincere this sense happened
to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely
urged objections dissolve the hard particles of dog-
matic belief. His objections were on a moral level
\nth the best side of the religion that they oppugned.
Those of Voltaire were only on a level ^vith its lowest
side, and that was the side presented by the gross
and repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the
rhurch.
Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands
276 ROUSSEAU.
OHAP.
of the partisans of every exclusive revelation an
instrument which was quite enough to disperse all
his objections to the winds, and which was the very
instrument that defended his own cherished religion.
If he was satisfied with replying to the atheist and
the materialist, that he knew there is a supreme God,
and that the soul must have here and hereafter an
existence apart from the body, because he found these
truths inelFaceably written upon his own heart, what
could prevent the Christian or the Mahometan from
replying to Eousseau that the New Testament or the
Koran is the special and final revelation from the
Supreme Power to his creatures 1 If you may appeal
to the voice of the heart and the dictate of the inner
sentiment in one case, why not in the other also 1
A subjective test necessarily proves anything that
any man desires, and the accident of the article
proved appearing either reasonable or monstrous to
other people, cannot have the least bearing on its
efficacy or conclusiveness.
Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path
for the future, because it makes no allowance for the
growth of intellectual conviction, and binds up religion
with mystery, with an object whose attributes can
neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too
all-embracing to be able to receive anything from us,
too august, self-contained, remote, to be able to bestow
on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The
temperature of thought is slowly but without an in-
stant's recoil rising to a point when a mystery like
V. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 277
this, definite enough to be imposed as a faith, but too
indefinite to be grasped by understanding as a tnith,
melts away from the emotions of religion. Then
those instincts of holiness, without which the world
would be to so many of its highest spirits the most
dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to associate them-
selves less with unseen di%*inities, than with the long
brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here
we shall move with an assurance that no scepticism
and no advance of science can ever shake, because
the benefactions which we have received from the
strenuousness of human effort can never be doubted,
and each fresh acquisition in knowledge or goodness
can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the
religious imagination struck by the awful procession
of man from the region of impenetrable night, by his
incessant struggle with the hardness of the material
world, and his sublimer struggle with the hard world
of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice
by which generation after generation has added some
smaU piece to the temple of human freedom or some
new fragment to the ever incomplete sum of human
knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong
or beautiful character, — those who have an eye for
aD this may indeed have no ecstasy and no terror, no
heaven nor hell, in their religion, but they will have
abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude,
and sovereign pitifulness.
And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation,
or the deathly chills of spiritual reaction. They will
278 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
bring forth abundant fruit in new hope and in\igorated
endeavour. This devout contemplation of the experi-
ence of the race, instead of raising a man into the
clouds, brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most
conscious relations with his kind, to whom he owes
all that is of value in his own life, and to whom he
can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent
tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the
true and sage spirits that have shone upon the earth,
and sorrow and reprobation for all the unworthier
souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man
Avith this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for
there is no mysteriously accorded divine grace in
which one may be a larger participant than another.
He can have no incentives to that mutilation with
which every branch of the church, from the oldest
to the youngest and crudest, has in its degree afflicted
and retarded mankind, because the key-note of his
religion is the joyful energy of every faculty, practical,
reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
visible common good. And he can be plunged into
no fatal and paralysing despair by any doctrine of
mortal sin, because active faith in humanity, resting
on recorded experience, discloses the many possibilities
of moral recovery, and the work that may be done
for men in the fragment of days, redeeming the con-
trite from their burdens by manful hope. If religion
is our feeling about the highest forces that govern
himian destiny, then as it becomes more and more
evident how much our destiny is shaped by the
y. THE SAVOYARD VICAR. 279
generation of the dead who have prepared the present,
and by the purport of our hopes and the direction of
our activity for the generations that are to fill the
future, the religious sentiment will more and more
attach itself to the great unseen host of our fellows
who have gone before us and who are to come after.
Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in the
sunshine of sentimentalism, like Kousseau's faith. It
rests on a positive base, which only becomes wider
and firmer with the widening of experience and the
augmentation of our skill in interpreting it. Nor is
it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of
the most scientific spirits of the eighteenth century,
while each moment expecting the knock of the execu-
tioner at his door, found as religious a solace as any
early martyr had ever found in his barbarous mysteries,
when he linked his omti efibrts for reason and freedom
with the eternal chain of the destinies of man. " This
contemplation," he wroto and felt, " is for him a refuge
into which the rancour of his persecutors can never
follow him; in which, living in thought ^vith man
reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature,
he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed,
by base fear, by envy ; it is here that he truly abides
with his fellows, in an clysium that his reason has
known how to create for itself, and that his love for
humanity adorns "vrith all purest delights." ^
This, to the shame of those wavering souls who
* Condorcet's Progris de V Esprit Humain (1794). (Euv.
vi 276.
280 KOUSSEAU. CHAP. V.
despair of progress at the first moment when it
threatens to leave the path that they have marked
out for it, was written by a man at the very close of
his days, when every hope that he had ever cherished
seemed to one without the eye of faith to be extin-
guished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism. But
tliere is a still happier season in the adolescence of
generous natures that have been wisely fostered, when
the horizons of the dawning life are suddenly lighted
up with a glow of aspiration towards good and holy
things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity
is lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is
gradually choked out by the dusty facts of life, and
slowly moulders away into dry indifference. It would
not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard Vicar,
instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top,
there to contemplate that infinite unseen which is in
truth beyond contemplation by the limited faculties
of man, were to associate these fine impulses of the
early prime with the visible, intelligible, and still
sublime possibilities of the human destiny. — that
imperial conception, which alone can shape an exist-
ence of entire proportion in all its parts, and leave
no uatu.ral energy of life idle or athirst. Do you
ask for sanctions ! One whose conscience has been
strengthened from youth in this faith, can know no
greater bitterness than the stain cast by wrong act or
unworthy thought on the high memories with which he
has been used to Avalk, and the discord wrought in hopes
that have become the ruling harmony of his days.
CHAPTER VI.
ENGLAND.^
TiiERE is in an English collection a portrait of Jean
Jacques, which was painted during his residence in
this country by a provincial artist. Singular and
displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up for us
many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and
elsewhere, which the ordinary engravings, and the
trim self-complacency of the statue on the little island
at Geneva, would leave very incomprehensible. It is
almost as appalhng in its realism as some of the dark
pits that open before the reader of the Confessions.
Hard struggles with objective difficulty and external
obstacle wear deep furrows in the brow ; they throw
into the glance a solicitude, half penetrating and
defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances
have sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle
of his days has been with his own passions and morbid
broodings and unchastened dreams, the eye and the
facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat
which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat
with evil and weakness, and leaves only eternal desola-
' Jau. 1766— May 1767.
282 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
tion and tho misery that is formless. Our English
artist has produced a vision from that prose Inferno
which is made so populous in the modern epoch by
impotence of will. Those who have seen the picture
may easily understand how largely the character of
the original must have been pregnant with harassing
confusion and distress.
Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom
Lord Marischal had told the story of Rousseau's
persecutions, had proffered his services, and declared
his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for
him in England. There had been an exchange of
cordial letters,^ and then the matter had lain quiet,
until the impossibility of remaining longer in Neuchatel
had once more set his friends on procuring a safe
establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rous-
seau's appearance in Paris had created the keenest
excitement. " People may talk of ancient Greece as
they please," wrote Hume from Paris, " but no nation
was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person
ever so much ennjaired their attention as Rousseau !
Voltaire and everybody else are quite eclipsed by
him." Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared
very homely and very awkward, was more talked of
than the Princess of Morocco or the Coimtess of
Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards him. His
very dog had a name and reputation in the world. ^
Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which
his presence created, but whether this was so or not
' Streckeiseii, ii. 275, etc. Con:, iii. - Burton, ii. 299.
VI.
ENGLAND. 283
he was very impatient to be away from it as soon as
possible.
In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second
week of January 1766. They crossed from Calais
to Dover by night in a passage that lasted twelve
hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know,
was extremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully passed
the whole night upon deck, taking no harm, though
the seamen were almost frozen to death. ^ They
reached London on the thirteenth of January, and
the people of London showed nearly as lively an
interest in the strange personage whom Hume had
brought among them, as the people of Paris had done.
^ The materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau'a
Correspondence (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's letters to
various persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton's
Life of Hume. Everj'body who takes an interest in Rousseau is
indebted to Mr. Burton for the ample documents which he has
provided. Yet one cannot but regret the satire on Rousseau
with which he intersperses them, and which is not always
felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295) that Rousseau
invented the story given iu the Confessions, of Hume's correcting
the proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story may
be true or not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circum-
stantially from Lord Marischal ; see letter from Lord M. to J.
J. R., in Streckeisen, ii. 67. Again, such an expression as
Rousseau's "occasional attention to small matters" (p. 321)
only shows that the writer has not read Rousseau's letters,
which are indeed not worth reading, except by those who wish
to have a right to speak about Rousseau's character. The
numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between Hume and Rous-
seau, if I may judge from those of them wliicli I luive turned
over, really shed no light on the matter, though they added
much heat. For the journey, see Corr., iv. 307 ; Burton, ii, 304.
284 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects
to the Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the play-
house showed more curiosity when the stranger came
in than when the king and queen entered. Their
majesties were as interested as their subjects, and
could scarcely keep their eyes off' the author of Emilius.
George III., then in the heyday of his youth, was so
pleased to have a foreigner of genius seeking shelter
in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway's
suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should
liave a pension settled on him. The ever illustrious
Burlce, then just made member of Parliament, saw
him nearly every day, and became persuaded that " he
entertained no principle either to influence his heart,
or guide his understanding, but vanity."^ Hume, on
the contrary, thought the best things of his client;
" He has an excellent warm heart, and in conversation
Idndles often to a degree of heat which looks like in-
spiration; I love him much, and hope that I have
some share in his affections. . . . He is a very modest,
mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited and warm-hearted man,
as ever I knew in my life. He is also to appearance
very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better
calculated for good company, nor who seems to take
more pleasure in it." " He is a very agreeable,
amiable man ; but a great humorist. The philo-
sophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not
conduct him to Calais without a quarrel ; but I think
1 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. The same
passage contains some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.
VI. ENGLAND. 28ri
I could live with him all my life in mutual friendship
and esteem. I believe one great source of our concord
is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not
the case with any of them. They are also displeased
with him, because they think he over-abounds in
religion ; and it is indeed remarkable that the philo-
sopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is
by far the most devout."^
What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his
pupil a humorist, may perhaps be inferred from the
story of the trouble he had in prevailing upon Rous-
seau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed
a special occasion and set apart a special box for him.
When the hour came, Rousseau declared that he could
not leave his dog behind him. "The first person,''
he said, '=who opens the door. Sultan will run into
the streets in search of me and will be lost." Hume
told him to lock Sultan up in the room, and carry
away the key in his pocket. This was done, but as
they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl ;
his master turned back and avowed he had not
resolution to leave him in that condition. Hume,
however, caught him in his arms, told him that Mr.
Garrick had dismissed another company in order to
make room for him, that the king and queen were
expecting to see him, and that without a better reason
than Sultan's impatience it would be ridiculous to
disappoint them. Thus, a httle by reason, but more
by force, he was carried off." Such a story, whatever
1 Burton, 304, 309, 310. » IL iL 309, ti.
286 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
else we may tliinlv of it, shows at least a certain curioua
and not untouching simplicity. And singularitj' Avhich
made Rousseau like better to keep his dog company
at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was
too private in its reward to be the result of that vanity
and affectation with which he was taxed by men who
lived in another sphere of motive.
There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau.
He was eager to leave London almost as soon as he
arrived in it. Though pleased with the friendly
reception Avhich had been given him, he pronounced
London to be as much devoted to idle gossip and
frivolity as other capitals. He spent a few weeks in
the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought about
fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales,
then somewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery,
one is glad to know, greatly attracted him. Finally
arrangements were made by Hume mth Mr. Daven-
port for installing him in a house belonging to the
latter, at Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak
of Derbyshire.' Hither Rousseau proceeded with
Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport was
a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom
inhabited this solitaiy house, was very willing that
Rousseau should take up his abode there without pay-
ment. This, however, was what Rousseau's inde-
^ Mr. Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's qnarters at
Wootton, in his VLsiis to Eemarl'iUe Places. One or two aged
peasants had some confused memory of "old Ross-hall." For
Rousseau's own description, sec his letters to Mdme. de Luze,
May 10, 1766. Corr., iv. 326.
7U ENGLAND. 287
pendeuce could not brook, and he insisted that his
entertainer should receive thirty pounds a year for
the board of himself and Theresa.^ So here he settled,
in an extremely bitter climate, knowing no word of
the language of the people about him, with no com-
panionship but Theresa's, and "with nothing to do but
walk when the weather was fair, play the harpsicord
when it rained, and brood over the incidents Avhich
had occurred to him since he had left Switzerland six
months before. The fir.st fruits of this unfortunate
leisure were a bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the
most famous and far-resounding of all the quaiTels of
illustrious men, but one about which verj' little needs
now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all
significance that may ever have belonged to it is
entirely dead. The incubation of his grievances began
immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but two
months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame. ^
The general charge against Hume was that he was
a member of an accursed triumvirate ; Voltaire and
D'Alembert were the other partners ; and their object
was to blacken the character of Eousseau and render
his life miserable. The particular acts on which this
belief was established were the follo^^"ing : —
1 While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a
* Burton, 313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid
this ; at any rate when he fled, he left between thirty and forty
pounds in Mr. Davenport's liands. See Davenport to Hume ;
Burton, 367. Rousseau's accurate probity in affairs of money
is absolutely unimpeachable.
' Corr. iv. 312. April 9, 1766.
288 KOUSSEAU.
CHAP,
letter nominally addressed to him by the King of
Prussia, and written in an ironical strain, which per-
suaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of
Voltaire.^ Then he suspected D'Alembert. It was
really the composition of Horace Walpole, who was
then in Paris. Now Hume was the friend of Walpole,
and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to him
for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage
of some papers. Although the false letter produced
the liveliest amusement at Rousseau's cost, first in
Paris and then in London, Hume, while feigning to
be his warm friend and presenting him to the Engli.sh
public, never took any pains to tell the world that
the piece was a forgery, nor did he break with its
^ Here is a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm : —
" My dear Jean Jacques — You have renounced Geneva, your
native place. You have caused your expulsion from Switzerland,
a country so extolled in your writings ; France has issued a
warrant against you ; so do you come to me. I admire your
taleuts ; I am amused by your dreamings, though let me tell
you they absorb you too much and for too long. You must at
length be sober and happy ; you have caused enough talk about
yourself by oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really
great man. Prove to your enemies that you can now and then
have common sense. That will annoy them and do you no
harm, ily states offer you a peaceful retreat. I wish you well,
and will treat you well, if you will let me. But if you persist
in refusing my help, do not reckon upon my telling any one
that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting your spirit to
find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I am a
king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure ; and what
will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I
will cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a prido
in being persecuted. Your good friend, Frederick."
v\. ENGLAND. 289
wicked author.^ (2) When Rousseau assured Hume
that D'Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable
man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although
he well knew the latter to be Rousseau's enemy.^
(3) Hume lived in London with the son of Tronchin,
the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the
foes of Jean Jacques.^ (4) When Rousseau first came
to London, his reception Avas a distinguished triumph
for the victim of persecution from so many govern-
ments. England was proud of being his place of
refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws
and administration. Suddenly and for no assignable
cause the public tone changed, the newspapers either
fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau
was thought of no more. This must have been due
to Hume, who had much influence among people of
credit, and who went about boasting of the protection
which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.^
(5) Hume resorted to various small artifices for pre-
venting Rousseau from making friends, for procuring
opportunities of opening Rousseau's letters, and the
like.^ (6) A violent satirical letter against Rousseau
appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions
which could only have been supplied by Hume. (7)
On the first night after their departure from Paris,
Rousseau, who occupied the same room -with Hume,
heard him call out several times in the middle of the
night in the course of his dreams, Je tiens Jean Jacques
1 Corr., iv. 313, 343, 388, 398. - lb. 395.
' lb. 389, etc. •• Tb. 384. * lb. 343, 344, 387, etc.
VOL. II. U
290 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
Rousseau, with extreme vehemence — which words, in
spite of the horribly sardonic tone of the dreamer, he
interpreted favourably at the time, but which later
event proved to have been full of malign significance.^
(8) Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with
a glance of sinister and diabolic import that filled him
with an astonishing disquietude, though he did his
best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was
seized with remorse, fell upon Hume's neck, embraced
him warmly, and, sufibcated with sobs and bathed in
tears, cried out in broken accents. No, no, David Hwne
is no traitor, with many protests of affection. The
phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with
politeness, stroked him gently on the back, and
repeated several times in a tranquil voice, Quoi, man
cher monsieur ! Eh ! mon cher monsieur ! Quoi done,
mon cher monsieur/- (9) Although for many weeks
Rousseau had kept a firm silence to Hume, neglecting
to answer letters that plainly called for answer, and
marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways,
yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what
1 Corn, iv. 316.
^ lb. 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, loug before the
rupture overt, shows the former to have been by no means so
phlegmatic on this occasion as he may have seemed. " I hope,"
he writes, "you have not so bad an opinion of me as to think
I was not melted on this occasion ; I assure you I kissed him
and embraced him twenty times, with a plentiful effusion of
tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more affecting."
Burton, ii. 315. Tlie great doubters of the eighteenth century
could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient saying,
that men without tears are worth little.
▼I. ENGLAND. 291
must necessarily have struck him as so singular, but
continued to write as if nothing had happened. Was
not this positive proof of a consciousness of perfidy 1
Some years afterwards he substituted another
shorter set of grievances, namely, that Hume would
not suffer Theresa to sit at table with him ; that he
made a show of him ; and that Hume had an eno-rav-
mg executed of himself, which made him as beautiful
as a cherub, while in another engraving, which was
a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was made as ugly
as a bear.^
It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in
discussing these charges. They are not open to serious
examination, though it is astonishing to find writers
in our own day who fully believe that Hume was a
traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortu-
nate man whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous
island. The only part of the indictment about which
there could be the least doubt, was the possibility of
Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very
small pleasantry. Some of liis friends in Paris sus-
pected that he had had a hand in the supposed letter
from the King of Prussia. Although the letter con-
stituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a
sensible man have been regarded as furnishing just
complaint against one who, like Walpole, was merely
an impudent stranger, yet if it could be shown that
Hume had taken an active part either in the composi-
tion or the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon
^ Bernardin de St. Pierre, (Euv., xii. 79.
292 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
one towards whom he was pretending a singular affec-
tion, then we should admit that he showed such a
want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted
to something like treachery. But a letter from Wal-
pole to Hume sets this doubt at rest. " I cannot be
precise as to the time of my writing the King of
Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the
letter while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you,
but it was the reason why, out of delicacy to myself,
I did not go to see him as you often proposed to me,
thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a
man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him."^
With this all else falls to the ground. It would
be as unwise in us, as it was in Eousseau himself, to
complicate the hypotheses. Men do not act without
motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering
into any plot against Eousseau, even if the rival
philosophers in France might have motives. We
know the character of our David Hume perfectly
well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly
lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world
comfortable for everybody, than in anything like
purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace.
Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hiune's
agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was
^ Walpole's Letters, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other
letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp.
23-28. A corroboration of the statement that Hume knew
nothing of the letter until he was in England, may be inferred
from what lie wrote to Madame de Boufflers ; Burton, ii. 306,
And n. 2.
^' ENGLAND. 293
not without vanity, and his letters show that he was
not displeased at the addition to his consequence
which came of his patronage of a man who was much
talked about and much stared at. But, however this
was, he did all for Rousseau that generosity and
thoughtfulness could do. He was at great pains in
establishing him ; he used his interest to procure for
him the grant of a pension from the king ; when
Rousseau provisionally refused the pension rather-
than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still ignorant
of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's
mind, supposed that the refusal came from the fact
of the pension being kept private, and at once took
measures with the minister to procure the removal of
the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like
these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious
ward is abundantly shown in his letters to all his
most intimate friends, just as Rousseau's gratitude to
him is to be read in all his early letters both to Hume
and other persons. In the presence of such facts on
the one side, and in the absence of any particle of
intelligible evidence to neutralise them on the other,
to treat Rousseau's charges with gravity is irrational.'
If Hume had written back in a mild and concilia-
tory strain, there can be no doubt that the unfortu-
nate victim of his ovm morbid imagination would, for
a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to
a sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed
beyond control at what he very pardonably took for
a masterpiece of atrocious ingi-atitude. He reproached
294 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm
had used nine years before. He wrote to all his
friends, withdrawing the kindly words he had once
used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in
their place the most unfavourable he could find. He
gave the philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight
by the confirmation which his story furnished of their
own foresight, when they had warned him that he
was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of
the advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of
men, Turgot, and one of the smallest, Horace Walpole,
he published a succinct account of the quarrel, first in
French, and then in English. This step was chiefly
due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert
was the spokesman, though it is due to him to mention
that he softened various expressions in Hume's
narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It may
be true that a council of war never fights ; a council
of men of letters always does. The governing com-
mittee of a literary, philosophical, or theological clique
form the very worst advisers any man can have.
Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was
by Avhat appeared the most hateful ferocity in one on
whom he had heaped acts of affection. Still, one
would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if
he had suffered with firm silence petulant charges
against which the consciousness of his own upright-
ness should have been the only answer. That high
pride, of which there is too little rather than too much
in the world, and which saves men from waste of
n. ENGLAND. 295
themselves and others in pitiful accusations, vindica-
tions, retaliations, should have helped humane pity in
preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long after-
wards Rousseau said, " England, of which they paint
such fine pictures in France, has so cheerless a climate ;
my soul, wearied with many shocks, was in a condition
of such profound melancholy, that in all that passed
I believe I committed many faults. But are they
comparable to those of the enemies who persecuted
me, supposing them even to have done no more than
published our private quarrels?"^ An ampler con-
trition would have been more seemly in the first
offender, but there is a measure of justice in his
complaint. We need not, however, reproach the
good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits
that he is sometimes inclined to blame his publica-
tion, and always to regret it.^ And his regret was
not verbal merely. When Rousseau had returned to
France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most
urgent in entreating Turgot to use his influence with
the government to protect the wretched wanderer, and
Turgot's answer shows both how sincere this humane
interposition was, and how practically serviceable.^
Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print.
Pamphlets appeared in Paris and London in a cloud.
The Succinct Exposure was followed by succinct re-
joinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account
of his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously
' Bernardin de St. Pierre, (Euv., xii. 79.
» To Adam Smith. Burton, 380. ^ Burton, 381.
296 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
wrote to the newspapers defending Rousseau and
attacking Walpole. King George followed the battle
with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn formalities
sent the documents to the British Museum. There
was silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton.
The unfortunate person who had done all the mischief
printed not a word.
Tlie most prompt and quite the least instructive
of the remarks invariably made upon any one who
has acted in an unusual manner, is that he must be
mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted
really tells us nothing, because the term may cover
any state of mind from a warranted dissent from
established custom, down to absolute dementia.
Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing
convenient clothes and living frugally. He was
called mad when he quitted the tow^n and went to
live in the country. The same facile explanation
covered his quarrel with importunate friends at the
Hermitage. Voltaire called liim mad for saying that
if there were perfect harmony of taste and tempera-
ment between the king's daughter and the execu-
tioner's son, the pair ought to be allowed to marry.
We who are not forced by conversational necessities
to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to take either
taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for
democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered
niind.^ That Rousseau's conduct tow^ards Hume was
' A very common but laiidom opinion traces Rousseau's
insanity to certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions,
n. ENGLAND. 297
incousisteut M'ith perfect mental soundness is quite
plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy, teaches
us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases
like monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the
conditions which prepared the way for mental derange-
ment, because this is the only means of understanding
either its nature, or the degree to wliich it extended.
These conditions in Eousseau's case are perfectly
simple and obvious to any one who recognises the
principle, that the essential facts of such mental dis-
order as his must be sought not in the symptoms,
but from the whole range of moral and intellectual
constitution, acted on by physical states and acting
on them in turn.
Eousseau was born with an organisation of extreme
sensibility. This predisposition was further dee])ened
by the application in early youth of mental influences
specially calculated to heighten juvenile sensibility.
Corrective discipline from circumstance and from
formal instniction was wholly absent, and thus the
particular excess in his temperament became ever
more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a rate
of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his
impulses and faculties ; these, if he had been happily
placed under some of the many forms of wholesome
They may have contributed in some small degree to depression
of vital energies, though for that matter Rousseau's strength
and power of endurance were remarkable to the end. But they
certainly did not produce a mental state in the least correspond-
ing to that particular variety of insanity, which jmssessea
definitely marked features.
298 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
social pressure, would theu on tlie contrary have
gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal pro-
portion. When the vicious excess had decisively
rooted itself in his character, he came to Paris, where
it was irritated into further activity by the uncon-
geniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the
groAvth of a marked unsociality, talcing literary form
in the Discourses, and practical form in his retirement
from the town. The slow depravation of the affective
life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion,
by the long musings of literary composition. Well
does Goethe's Princess warn the hapless Tasso : —
Dieser Pfad
Verleitet uus, (lurch eiusamus GebUsch,
Durcli stille Thaler foitznwandern ; mehr
Und mchr verwohut sich das Gemiith iind streht
Die goldne Zeit, die ihra vou aussen mangelt,
In seinem luiiern wieder herzustellen,
So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.
Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged
for many months, and this introduced a slight but
genuinely misanthropic element of bitterness into
what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about
himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility
or suspicion about others. Finally and perhaps above
all else, he was the victim of tormenting bodily pain,
and of sleeplessness which resulted from it. The
agitation and excitement of the journey to England,
completed the sum of the conditions of disturbance,
and as soon as ever he was settled at Wootton, and
TT. ENGLAND. 299
had leisure to brood over the incidents of the few
weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which
had long been spreading through his impulses and
affections, suddenly but by a most natural sequence
extended to the faculties of his intelligence, and he
became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was
not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.
"He has ovAy felt during the whole course of his
life," wrote Hume sympathetically; "and in this
respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I
have seen any example of ; but it still gives him a
more acute feehng of pain than of pleasure. He is
like a man who was stripped not only of his clothes,
but of his skin, and turned out in that situation to
combat Avith the rude and boisterous elements."^ A
morbid aflfective state of this kind and of such a
degree of intensity, was the sure antecedent of a
morbid intellectual state, general or partial, depressed
or exalted. One who is the prey of unsound feel-
ings, if they are only marked enough and persistent
enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound
arrangement of all or some of his ideas to match.
The intelligence is seduced into finding supports in
misconception of circumstances, for a misconception
of human relation which had its root in disordered
emotion. This completes the breach of correspond-
ence between the man's nature and the external facts
A^-ith which he has to deal, though the breach may not,
and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along
^ Burton, ii 314.
300 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
the whole line of feeling and judgment. Kousseau'a
delusion about Hume's sinister feeling and designs,
which was the first definite manifestation of positive
unsoundness in the sphere of the intelligence, was a
last result of the gradual development of an inherited
predisposition to affective unsoundness, which un-
happily for the man's history had never been counter-
acted either by a strenuous education, or by the
wholesome urgencies of life.
We have only to rememlier that Avith him, as with
the rest of us, there was entire unity of nature, with-
out cataclysm or marvel or inexplicable rupture of
mental continuity. All the facts came in an order
that might have been foretold ; they all lay together,
with their foundations down in physical temperament;
the facts which made Eousseau's name renoAvned and
his influence a great force, along with those which
made his life a scandal to others and a misery to
himself. The deepest root of moral disorder lies in
an immoderate expectation of happiness, and this
immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark both
of his character and his work. The exaltation of
emotion over intelliirence was the secret of his most
striking production ; the same exaltation, by gaining
increased mastery over his whole existence, at length
passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The
tendency of the dominant side of a character towards
diseased exa2;i2;eration is a fact of daily observation.
The ruin which the excess of strong religious imagina-
tion works in natures without the quality of energetic
VI.
ENGLAND. 301
objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's
contemporary, Cowpcr. This gentle poet's dehisions
about the wrath of God were equally pitiable and
equally a source of torment to their victim, with
Rousseau's delusions about the malignity of his
mysterious plotters among men. We must call such
a condition unsound, but the important thing is to
remember that insanity was only a modification of
certain specially marked tendencies of the sufferer's
sanity.
The desire to protect himself against the defama-
tion of his enemies led him at this time to compose
that account of his o^vn life, which is probably the
only one of his writings that continues to be generally
read. He composed the first part of the Confessions
at Wootton, during the autumn and winter of 1766,
The idea of giving his memoirs to the public was an
old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers.
To write memoirs of one's o'wn life was one of the
fancies of the time, but like all else, it became in
Rousseau's hand something more far-reaching and
sincere than a passing fashion. Other people wrote
polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured
with romantic decorations. Rousseau with unquail-
ing veracity plunged into the inmost depths, hiding
nothing that would be likely to make him either
ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and invent-
ing nothing that could attract much sympathy or
much admiration. Though, as has been pointed out
already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies
302 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
of date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in
reference to the facts of his boyhood, whether a
Eousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two of the
incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of
sentimental reminiscence, and one or two of them are
downright impossible, yet when all these deductions
have been made, the substantial truthfulness of what
remains is made more evident with every addition tc
our materials for testing them. When all the circum-
stances of Rousseau's life are weighed, and when full
account has been taken of his proved delinquencies,
we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as
essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality,
as is consistent with the general empire of sensation
over untrained intelligence.^ As for the egotism of
the Confessions, it is hard to see how a man is to tell
the story of his own life without egotism. And it
may be worth adding that the self -feeling which
comes to the surface and asserts itself, is in a great
many cases far less vicious and debilitating than the
same feeling nursed internally with a troglodytish shy-
ness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itself per-
versely. This is true to a certain small extent, and
one or two of the disclosures in the Confessions are
in very nauseous matter, and are made moreover in a
very nauseous manner. There are some vices whose
grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright
1 For an instructive and, as it appears to mo, a thoroughly
trustworthy account of the temper iu which the Confessions
were written, see tlie 4tli of the Reveries.
^' ENGLAND. 3O3
atrocities, and we read of certain puerilities avowed
by Kousseau, with a livelier impatience than old
Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he confesses
to a horrible assassination. This morbid form of self-
feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form
which clothes itself in the phrases of religious exalta-
tion. And there is not much of it. Blot out half a
dozen pages from the Confessions, and the egotism is
no more perverted than in the confessions of Au-ustine
or of Cardan.
These remarks are not made to extenuate Rous-
seau s faults, or to raise the popular estimate of his
character, but simply in the interests of a greater pre-
cision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly
always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect
to Rousseau, from the time of Horace Walpole down-
wards The Confessions in their least agreeable parts,
or rather especially in those paits, are the expression
on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same
notion of the essential goodness of nature and the
importance of understanding nature and restoring its
reign, wluch inspired the Discourses and EmSius
"I would fain show to my fellows," he be-an "a
rnan m aU the truth of nature," and he cannot be
•charged with any failure to keep his word He
despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe
^vhether or no this revelation of human nakedness
was likely to add to the popular respect for nature
and the natural man. After all, considering that
bterature ,s for the most part a hollow and pretentious
304 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches
and peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows
to the dignified assumptions, solemn words, and high
heels of convention, in one who would not lie, nor
dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense sub-
jective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures
all tend to come to the same end. The distance from
Rousseau's odious erotics to the glorified ecstasies of
many a poor female saint is not far. In any case,
let us know the facts about human nature, and the
pathological facts no less than the others. These are
the first thing, and the second, and the third also.
The exaltation of the opening page of the Confes-
sions is shocking. No monk nor saint ever wrote any-
thing more revolting in its blasphemous self-feeling.
But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when
the course of the story necessarily drew the writer
into dealings with objective facts, even muffled as
they were by memory and imagination. The brood-
ings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour
of composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the
modern reader would never know from internal
evidence, that he was preparing a vindication of his
life and character against the infamies with which
Hume and others were supposed to be industriously
blackening them. While he was writing this famous
composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the modes
of English provincial life, he was on good terms with
one or two of the great people in his neighbourhood,
and kept up a gracious and social correspondence
^' ENGLAND. 395
with them. He was greatly pleased by a comi)Iiment
that was paid to him by the government, apparently
through the interest of General Conway. The duty
that had been paid upon certain boxes forwarded to
Rousseau from Switzerland was recouped by the
treasury, 1 and the arrangements for the annual pen-
sion of one hundred pounds were concluded and
accepted by him, after he had duly satisfied himself
that Hume was not the indirect author of the bene-
faction.2 The weather was the worst possible, but
whenever it allowed him to go out of doors, he found
delight in climbing the heights around him in search
of curious mosses; for he had now come to think the
discovery of a single new plant a hundred times more
useful than to have the whole human race listening,
to your sermons for half a century.^ " This indolen't
and contemplative life that you do not approve"
he wrote to the elder Mirabeau, "and for which 'l
pretend to make no excuses, becomes every day more
delicious to me : to wander alone among the trees
and rocks that surround my dwelling; to muse or
rather to extravagate at my ease, and as you say to
stand gaping in the air; when my brain gets too hot,
to calm It by dissecting some moss or fern ; in short to
surrender myself mthout restraint to my phantasies
which, heaven be thanked, are all under my own con-
98 ! llsTut *^' ^"^' "'" ^'''"*°"' ^'^- ^^' ^^^^- ^'^" '•
' lb. V. 133 ; also to General Couway (March 26), p. I37,
cic
» Corr., V. 37.
VOL ri
X
306 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
trol, — all that is for me the height of enjoyment, to
which I can imagine nothing superior in this world
for a man of my age and in my condition."^
This contentment did not last long. The snow
kept him indoors. The excitement of composition
abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble quarrels
with the women in the kitchen. His delusions re-
turned Avith greater force than before. He believed
that the whole English nation was in a plot against
him, that all his letters were opened before reaching
London and before leaving it, that all his movements
were closely watched, and that he was surrounded
by unseen guards to prevent any attempt at escape.^
At length these delusions got such complete mastery
over him, that in a paroxysm of terror he fled away
from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else
behind him. Nothing was heard of him for a fort-
night, when Mr. Davenport received a letter from
him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Daven-
port's conduct throughout was marked by a humanity
and patience that do him the highest honour. He
confesses himself " quite moved to read poor Rous-
seau's mournful epistle." " Y"ou shall see his letter,"
he writes to Hume, " the first opportunity ; but God
help him, I can't for pity give a copy; and 'tis
so much mixed with his own poor little private
concerns, that it would not be right in me to do
1 Con:, V. 88.
- See the letters to ])u Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April
1767. Corr., v. 110-147.
'^ ENGLAND. 307
it'" This is thegenerosity whichmakesHume's impati-
ence and that of his mischievous advisers in Paris ap-
pear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite as ill to Mr.
Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received
at least equal services from him.^ The good man at
once sent a ser\'ant to Spalding in search of his im-
happy guest, but Rousseau had again disappeared.
The parson of the parish had passed several houi-s
of each day in his company, and had found him
cheerful and good-humoured. He had had a blue
coat made for himself, and had written a long letter
to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a°guard,
at Rousseau's o^m expense, to escort him in safety
out of the kingdom where enemies were plotting
against his life.^ He was next heard of at Dover
(May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General Con-
way, setting forth his delusion in full form.* He is
the victim of a plot ; the conspirators \rill not allow
him to leave the island, lest he shoiUd divulge in
other countries the outrages to which he has-been
subjected here ; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres
that will arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on
board ship. But he warns them that his tragical
disappearance cannot take place without creating in-
quiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go,
he gives his word of honour that he \nll not publish
» Davenport to Hume ; Burton, 367-371.
» J. J. R. to Davenport, Dec 22, 1766, anJ April 30. 1767
Corr., V. 66, 152.
» Burton. 369. 375. * Corr., v. 163.
308 ROUSSEAU. CHAP. VI.
a line of the memoirs he has wiitten, nor ever divulge
the wrongs which he has suffered in England. "I
see my last hour approaching,'' he concluded ; " I am
determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and
to perish or be free ; there is no longer any other
alternative." On the same evening on which he
wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn crea-
ture took boat and landed at Calais, where he seema
at once to have recovered his composure and a right
miud.
CHAPTER VII
THE END.
Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more
than one long and rambling letter from a man who
was as unlike the rest of mankind as he was unlike
them himself. This was the Marquis of Mirabeau
(1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humor-
istic sire of a more famous son. Perhaps we might
say that Mirabeau and Rousseau were the two most
singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
originality was in some respects the more saHent of
the two. There is less of the conventional tone of
the eighteenth century Frenchman in him than in
any other conspicuous man of the time, though like
many other headstrong and despotic souls he picked
up the current notions of philanthropy and human
brotherhood. He really was by very force of tempera-
ment that rebel against the narrowness, trimness,
and moral formalism of the time which Rousseau
only claimed and attempted to be, with the secondary
degree of success that follows vehemence ^vithout
native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who
had strangely taken up the trade of friendship for
310 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
man and adopted the })hrases of perfectibility ; while
Kousseau on the other hand was meant for a Fenelon,
save that he became possessed of unclean devils.
Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so im-
pressed by the marked tenor of contemporary feel-
ing, its prudential didactics, its formulistic sociality,
that his native insurgency only found vent in private
life, while in })ul)lic he played pedagogue to the human
race. Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as
he was, lie delighted in Rousseau's books: "I know
no morality that goes deeper than yours ; it strikes
like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady
assurance of truth, for you are always true, according
to your notions for the moment." He wrote to tell
him so, but he told him at the .same time at great
length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency
less academic than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved
absurdly in his quarrel with Hume. There is nothing
more quaint than the aj^pearance of a few of the
sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists,
floating in the midst of a copious stream of egoistic
whimsicalities. He concludes with a diverting enu-
meration of all his country seats and demesnes, with
their respective advantages and disadvantages, and
prays Rousseau to take up his residence in which-
ever of them may please him best.^
Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau in-
formed Mirabeau, and Mirabeau lost no time in con-
veying him stealthily, for the warrant of the pariia-
' Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.
VII. THE END. 311
ment of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury.
But the Friend of Men, to use his o^n account of
himself, "bore letters as a plum-tree bears plums,"
and wrote to his guest with strange humoristic volu-
bility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who
knew liis Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many
sheets to liardcn himself against excessive sensibility,
to be less pusillanimous, to take society more lightly,
as his own light estimate of its worth should lead him
to do. " No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-
picture, nay even ridiculous, if you will ; but if the
irregular and ceaseless flight of butterflies wearies you
in your walk, it is your own fault for looking continu-
ously at what was only made to adorn and vary the
scene. But how many social virtues, how much
gentleness and considerateness, how many benevolent
actions, remain at the bottom of it all."^ Enormous
manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility were not
in the least degree either soothing or interesting to
Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his
expense might touch his fancy on a single occasion,
but not oftener. Two humorists are seldom success-
ful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau in-
sisted that Jean Jacques should read this or that of
his books. Rousseau answered that he would try,
but warned him of the folly of it. " I do not engage
always to follow what you say, because it has always
been painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow
the thoughts of other people, and at present I cannot
' Streckeisen, ii. 337.
312 ROUSSEAU. CHAP
do SO at all."^ Though they continued to be good
friends, Rousseau only remained three or four weeks
at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency,
the Prince of Conti, partly perhaps from contrition
at the rather unchivalrous fashion in which his great
friends had hustled the philosoj^her away at the time
of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him
refuge at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors.
Here he installed Rousseau under the name of Renou,
either to silence the indiscreet curiosity of neighbours,
or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.
Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767 -June
1768), composing the second part of the Confessions,
in a condition of extreme mental confusion. Dusky
phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the
gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in
the pay of Hume, and that he was watched day and
night with a view to his destruction." He entirely
gave up either reading or Avriting, save a very small
number of letters, and he declared that to take up the
pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The
only interest he had was botany, and for this his
passion became daily more intense. He appears to
have been as contented as a child, so long as he could
employ himself in long expeditions in search of new
plants, in arranging a lierbarium, in watching the
growth of the germ of some rare seed which needed
careful tending. But the story had once more the
same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled
1 June 19, 1767. Corr., v. 172. - Corr., v. 267, 375.
▼"• THE END. 313
from WoottoiL He meant apparently to gu to
Chamberi, drawn by the deep magnetic force of old
memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble
on his way thither he encountered a substantial
grievance. A man aUeged that he had lent Rousseau
a few francs seven years previously. He was un-
doubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his
mistake by proper authorities, but Eousseau's corre-
spondents suffered none the less for that. We all
know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly
and how eagerly it colours every incident. The mis-
taken claim was proof demonstrative of that frightful
and tenebrous conspiracy, which they might have
thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this
showed to be only too tragically real; and so on,
through many pages of droning wretchedness.^ Then
we find him at Bourgoin, where he spent some months
in shabby taverns, and then many months more at
Monquin on adjoining uplands." The estrangement
from Theresa, of which enough has been said already,"
was added to his other torments. He resolved, as so
many of the self-tortured have done since, to go in
search of happiness to the western lands beyond the
Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the
wearied among us to be inexhaustible and assured.
Almost in the same page he turns his face eastwards,
» Corr., V. 330-381, 408, etc.
» Bourgoin. Aug. 1763, to March, 1769. Mouquin to
July 1770.
' See above, vol. L chap. iv.
314 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the
islands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely,
not only designed, but actually took measures, to re-
turn to Wootton. All was no more than the momen-
tary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the
weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted
himself to isolation from his fellows, without first
sitting down carefully to count the cost, or to measure
the inner resources which he possessed to meet the
deadly strain that isolation j^iits on every one of a
man's mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to
some a condition of their fullest strength, but most
of the few who dare to make a moral solitude for
themselves, find that they have assuredly not made
peace. Such solitude, as South said of the study of
the Apocalypse, either finds a man mad, or leaves him
so. Not all can play the stoic who will, and it is still
more certain that one who like Eousseau has lain
down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable
it is impossible for him to do at all what he cannot
do with pleasure, will end in a condition of profound
and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure itself.
In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here
he remained eight years longer, not without the in-
troduction of a certain degree of order into his outer
life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and distrust,
half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon
his mind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this
period (1775-76) to vindicate his memory from the
defamation that was to be launched in a dark torrent
VII. THE END. 315
upon the world at the moment of his death, could
not possibly have been written by a man in his right
mind. Yet the best of the Musings, which were
written still nearer the end, are masterpieces in the
style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth,
the seventh, especially abound in that even, full,
mellow gravity of tone which is so rare in literature,
because the deep absorption of spirit which is its
source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to us
with a tnxth beyond that attained in any of his other
pieces — a mournful .sombre figure, looming shadowily
in the dark glow of sundown among sad and desolate
places. There is nothing like them in the French
tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful,
or the august among men ; nothing like this sonorous
plainsong, the strangely melodious expression in the
music of prose of a darkened spirit which yet had
imaginative visions of beatitude.
It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of
the last waste and obscure years of the man, whose
words were at this time silently fermenting for good
and for evil in many spirits — a Schiller, a Herder, a
Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau,
and many hundreds of those whose destiny was not
to lead, but ingenuously to follow. Rousseau seems to
have repulsed nearly all his ancient friends, and to
have settled do'vvn with dogged resolve to his old
trade of copying music. In summer he rose at five,
copied music until half- past seven ; munched his
316 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
breakfast, arranging on paper during the process such
plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon;
then he returned to his work, dined at half-past twelve,
and went forth to take coffee at some public place.
He would not return from his v/alk until nightfall,
and he retired at half -past ten. The pavements of
Paris were hateful to him because they tore his feet,
and, said he, with deeply significant antithesis, " I am
not afraid of death, but I dread pain." He always
found his way as fast as possible to one of the suburbs,
and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont
Val6rien in the sunset. "Atheists," he said calumni-
ously, " do not love the country ; they like the en-
virons of Paris, where you have all the pleasures of
the city, good cheer, books, pretty women ; but if you
take these things away, then they die of weariness."
The note of every bird held him attentive, and filled
his mind with delicious images. A graceful story is
told of two swallows who made a nest in Kousseau's
sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. " I was
no more than a doorkeeper for them," he said, " for
I kept opening the window for them every moment.
They used to fly with a great stir round my head,
until I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention
between these swallows and me."
In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author
of the immortal Paul and Virginia (1788), finding
himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote to a friend
in France just previously to his return to Europe,
counting among other delights that of seeing two
ru. THE END. 317
summers in one year.* Rousseau happened to see
the letter, and expressed a desire to make the ac-
quaintance of a man who in returning home should
think of that as one of his chief pleasures. To this
we owe the following pictures of an interior from St.
Pierre's hand : —
In the month of June in 17 72, a friend having offered
to take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me
to a house in the Rue PhUriere, nearly opposite to the
Hotel de la Poste. We mounted to the fourth story.
We knocked, and Madame Rousseau opened the door.
" Come in, gentlemen," she said, " you will find my
husband." We passed through a very small antechamber,
where the household utensils were neatly arranged, and
from that into a room where Jean Jacques was seated in
an overcoat and a white cap, busy coiiying music. He
rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed
his work, at tlie same time taking a pait in conversation.
He was thin and of middle height. One shoulder struck
me as rather higher than the other . . . otherwise he
was very well proportioned. He had a brown complexion,
some coloiu" on his cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-
made nose, a rounded and lofty brow, and eyes full of
fire. The oblique lines falling from the nostrils to tlie
extremity of the lips, and marking a physiognomy, in his
case expressed great sensibility and something even pain-
ful. One observed in his face three or four of the char-
acteristics of melancholy — the deep receding eyes and the
elevation of the eyebrows ; you saw profound satlness in
the wrinkles of tlie brow ; a keen and even caustic gaiety
in a thousand little creases at the corners of the eyes, of
' The life of BernarJin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was Dearly
as irregular as that of his friend and master. But his character
was essentially crafty anrl selfish, like that of many other senti-
mentalists of the 6rst order.
318 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
which the orbits entirely disappeared when he laughed.
. . , Near him was a spinette on which from time to
time he tried an air. Two little beds of blue and white
striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of
his furniture. Ou the walls hung a plan of the forest
and park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and
an engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor.
His wife was sitting mending linen ; a canary sang in a
cage hung from the ceiling ; sparrows came for crumbs on
to the sills of the windows, which on the side of the street
were open ; while in the window of the antechamber we
noticed boxes and pots filled with such plants as it pleases
nature to sow. There was in the whole effect of his little
establishment an air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity,
which was delightful.
A few days after, Kousseau returned the visit.
"He wore a round wig, well powdered and curled,
carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full suit of
nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but ex-
tremely neat." He expressed his passion for good
coftee, saying that this and ice were the only two
luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to
have brought some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on
the following day he rashly sent Rousseau a small
packet, Avhich at first produced a polite letter of
thanks ; but the day after the letter of thanks came
one of harsh protest against the ignominy of receiving
presents which could not be returned, and bidding
the unfortunate donor to choose between taking his
coffee back or never seeing his new friend again.
A fair bargain was ultimately arranged, St. Pierre
receiving in exchange for his coffee some curious root
VIL THE END. 319
or other, and a book on ichthyology. Immediately
afterwards he went to dine with his sage. He arrived
at eleven in the forenoon, and they conversed until
half-past twelve.
Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of
wine, and as he put it on the table, a.sked whether we
should have enougli, or if I was fond of drinking. "How
many are there of us," said I. " Tliree," he said ; " you,
my wife, and myselt" "Well," I went on, "when I drink
wine and am alone, I drink a good half-bottle, and I
drink a trifle more when I am with friends." " In that
case," he answered, "we shall not have enough ; I must go
down into the cellar." He brought up a second bottle.
His wife served two dishes, one of small tarts, and another
which was covered. He said, showing me the first, "That
is your dish and the other is mine." " I don't eat much
pastry," I said, " but I hope to be allowed to taste what you
have got." " Oh, they are both common," he replied ;
"but most people don't care for this. 'Tis a Swiss dish ; a
compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and chestnuts." It
was excellent. After these two dishes, we had slices of
beef in salad ; then biscuits and cheese ; after which his
wife served the coffee.
******
One morning when I was at his house, I saw various
domestics either coming for rolls of music, or bringing
them to him to coi)y. He received them standing and
uncovered. He si\id to some, " The price is so much,"
and received the money ; to others, " How soon must 'l
return my copy V « My mistress would like to have it
back in a fortnight." " Oh, that's out of the question : I
have work, I can't do it in less than tliree weeks." I
inquired why he did not take his talents to belter market.
"Ah," he answcrpfl, "there are two Ilousseaus in the
world ; one rich, or who might have been if he had
320 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
chosen ; a mmi capricious, singular, fantastic ; this is the
Rousseau of the public ; the other is obliged to work for
his living, tlie Rousseau whom you see."^
They often took long rambles together, and all
proceeded most harmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered
to pay for such refreshment as they might take, when
a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here is one
more picture, without explosion.
A71 Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Valerien.
We made an appointment at a caf6 in the Champs
Elys(5es. In the morning we took some chocolate. The
wind was westerly, and the air fresh. The sun was sur-
rounded by white clouds, spread in masses over an azure
sky. Reaching the Bois de Boulogne by eight o'clock,
Jean Jacques set to work botanising. As he collected his
little harvest, we kept walking along. We had gone
through part of the wood, when in the midst of the soli-
tude we perceived two young girls, one of whom w'as
arranging the other's hair. — [Reminded them of some
verses of Virgil.] , . .
Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry
with a number of people whom devotion was taking to
Mont Valerien. We climbed an extremely stiff slope, and
were hardly on the top before hunger overtook us and wo
began to think of dining. Rousseau then led the way
towards a hermitage, where he knew we coidd make sure
of hospitality. The brotlier who opened to us, conducted
us to the chapel, where they were reciting the litanies of
providence, which are extremely beautiful. . . . When
we had prayed, Jean Jacques said to me with genuine
feeling : " Now I i'eel what is said in the gospel, ' Where
several of you are gathered together in ray name, there
' (Euv., xii. 69, 73.
VII.
THE END. 321
will I be in the midst of them.' There is a sentiment
of peace and comfort here that penetrates the soul."
I replied, "If Fenelon were alive, you would be a
Catholic." "All," said he, the tears in his eyes, "if
Fenelon were alive, I would seek to be his lackey."
Presently we were introduced into the refectory ; we
seated ourselves during the reading. The subject was the
injustice of the complainings of man : God has brought
him from nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the
reading, Rousseau said to me in a voice of deep emotion :
" Ah, how happy is the man who can believe. . . ." We
walked about for some time in the cloister and the gardens.
They command an immense prospect. Paris in the dis-
tance reared her towers all covered with light, and made
a crown to the far-spreading landscape. The brightness
of the view contrasted Avith the great leaden clouds that
rolled after one another from the west, and seemed to fill
the valley. ... In the afternoon rain came on, as we
approached the Porte Maillot. We took shelter along
with a crowd of other holiday folk under some chestnut-
trees whose leaver were coming out. One of the waiters
of a tavern percei\'ing Jean Jacques, rushed to him full
of joy, exclaiming, " What, is it you, mon bonhomme ?
Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you." Rous-
seau replied cheerfully, " 'Tis because my wife has been
ill, and I myself have been out of sorts." " Mon pauvre
bonhomme," replied the lad, " you must not stop here ;
come in, come in, and I will find room for you." He
hurried us along to a room upstairs, wliere in spite of the
crowd he procured for us chairs and a table, and bread
and wine. I said to Jean Jacques, " He seems very
familiar with you." He answered, " Yes, we have known
one another some years. We used to come here in fine
weather, my wife and I, to eat a cutlet of an evening." ^
^ (Euv., xiL 104, etc. ; and also the Priambide ie I'Arcadie,
CEuv., viL 64, C5.
VOL. IT. Y
322 ROUSSEAU. OHAP.
Things did not continue to go thus smoothly.
One day St. Pierre went to see him, and was received
without a word, and with stiff and gloomy mien. He
tried to talk, but only got monosyllables ; he took up
a book, and this drew a sarcasm which sent him forth
from the room. For more than two months they did
not meet. At length they had an accidental encounter
at a street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre,
and with a gradually warming sensibility proceeded
thus : "There are days when I want to be alone and
crave privacy. I come back from my solitary expedi-
tions so calm and contented. There I have not been
wanting to anybody, nor lias anybody been wanting
to me," and so on.^ He expressed this humour more
pointedly on some other occasion, when he said that
there were times in which he fled from the eyes of
men as from Parthian arrows. As one said who
knew from experience, the fate of his most intimate
fi'iend depended on a word or a gesture." Another
of them declared tha.t he knew Rousseau's style of
discarding a friend b}^ letter so thoroughly, that he
felt confident he could supply Rousseau's place in
case of illness or absence.^ In much of this we sus-
pect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality
meant a futile display before unworthy and conde-
scending curiosity. " It is not I whom they care
1 St. Pierre, xii. 81-83.
^ Dusaulx, p. 81. For his (luarrel with Rousseau, see pp.
130, etc.
^ Rulhieres in Dusaulx, p. 179. For a strange interview
between Kulliieres and Rou.sscau, see pp. 185-186.
VII.
THE END. 323
for," he very truly said, " but public opinion and talk
about me, without a thought of what real worth I
may have." Hence his steadfast refusal to go out to
dine or sup. The mere impertinence of the desire to
see him was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted
with a famous actress of his acquaintance, that she
should iuAate the strange philosopher to meet them.
She was aware that no known force would persuade
Rousseau to come, so she dressed up her tailor as
philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and
vanish suddenly without a word of farewell. The
tailor was long philosophically silent, and by the time
that wine had loosened his tongue, the rest of the
company were too far gone to perceive that the sup-
posed Rousseau was chattering vulgar nonsense.^
We can believe that with admirers of this stamp
Rousseau was well pleased to let tailors or others
stand in his place. There were some, however, of a
different sort, who flitted across his sight and then
either vanished of their own accord, or were silently
dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to Gretry and
Gluck- With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for
setting his music to French words, when he must
have kno^v^l that Italian was the only tongue fit for
music. ^ Yet it was remarked that no one ever heard
him speak ill of others. His enemies, the figures of
his delusion, were vaguely denounced in many dron-
ings, but they remained in dark shadow and were
unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous last visit
1 Musset-Pathay, i. 181. - lb.
324 ROUSSEAU.
CHAP.
to tlie capital (1778), sorae one thought of paying
court to Eousseau by making a mock of the triumphal
reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau harshly
checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he
gave to some few of his acquaintances one or more
readings of the Confessions, although they contained
much painful matter for many people still living,
among the rest for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote
justifiably enough to the lieutenant of police, praying
that all such readings might be prohibited, and it is
believed that they were so prohiljited.^
In 17G9, when Polish anarchy was at its height,
as if to show at once how profound the anarchy was,
and how profound the faith among many minds in
the power of the new French theories, an application
was made to Mably to draw up a scheme for the
renovation of distracted Poland. Mably's notions
won little esteem from the persons who had sought
for them, and in 1771 a similar application was made
to Rousseau in his Parisian garret. He replied in
the Considerations on the Government of Poland,
which are written with a good deal of vigour of
expression, but contain nothing that needs further
discussion. He hinted to the Poles with some shrewd-
^ Musset-Patliay, i. 209. Rousseau gave a copy of the Con-
fessions to Moultou, but forbade the publication before the year
1800. Notwithstanding this, printers procured copies surrepti-
tiously, perhaps through Theresa, ever in need of money ; the
first part was published four years, and the second part with
many suppressions eleven years, after his death, iu 1782 and
1789 respectively. See llusset-Pathay, ii. 4CL
VII. THE END. 325
ness that a curtailment of their territory by their
neighbours was not far off,^ and the prediction was
rapidly fulfilled by the first partition of Poland in
the following year.
He was asked one day of what nation he had the
highest opinion. He answered, the Spanish. The
Spanish nation, he said, has a character ; if it is not
rich, it still preserves all its pride and self-respect in
the midst of its poverty ; and it is animated by a
single spirit, for it has not been scourged by the con-
flicting opinions of philosophy.^
He was extremely poor for these last eight years
of his life. He seems to have drawn the pension
which George ill. had settled on him, for not more
than one year. We do not know why he refused to
receive it afterwards. A well-meaning friend, when
the arrears amounted to between six and seven
thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf, and a
draft for the money was sent. Rousseau gave the
offender a vigorous rebuke for meddling in affairs
that did not concern him, and the draft was destroyed.
Other attempts to induce him to draw this money
failed equally.^ Yet he had only about fifty pounds
* Ch. V. Sucli a curtailment, he says, " would no doubt be
a great evil for the parts dismembered, but it would be a great
advantage for the body of the nation." He urged federation as
the condition of any solid imjjrovement in their affairs.
- Bemanlin de St. Pierre, xii. 37. Comte liad a similar
admiration for Spain and for the same reason.
' Corancez, quoted iu Musset-Pathay, L 239. Alao Corr.,
vi. 295.
326 ROUSSEAU. CHAP.
a year to live on, together with the modest amount
which he earned by copying music. ^
The sting of indigence began to make itself felt
towards 1777. His health became worse and he
could not work. Theresa was waxing old, and could
no longer attend to the small cares of the household.
More than one person offered them shelter and pro-
vision, and the old distractions as to a home in which
to end his days began once again. At length M.
Girardin prevailed upon him to come and live at
Ermenonville, one of his estates some twenty miles
from Paris. A dense cloud of obscure misery hangs
over the last months of this forlorn existence.^ No
tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. Theresa's
character seems to have developed into something
truly bestial. Rousseau's terrors of the designs of
his enemies returned with great violence. He thought
he was imprisoned, and he knew that he had no means
of escape. One day (July 2, 1778), suddenly and
without a single warning symptom, all drew to an
end ; the sensations which had been the ruling part of
his life were affected by pleasure and pain no more,
the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The
surgeons reported that the cause of his death was
apoplexy, but a suspicion has haunted the world ever
since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol-shot.
We cannot tell. There is no inherent improbability
1 Corr., vi. 303.
- Robespierre, then a youth, is .said to have invited liim
here. See llamel's Rolespierre, i. 22.
rii. THE END. 327
in the fact of his having committed suicide. In the
New Helo'isa he had thrown the conditions which
justified self-destruction into a distinct formula.
Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case
fell within the conditions which he had prescribed,
and that he was meditating action.^ Only seven years
before, he had implied that a man had the right to
deliver himself of the burden of his own life, if its
miseries were intolerable and irremediable.^ This,
however, counts for nothing in the absence of some
kind of positive evidence, and of that there is just
enough to leave the manner of his end a little doubt-
ful.^ Once more, we cannot tell.
By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his
' See above, vol i. jip. 16, 17. ^ Corr., vi. 264.
' The case stands tliua : — (1) There was the certificate of five
doctors, attesting that Rousseau had died of ajioplexy. (2) The
assertion of M. GiiarJin, in whose house he dieil, that there
was no hole in his head, nor poison in the stomach or viscera,
nor other siirn of self-destruction. (3) The assertion of Theresa
to the same effect. On the other hand, we have the assertion
of Corancez, that on his journey to Ernienonville on the day of
Rousseau's burial a horse-master on the road had said, " Who
would have supposed that M. Rousseau would have destroyed
himself !"— and a variety of inferences from the wording of the
certificate, and of Theresa's letter. Musset-Pathay believes in
the suicide, and arj^ued very ingeniously against M. Girardin.
But his arguments do not go far beyond verbal ingenuity,
showing that suicide was possible, and was consistent \dth
the language of the documents, rather than adducing positive
testimony. See vol. i. of his History, pp. 263, etc. The con-
troversy was resumed as late as 1861, between tlie Figaro and
the MoTide Illiistri. See also M. Jal's Did. Crit. de Biog. ei.
d'Hi^l., \). 1091.
328 KOUSSEAU. CHAP. viL
body was ptit under the ground on an island in the
midst of a small lake, where poplars throw shadows
over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of
mortals. Here it remained for sixteen years. Then
amid the roar of cannon, the crash of trumpet and
drum, and the wild acclamations of a populace gone
mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that
the poor dust should be transported to the national
temple of great men.
INDEX.
Academies (French) locnl, i. 132.
Academy, of Dijou, Rousseau
writes essays for, i. 133 ;
French, prize essay against
Flousseau's Discourse, 1. 150, n.
Actors, how regarded in France
in Rousseau's time, L 322.
Althusen, teaches doctrine of
sovereignty of the people, ii.
147.
America (U.S.), effects in, of the
doctrine of the equality of
men, i. 1S2.
American colonists indebted in
eighteenth century to Rous-
seau's writings, i. 3.
Anchorite, distinction between
the old and the new, i. 234.
Annecy, i. 34, 50 ; Rousseau's
room at, i. 54 ; Rousseau's
teachers at, i. 56 ; seminary
at, i. S2.
Aquinas, protest against juristi-
cal doctrine of law being the
pleasure of the prince, ii. 144,
145.
Aristotle on Origin of Society,
i. 174.
Atheism, Rousseau's prottst I
against, i, 20S ; St. Lambert j
on, L 209, n. ; Robespierre's i
protest against, ii. 178 ; Cha\i- !
niette put to death for en-
deavouring to base the govern- 1
ment of France on, ii. 180. |
Augustine (of Hippo), ii. 272, 303.
Austin, John, ii. 151, n. ; on
Sovereignty, ii. 162.
Authors, difficulties of, in Fi-ance
in the eighteenth century, ii.
55-61.
Babceof, on the Revolution, ii.
123, n.
Barbier, iL 26.
Basedow, his enthusiasm for Rous-
seau's educational theories, ii.
251.
Beaumont, De, Archbishop of
Paris, mandate against Rous-
seau issued by, ii. 83 ; argu-
ment from, ii. 86.
Bernard, maiden name of Rous-
seau's mother, i. 10.
Bienne, Rousseau driven to take
refuge in island in lake of, ii.
108; his account of, ii. 109-115.
Bodin, on Government, ii. 147 ;
his definition of an aristocratic
state, ii. 1G8, n.
Bonaparte, Napoleon, ii. 102, n.
Bossuet, on Stage Plays, L 321.
Boswell, James, ii. 98 ; visits
Rous e;iu, ii. 9S, also ib. n. ;
urged by Rousseau to visit
Corsica, ii. 100 ; his letter to
Rousseau, ii. 101.
Boufflers, M.idame de, n. ^,\b. n.
Bougainville (brother of the navi.
gator), i. 184, n.
330
IN DFX
Bi^utus, how Rousseau came to
be paue.cryrist of, i. 187.
Buffon, ii.''205.
Burke, ii. 140, 192.
Burnet, Bishop, od Genevese, i.
225.
Burton, John Hill, his Life of
Huvie (on Rousseau), ii. 283, n.
Byron, Lord, antecedents of
highest creative efforts, ii. 1 ;
effect of nature upon, ii. 40 ;
difference between and Rous-
seau, ii. 41.
Galas, i. 312.
Calvin, i. 4, 189 ; Rousseau on, as
a legislator, ii. 131 ; and Serve-
tus, ii. 180; mentioned, ii. 181.
Candide, thought by Rousseau to
be meant as a reply to him,
i. 319.
Cardan, ii. 303.
Cato, how Rousseau came to be
his panegyrist, i. 187.
Chamberi, probable date of Rous-
seau's return to, i. 62, n. ; talccs
up his residence there, i. 69 ;
effect on his mind of a French
column of troops passing
through, i. 72, 73 ; his illness
at, i. 73, n.
Gharmettes, Les, Madame de
Warens's residence, i. 73 ; pre-
sent condition of, i. 74, 75, n. ;
time spent there by Rousseau,
i. 94.
Charron, ii. 203.
Chateaubriand, influenced by
Rousseau, i. 3.
Chatham, Lord, ii. 92.
Cbaumette, ii. 178 ; guillotined
on charge of endeavouring to
establish atheism in France,
ii. 179.
Chesterfield, Lord, ii. 15.
Choiseul, ii. 57, 64, 72.
Citizen, revolutionary use of word,
derived from Rousseau, ii. 161.
Civilisation, variety of the origin
and process of, i. 176 ; defects
of, i. 176 ; one of the worst trials
of, ii. 102.
Gobbett, ii. 42.
Collier, Jeremy, on the English
Stage, i. 323.
Condillac, i. 95.
Gondorcet, i. 89 ; on Social Posi-
tion of Women, i. 335 ; human
perfectibility, ii. 119 ; inspira-
tion of, drawn from the school
of Voltaire and Rousseau, ii.
194 ; belief of, in the improve-
ment of humanity, ii. 246 ;
grievous mistake of, ii. 247.
Confessions, the, not to be trusted
for minute accuracy, i. 86, n. ;
or for dates, i. 93 ; first part
written 1766, ii. 301 ; their
character, ii. 303 ; published
surreptitiously, ii. 324, n. ;
readings from, prohibited by
police, ii. 324.
Conti, Prince of, ii. 4-7 ; receives
Rousseau at Trye, ii. 118.
Contract, Social, i. 136.
Corsica, struggles for independ-
ence of, ii. 99 ; Rousseau in-
vited to legislate for, ii. 99-
102 ; bought by France, ii. 102.
Cowper, i. zO ; ii. 41 ; on Rous-
seau, ii. 41, ?i. ; lines in the Task,
ii. 253 ; his delusions, ii. 301.
Cynicism, Rousseau's assumption
of, i. 206.
D'AiGUiLLON, ii. 72.
D'Alembert, i. 89 ; Voltaire's
staunchest henchman, i. 321 ;
his article on Geneva, i. 321 ;
on Stage Plays, i. 326, n. ; on
Position of Women in Society,
1. 335 ; on Rousseau's letter on
INDEX.
331
the Theatre, i. 336 ; suspected
by Rousseau of having written
the preteuiled letter from Fred-
erick of Prussia, ii. 288 ; advises
Hume to publish account of
Rousseau's quarrel with him,
ii. 294.
D'Argenson, ii. ISO.
Dates of Rousseau's letters to be
relied on, not those of the Con-
fessions, i. 93.
Davenport, Mr., provides Rousseau
Tvith a home at Wootton, ii.
286 ; his kindness to Rousseau,
ii. 306.
Deism, Rousseau's, ii. 260-275 ;
that of others, ii. 262-265 ;
shortcomings of Rousseau's, ii.
270.
Democracy defined, ii. 168 ; re-
jected by Rousseau, as too per-
fect for men, ii. 171.
D'Epinay, Madame, i. 194, 195,
205 ; gives the Hermitage to
Rousseau, i. 229, n. ; his quar-
rels with, i. 271 ; his relations
with, L 273, 276 ; journey to
Geneva of, i. 2S4 ; squabbles
arising out of, between, and
Rou.sseau, Diderot, and Grimm,
L 285-290 ; mentioned, ii. 7,
26, 197 ; vrrotn on education,
ii. 199 ; applies to secretary of
police to prohibit Rousseau's
readings from his Confessions,
ii. 324.
D'Epinay, Monsieur, L 254 ; iL 26.
Descartes, i. 87, 225 ; ii. 267.
Deux Fonts, Due de, Rousseau's
rude reply to, i. 207.
D'Holbach, i. 192; Rousseau's dis-
like of his materialistic friends,
i. 223 ; ii. 37, 256.
DHoudetot, Madame, i. 255-270 ;
Madame d'Epinay's jealousy of,
L 278 ; mentioned, iL 7 ; Duel's
Rousseau a home in Normandy,
ii. 117.
Diderot, i. 64, 89, 133 ; tries to
manage Rousseau, i. 213 ; his
domestic misconduct, i. 215 ;
leader of the materialistic party,
i. 223 ; on Solitary Life, i. 232 ;
his active life, i. 233 ; without
moral sensitiveness, L 262 ;
mentioned, i. 262, 269, 271 ; ii.
8 ; his relations with Rousseau,
i. 271 ; accused of pilfering
Goldoni's new play, i. 275 ;
his relations and contentions
with Rousseau, i. 275, 276 ; lec-
tures Rousseau about Madame
d'Epinay,i.2S4 ; visits Rousseau
after his leaviug the Hermitage,
i. 289 ; Rousseau's final breach
with, i. 336 ; his criticism, and
plays, ii. 34 ; his defects, ii. 34 ;
thro^vu into prison, ii. 57 ; his
difficulties with the Encyclo-
paedists, ii. 57 ; his papers saved
from the police by 5lalesherbes,
ii. 62.
Dijon, academy of, i. 132.
Discourses, The, Circumstances of
the composition of the first
Discourse, i. 133-136 ; sum-
mary of it, i. 138-145 (dis-
astrous effect of the progress of
sciences and arts, i. 140, 141 ;
error more dangerous than
truth useful, i. 141 ; viseless-
ness of learning and art, i. 141,
142 ; terrible disonlers caused
in Europe by the art of print-
ing, i. 143 ; two kinds of ignor-
ance, i. 144); tlie relation of
this Discourse to Montaigne,
i. 145 ; its one-sidedncss and
hollowness, i. 148 ; shown by
Voltaire, L 148 ; its positive
side, i. 149, 150 ; second Dis-
course, origin of the Inequality
332
INDEX.
of Man, i. 154 ; summary of
it, i. 159, 170 ; (state of nature,
i. 150, 162 ; Hobbes's mistake,
i. 181 ; what broke up the
"state of nature," i. 164 ; its
preferableness, i. 166, 167 ;
origin of society and laws, i.
168; "new state of nature,"
i. 169 ; main position of tbe
Discoui-se, i. 169) ; its utter in-
clusiveness, i. 170 ; criticism
on its method, i. 170 ; on its
matter, i. 172 ; wanting in
evidence, i. 172 ; further objec-
tions to it, i. 173 ; assumes
uniformity of process, i. 176 ;
its unscientific character, i. 177 ;
its real importance, i. 178 ; its
protest against the mockery of
civilisation, i. 178 ; equality of
man, i. 181 ; difi'erent eflects
of this doctrine in France and
the United States explained,
i. 182, 183 ; discovers a reac-
tion against the historical
method of Montesquieu, i.
183, 184 ; pecuniary results
of, i. 196 ; Diderot's praise of
first Discourse, i. 200 ; Vol-
taire's acknowledgement of gift
of second Discourse, i. 308 ;
the, an attack on the general
ordering of society, ii. 22 ;
referred to, ii. 41.
Drama, its proper elfect, i. 826 :
what would be that of its intro-
duction into Geneva, i. 327 ;
true answer to Rousseau's con-
tentions, i. 329.
Dramatic moralitj', i. 326.
Drinkers, Rousseau's estimate of,
i. 330.
Drunkenness, how esteemed in
Switzerland and Naples, i. 331 .
Duclos, i. 206 ; ii. 62.
Duni, i. 292.
Dupin, Madame de, Rousseau
secretary to, i. 120 ; her posi-
tion in society, i. 195 ; Rous-
seau's country life with, i. 196 ;
friend of the Abbe de Saint
Pierre, i. 244.
Education, interest taken in, in
France in Rousseau's time, ii.
193, 194 ; its new direction
ii. 195 ; Locke, the pioneer of,
ii. 202, 203 ; Rousseau's special
merit in connection with, ii.
203 ; his views on (see Emilias,
passim, as well as for general
consideration of) what it is,
ii. 219 ; plans of, of Locke and
others, designed for the higher
class, ii. 254 ; Rousseau's for
all, ii. 254.
Emile, i. 136, 196.
Emilius, character of, ii. 2, 3 ;
particulars of the publication
of, ii. 59, 60 ; effect of, on
Rousseau's fortunes, ii. 62-64 ;
ordered to be biu-nt by public
executioner at Paris, ii. 65 ;
at Geneva, ii. 72 ; condemned
by the Sorbonue, ii. 82 ; sup-
plied (as also did the Social
Contract) dialect for the long-
ing in France and Germany
to return to nature, ii. 193 ;
substance of, furnished by
Locke, ii. 202 ; examination
of, ii. 197-280 ; mischief pro-
duced by its good advice, ii. 206,
207; training of young children,
ii. 207, 208 ; constantly reason-
ing with them a mistake of
Locke's, ii. 209 ; Rousseau's
central idea, disparagement of
the reasoning faculty, ii. 209,
210 ; theories of education,
practice better than precept,
INDEX.
333
iL 211 : the idea of jiroperty,
the first that Rousseau would
have given to a child, ii. 212 ;
modes of teaching, ii. 214, 215 ;
futility of such methods, ii.
215, 216 ; where Rousseau is
right, and where wi-ong, ii. 219,
220 ; effect of his owu waut of
parental love, ii. 220 ; teaches
that everybody should learn a
trade, ii. 223 ; no special fore-
sight, ii. 224, 225 ; supremacy
of the common people insisted
upon, ii. 226, 227 ; three domi-
nant states of mind to be esta-
blished by the instructor, ii.
229, 230 ; Rousseau's incom-
plete notion of justice, ii. 231 ;
ideal of Emilius, ii. 232, 233 ;
forbids early teaching of history,
ii. 237, 238 ; disparages modem
history, ii. 239 ; criticism on
the old historians, ii. 240 ;
education of women, ii. 241 ;
Rousseau's failure here ; ii.
242, 243 ; inconsistent with
himself; ii. 244, 245 ; worth-
lessness of his views, ii. 249 ;
real merits of the work, ii. 249 ;
its effect in Germany, ii. 251,
252 ; not much effect on educa-
tionin England, ii. 252 ; Emilias
the first expression of demo-
cratic teaching in education,
IL 254 ; Rousseau's deism, iL
258, 260, 264-267, 269, 270,
276 ; its inadequacy for the
wants of men, ii. 267-270 ;
his position towards Christian-
ity, ii. 270-276 ; real satisfac-
tion of the religious emotions,
ii. 275-280.
Encyclopnsdia, The, D'Alembert's
article on Geneva in, L 321.
Encyclopaedists, the society of,
confirms Rousseau's religious
faith, i. 221 ; referred to, ii.
257.
Evil, discussions on Rousseau's,
Voltaire's, and De Maistre's
teachings concerning, i. 313, n.,
31 S ; different effect of exist-
ence of, on Rousseau and Vol-
taire, i. 319.
F^NELON, ii. 37, 248 ; Rousseau's
veneration for, ii. 321.
Ferguson, Adam, ii. 253.
Filraer contends that a man is
not naturally free, ii. 126.
Foundling Hospital, Rousseau
sends his children to the, i.
120.
France, debt of, to Rousseau, i. 3 ;
Rousseau the one gieat reli-
gious \vriter of, in the eighteenth
century, i. 26 ; his wanderings
in the east of, i. 61 ; his fond-
ness for, i. 62-72 ; establish-
ment of local academies in,
i. 132 ; decay in, of Greek
literary studies, i. 146 ; effects
in, of doctrine of equality of
man, i. 182 ; effects in, of Mon-
tesquieu's "Spirit of Laws,"
i. 183 ; amiability of, in the
eighteenth centur)-, i. 187 ;
effect of Rousseau's writings
in, i. 187 ; collective organisa-
tion in, i. 222 ; St. Pierre's
strictures on government of,
i. 244 ; Rousseau on govern-
ment of, i. 246 ; effect of
Rousseau's spiritual element
on, i. 306 ; patriotism wanting
in, i. 332 ; difficulties of author-
ship in, ii. 55-64 ; buys Corsica
from the Genoese, ii. 102 ; state
of, after 1792, apparently favour
able to the carrying out of
Rousseau's political views, ii.
131 132; in 1793, ii. 135;
334
INDEX.
haunted by uan-ow and fervid I
minds, ii. 142. i
Francueil, Rousseau's patron, i.
99 ; grandfather of Madame
George Sand, i. 99, ?>. ; Rous-
seau's salary from, i. 120 ;
country-bouse of, i. 19(j.
Franklin, Benjamin, ii. 42.
Frederick of Prussia, relations
between, and Rousseau, ii. 73-
78 ; "famous bull" of, ii. 90.
Freemau on Growth of English
Constitution, ii. 164.
French, principles of, revolution,
i. 1, 2, 3 ; process and ideas
of, i. 4 ; Rousseau of old, stock,
i. 8 ; poetry, Rousseau on, i.
90, ib. n. ; melody, i. 105 :
academy, thesis for prize, i.
150, 71. ; philosophers, i. 202,
music, i. 291 ; music, its pre-
tensions demolished by Rous-
seau, i. 294 ; ecclesiastics op-
posed to the theatre, ii. 322 ;
stage, Rousseau on, i. 325 ;
morals, depravity of, ii. 26, 27 ;
Barbier on, ii. 26 ; thought,
beuetit, or otherwise of revolu-
tion on, ii. 54 ; history, evil
side of, in Rousseau's time,
ii. 56 ; indebted to Holland
for freedom of the press, ii. 59 ;
catholic and monarchic absolu-
tism sunk deep into the char-
acter of the, ii. 167.
French Convention, story of
member of the, ii. 134, n.
Galuiti, effect of his music, i.
105.
Geneva, i. 8 ; characteristics of
its people, i. 9 ; Rousseau's
visit to, i. 93 ; influence of,
on Rousseau, i. 94 ; he revisits
it in 1754, i. 186-190, 218;
turns Protestant again there.
i. 220 ; religious opinion in,
i. 223 (also i. 224, n.) ; Rous-
seau thinks of taking up his
abode in, i. 228 : Voltaire at,
i. 308; D'Alembert's article
on, in Encyclopedia, i. 321 ;
Rousseau's notions of effect of
introducing the drama at, i.
327 ; council of, order public
burning of Emilius and the
Social Contract, and arrest of
the author if he came there, ii.
72 ; the only place where the
Social Contract was actually
burnt, 73, n. ; Voltaire sus-
pected to have had a haml in
the matter, ii. 81 ; council of,
divided into two camps by
Rousseau's condemnation, in
1762, ii. 102 ; Rousseau re-
nounces his citizenship in, ii.
104 ; working of the republic,
ii. 104.
Genevese, Bishop Burnet on, i.
225 ; Rousseau's distrust of, i.
228 ; his panegjTic on, i. 328 ;
manners of, according to Rous-
seau, i. 330 ; their complaint
of it, i. 331.
Genlis, Madame de, ii. 323.
Genoa, Rousseau in quarantine at,
i. 103 ; Corsica sold to France
by, ii. 102.
Germany, sentimental movements
in, ii. 33.
Gibbon, Edward, at Lausanne,
ii. 96.
Girardin, St. Marc, on Rousseau,
i. Ill, 71. ; on Rousseau's dis-
cussions, ii. 11, n. •. offers
Rousseau a home, ii. 326.
Gluck, i. 291, 296 ; Rousseau
quarrels with, for setting his
music to French words, ii. 323.
Goethe, i. 20.
Goguet on Society, ii 127, n. ; on
INDEX.
335
tacit conveutions, ii. 148, n. ;
on law, ii. 153, n,
Goldoui, Diderot accused of pilfer-
ing liis new play, i. 275.
Gothic architecture denounced by
Voltaire and Turgot, i. 294.
Gouvon, Count, Rousseau servant
to, i. 42.
Government, disquisitions on, ii.
131-20(3 ; remarks on, ii. 131-
141 ; early democratic ideas of,
ii. 144-148 ; Hobbes' philosophy
of, ii. 151; Rousseau's science
of, ii. 155, 156 ; De la Rinere's
science of, LL 156, n. ; federa-
tion recommended by Rousseau
to the Poles, iL 166 ; three
forms of government defined,
ii. 169 ; definition inadequate, ii.
169 ; Montesquieu's definition,
iL 169; Rousseau's distinction
between tyrant and despot, ii.
169, 71. ; his objection to de-
mocracy, ii. 172 ; to monarchy,
iL 173 ; consideration of aristo-
cracy, iL 174 ; his own scheme,
iL 175 ; Hobbes's " Passive
Obedience," iL 181, 182; social
conscience theory, iL 183-187 ;
government made impossible by
Rousseau's doctrine of social
contract, iL 188-192; Burke
on expediency in, ii. 192 ; what
a civilised nation is, iL 194 ;
Jefferson on, ii. 227, 228, n.
Governments, earliest, how com-
posetl, L 169.
Graffiiruy, Madame de, iL 199.
Gratitiule, Rousseau on, ii. 14, 15 ;
explanation of his want of, ii.
70.
Greece, importance of history of,
L 184, and ib. n.
Greek ideas, influence of, in France
in the eighteenth century, L
146.
Grenoble, L 93.
Gretry, L 292, 296 ; ii. 323.
Grimm, description of Rom-
seau by, i. 206 ; Rousseau's
quarrels with, i. 279 ; letter of,
about Rousseau and Diderot,
i. 275 ; relations of, with Rous-
seau, L 279 ; some account of
his life, i. 279 ; his conversation
with Madame d'Epinay, i. 281 ;
criticism on Rousseau, i. 281 ;
natural want of sympathy be-
tween the two, L 282; Rous-
seau's quarrel with, i. 285-290 ;
iL 65, 199.
Grotius, on Government, ii. 148.
Hebert, ii. 178 ; prevents publi-
cation of a book in which the
author professed his belief in a
god, ii. 179.
Helmholtz, i. 299.
Helvetius, i. 191 ; ii. 65, 199.
Herder, ii. 251 ; Rousseau's influ-
ence on, ii. 315.
Hermitage, the, given to Rousseau
by Madame d'Epiu.iy, L 229
(also ib. n.) ; what his friends
thought of it, L 231 ; sale of,
after the Revolution, i. 237, n. ;
reasons for Rousseau's leaving,
L 286.
Hildebrand, i. 4.
Hobbes, L 143, 161 ; his " PhUo-
sophy of Government," ii. 151 ;
singular inriuence of, upon Rous-
seau, iL 151, 183 ; es.sential
ditlerence between lus views
and those of Rousseau, iL 159;
on Sovereignty, iL 162 ; Rous-
seau's definition of the three
forms of government adopted
by, inadequate, ii. 168 ; would
reduce spiritual ami temporal
jurusdiction to one political
unity, iL li3.
336
INDEX.
Holbachians, i. 337 ; ii. 2.
Hooker, on Civil Government, ii.
148,
Hotel St. Quentin, Rousseau at,
i. 106.
Hume, David, i. 64, S9 ; his deep-
set sagacity, i. 156, ii. 6, 7i'j ;
suspected of tampering witli
Boswell's letter, ii. 98, n.; on
Boswell, ii. 101, n.; his eager-
ness to find Rousseau a refuge
in England, ii. 282, 283 ; his
account of Rousseau, ii. 284 ;
finds him a home at Wootton,
ii. 280 ; Rousseau's quarrel
with, ii. 286-291 (also ii. 290,
?(.) ; his innocence of Walpole's
letter, ii. 292 ; his conduct in
the quarrel, ii. 293 ; saves
Rousseau from arrest of French
Government, ii. 295 ; on Rous-
seau's seusitiveness, ii. 299.
Imagination, Rousseau's, i. 247.
Jacobins, the, Rousseau's Social
Contract, their gospel, ii. 132,
133 ; theirniistake, ii. 136 ; con-
venience to them of some of the
maxims of the Social Contract,
ii. 142 ; Jacobin supremacy and
Hobbism, ii. 152 ; how they
might have saved France, ii.
167.
Jansen, his propositions, i. 31.
Jansenists, Rousseau's suspicions
of, ii. 63 ; mentioned, ii. 89.
Jean Paul, ii. 216, 252.
Jefferson, ii. 227, n.
Jesuits, Rousseau's suspicions of
the, ii. 64 ; the, and parlia-
ments, ii. 65 ; movement against,
ii. 65 ; suppression of the, leads
to increased thought about edu-
cation, ii. 199.
Johnson, ii. 15, 98.
Kamks, Lord, ii. 253.
Lamennais, influenced by Rous-
seau, ii. 228.
Language, origin of, i. 161.
Latour, Madame, ii. 19, ib. n.
Lavater favourable to education
on Rousseau's plan, ii. 251
(also ib. n.)
Lavoisier, reply to his request for
a fortnight's respite, ii. 227, n.
Law, not a contract, ii. 153.
Lecouvreur, Adrienne, refused
Christian burial on account of
her being an actress, i. 323.
Leibnitz, i. 87 ; his optimism, i.
309 ; on the constitution of the
universe, i. 312.
Lessing, on Pope, i. 310, n.
" Letters from the Mountain," ii.
104 ; burned, by command, at
Paris and the Hague, ii. 105.
Liberty, English, Rousseau's no-
tion of, ii. 163, 11.
Life, Rousseau's condemnation of
the contemplative, i. 10 ; his
idea of household, i. 41 ; easier
for him to preach than for
others to practise, i. 43.
Jjisbon, earthquake of, Voltaire
on, i. 310 ; Rousseau's letter to
Voltaire on, i. 310, 311.
Locke, his Essay, 1. 87 ; his
notions, i. 87 ; his influence
upon Rousseau, ii. 121-126;
on Marriage, ii. 126 ; on Civil
Government, ii. 149, 150, n.;
indefiniteness of his views, ii.
160 ; the pioneer of French
thought on education, ii. 202,
203 ; Rousseau's indebtedness
to, ii. 203 ; his mistake in
education, ii. 209 ; subjects of
his theories, ii. 254.
Lulli (music), i. 291.
Luther, i. 4.
INDEX.
33/
Lazembonrg, the Diike of, gives
Roxisseau a home, ii. 2-7, 9.
Luxembourg, the iLirechale de, in
vain seeks Rousseau's chihlrcu,
i. 12S ; helps to get Emilias
published, 63-64, 67.
Lycurgus, ii. 129, 131 ; influence
of, upon Saint Just, ii. 133.
Lyons, Rousseau a tutor at, i. 'J5-
97.
Mably, De, i. 95 ; his socialism,
L 18-4 ; applied to for scheme
for the government of Poland,
ii. 324.
Maistre, De, i. 145 ; on Optimism,
i. 314.
Maitre, Le, teaches Rousseau
music, i. 58.
Malebranche, i. 87.
Malesherbes, Rousseau confesses
his ungrateful nature to, ii. 14 ;
his dishonest advice to Rous-
seau, IL 60 ; helps Diderot,
ii. 62 ; and Rousseau in the
publishing of Emilius, ii. 62,
63 ; endangered by it, ii. 67 ;
asks Rousseau to collect plants
for him, ii. 76.
Man, his specific distinction from
other animals, i. 161 ; his state
of nature, i. 161 ; Hobbes wrong
concerning this, i. 161 ; equality
of, i. 180 ; effects of this
doctrine in France and in the
United States, i. 182 ; not
naturally free, iL 126.
Mandeville, i. 162.
Manners, Rousseau's, Marmontel,
and Grimm on, i. 205, 206 ;
Rou.'sseau on Swiss, i. 329, 330 ;
depravity of French, in the
eighteenth century, ii. 25, 26. \
Marischal, Lord, friendship be-
tween, and Rousseau, ii. 79-1
VOL. n.
81 ; account of, iL 80 ; on
Boswell, ii. 98
Marmontel, on Rousseau's man-
ners, i. 206 ; on his success, ii. 2.
Marriage, design of the New
Heloisa to exalt, ii. 46-48, ib.
n.
Marsilio, of Padua, on Law, ii.
145.
Men, inequality of, Rousseau's
second Discourse (see Dis-
courses), dedicated to the re-
public of Geneva, i. 190 ; how
received there, i. 228.
Mirabeau the elder, Rousseau's
letter to, from Wootton, ii. 305,
306 ; his character, ii. 309-312 ;
receives Rousseau at Fleury, ii.
311.
Mirabeau, Gabriel, Rousseau's
influence on, ii. 315.
Moliere (Misanthrope of), Rous-
seau's criticism on, L 329 ;
D'Alembert on, i. 329.
Monarchy, Rousseau's objection
to. ii. 171.
Montaigu, Count de, avarice of,
i. 101, 102.
Montaigne, Rousseau's obligations
to, i. 145 ; influence of, on
Rousseau, ii. 203.
Montesquieu, " incomplete posi-
tivity" of, i. 156 ; on Govern-
ment, i. 157 ; effect of his
Spirit of Laws on Rou.sseau, i.
183 ; confuse<l definition of
laws, ii. 153 ; balanced parlia-
mentary system of, ii. 163 ; his
definition of forms of govern-
ment, ii. 169.
Montmorency, Rousseau goes to
live there, i. 229 ; his life at, ii.
2-9.
Jlontpellier, i. 92.
Morals, state of, in France in the
eighteenth century, ii. 26.
338
INDEX.
Morc'llet, thrown into the Bastile,
ii. 57.
Morelly, his indirect influence on
Rousseau, i. 156 ; his socialistic
theory, i. 157, 158 ; his rules
for organising a model commun-
ity, i. 158, '/t. ; his terse exposi-
tion of inequality contrasted
with that of Rousseau, i. 170 ;
ou primitive human nature, i.
175 ; liis socialism, ii. 52 ; influ-
ence of his "model community"
upon St. Just, ii. 133, ji. ; ail-
vice to mothers, ii. 205.
Metiers, Rousseau's home there,
ii. 77 ; attends divine service at,
ji. 91 , life at, ii. 91, 93.
Moultou (pastor of Motiers), his
enthusiasm for Rousseau, ii. 82.
Music, Rousseau imdertake.'' tf
teach, i. 60 ; Rousseau's opinion
concerning Italian, i. 105 ; efl'ect
of Galuppi's, i. 105 ; Rousseau
earns his living by copjing, i.
196 ; ii. 315 ; Ram eau's criticism
on Rousseau's Muses Galantes, i.
211 ; French, i. 291 ; Rousseau's
letter on, i. 292 ; Italian, de-
nounced at Paris,!. 292 •,Rousseau
utterlycondemus French, 1.294 ;
quarrels with Gluck for setting
his, to Freuch words, ii. 323.
Musical notation, Rousseau's, i.
291 ; his Musical Dictionary, i.
296 ; his notation explained, i.
296-301 ; his system inapplic-
able to instruments, i. 301.
Naples, drunkenness, how re-
ganled in, i. 331.
Narcisse, Rousseau's condemna-
tion of his own comedy of, i.
215.
Nature, Rousseau's love of, i. 234-
241 ; ii. 39 ; state of, Rousseau,
Montesquieu, Voltaire, and
Hume ou, i. 156-158 ; Rous-
seau's, in Second Discourse, 1.
171-180 ; his starting-point of
right, aud normal constitution
of civil society, ii. 124. See
State of Nature.
Necker, ii. 54, 98, n.
Neuchatel, flight to jTiucipality
of, by Rousseau, ii. 73 ; history
of, ii. 73, 71. ; outbreak at, arising
from religious controversy, ii.
90 ; prejjarations for driving
Rousseau out of, defeated by
Frederick of Prussia,ii.90 ; clergy
of, against Rousseau, ii. 106.
New Helo'isa, first couceptioa of,
i. 250 ; monument of Rousseau's
fall, ii. 1 ; when completed and
])ublishcd, ii. 2 ; read aloud to
the Duchess de Luxembourg,
ii. 3 ; letter on suicide in, ii.
16 ; efl'ects upon Parisian ladies
of reading the, ii. 18, 19 ;
criticism ou, ii. 20-55 ; his
scheme proposed in it, ii. 21 ;
its story, ii. 24 ; its purity,
contrasted with contem2iorary
and later French romances, ii.
24 ; its general efl'ect, ii. 27 ;
Rousseau absolutely without
humour, ii. 27 ; utter selfishness
of hero of, ii. 30 ; its heroine, ii.
30 ; its popularity, ii. 231, 232 ;
burlesque ou it, ii. 31, ii. ; its
vital defect, ii. 35 ; difference
between Rousseau, Byron, and
others, ii. 42 ; sumptuary de-
tails of the story, ii. 44, 45 ;
its democratic tendency, ii. 49,
50 ; the bearing of its teaching,
ii. 54 ; hindrances to its ch'cula-
tion in France, ii. 67 ; Males-
herbes's low morality as to pub-
lishing, ii. 61.
Optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, i,
309-310 ; discussed, ii. 128-13a
INDEX.
339
Origin of inequality among men,
i. 156. See also Discourses.
P.\LET, ii. 191, n.
Palissot, ii. 56.
Paris, Rousseau's first visit to, L
61 ; his second, i. 63, 97,
102 ; third visit, i. 106 ; effect
in, of his first Discourse, L 139,
n. ; opinions in, on religion,
laws, etc., i. 185 ; " mimic
philosophy " there, i. 193 ;
society in, in Rousseau's time,
i. 202-211 ; his \iew of it, i.
210 ; composes there his Muses
Galantes, i. 211 ; returns to,
from Geneva, i. 228 ; his belief
of the unfitness of its people for
political affairs, i. 246 ; goes to,
in 1741, with his .scheme of
musical notation, i. 291 ; effect
there of his letter on music,
i. 295 ; Rousseau's imaginary
contrast between, and Geneva,
L 329 ; Emilius ordered to be
publicly burnt in, ii. 65 ; parlia-
ment of, orders " Letters from
the Mountain " to be burnt, ii.
295 ; also Voltaire's Philosophi-
cal Dictionary, ii. 295 ; Danton's
scheme for municipal adminis-
tration ofi ii. 168, 71. ; two parties
(those of Voltaire and of Rous-
seau) in, in 1793, ii. 173 ;
excitement in, at Rousseau's
appearance in 1765, ii. 283 ;he
goes to live there in 1770, ii.
314 ; Voltaire's last visit to, ii.
323, 324.
Piris, Abbe, miracles at his tomb,
iL 88.
Parisian frivolity, i. 193, 220, 329.
Parliament and Jesuits, ii. 64.
Pascal, iL 37.
Passy, Rousseau composes the
"Village Soothsayer" at, i. 212.
Paul, St., eflfect of, on western
society, i. 4.
Peasantr}', French, oppression of,
i. 67, 68.
Pedigree of Rousseau, i. 8, n.
Pelagius, ii. 272.
Peoples, sovereignty of, Rousseau
not the inventor of doctrine of,
ii. 144-148 ; taught by Althusen,
i. 147 ; constitution of Helvetic
Republic in 1798 ; a blow at,
ii. 165.
Pergolese, i. 292.
Pestalozzi indebted to Emilius,
ii. 252.
Philidor, i. 292.
Philosophers, of Rousseau's time,
contradicting each other, i. 87 ;
Rousseau's complaint of the, i.
202 ; war between the, and the
priests, L 322 ; Rousseau's reac-
tionary protest against, L 328 ;
troubles of, iL 59 ; parliaments
hostile to, iL 64.
Philosopliy, Rousseau's disgust at
mimic, at Paris, i. 193 ; drew
him to the essential in religion,
L 220 ; Voltaire's no perfect,
L 318.
Phlipon, Jean ilarie, Rousseau's
influence on, ii. 315.
Plato, his republic, i. 122 ; his in-
fluence on Rousseau, i. 146,
325, n. ; Milton on his Laws,
iL 178.
Plays (stase), Rou.sseau's letter
on, to D'Alemljert, L 321 ; his
views of, i. 323 ; Jeremy Collier
and Bossuet on, i. 323 ; in
Geneva, i. 333, 334, n. ; Rons-
seau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert
on, i. 332-337.
Plutarch, Rousseau's love for, i. 13.
Plutocracy, new, faults of, L 195.
Pompadour, Madame de, and the
Jesuits, ii. 64.
340
INDEX.
Pontverre (]iriest) converts Rous-
seau to Romanism, i. 31-35.
Pope, his Essay on Man translated
by Voltaire, i. 309 ; Berlin
Academy and Lessing on it, i.
810, 71. ; criticism on it by
Rousseau, i. 312 ; its general
position reproduced by Rous-
seau, i. 315.
Popeliuii-re, M. de, i. 211.
Positive knowledge, i. 78.
Press, I'ree.dom of the, ii. 59.
Prevost, Abbe, i. 48.
Projet pour VEducatimi, i. 96, n.
Property, private, evils ascribed
to i. 157, 185 ; Robespien-e dis-
claimed tlie intention of attack-
ing, i. 123, n.
Protestant principles, efi'ect of
development of, ii. 14G-147.
Protestantism, his conversion to,
i. 220 ; its influence on Rous-
seau, i. 221.
Rameau on Rousseau's Mu.ws
Galantcs, i. 119, 211 ; men-
tioned, 291.
Rationalism, i. 224, 225 ; influence
of Descartes on, i. 225.
Reason, De Saint PieiTe's views
of, i. 244.
Reform, essential priority of social
over political, ii. 43.
Religion, simiDlification of, i. 3 ;
ideas of, in Paris, i. 186, 187,
207, 208 ; Rousseau's view of,
i. 220 ; doctrines of, in Geneva,
i. 223-227, also w. ; curious
project concerning it, by Rous-
.seau,i. 317 ; separation of spirit-
ual and temporal powers deemed
mischievous by Rousseau, ii.
173 ; in its relation to the state
may be considered as of three
kinds, ii. 175 ; duty of the
sovereign to establish a civil
confession of faith, ii. 176, 177 ;
positive dogmas of this, ii. 176 ;
Rousseau's " pure Hobbism,"
ii. 177. See Savoyard Vicar
(Kmilius), ii. 256, 281.
Renou, Rousseau assumes name
of, i. 129 ; ii. 312.
Revelation, Christian, Rousseau's
controversy on, with Archbishop
of Paris, ii. 86-91.
Receries, Rousseau's relinquishing
society, i, 199 ; desciiption of
his life in the isle of St. Peter,
in the, ii. 109-115 ; their style,
ii. 314.
Revolution, French, principles of,
i. 1, 2 ; benefits of, or other-
wise, ii. 54 ;Babceufon, ii. 123,
124, V. ; the starting point in
the history of its ideas, ii. 160.
Revolutionary process and idea!
i. 4, 5.
Revolutionists, difference among,
i. 2.
Richardson (the novelist), ii. 25,
28.
Richelieu's brief patronage ot
Rousseau, i. 195, 302.
Riviere, de la, origin of society,
ii. 156, 157 ; anecdote of, ii.
156, 157, n.
Robecq, Madame de, ii. 56.
Robespierre, iL 123, 134, 160,
178, 179; his "sacred right
of insurrection," ii. 188, n. ;
Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
Rousseau, Didier, i. 8.
Rousseau, Jean Baptiste, i. 61, n.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, influence
of his ^Titings on France and
the American colonists, 1. 1, 2 ;
on Robespierre, Paine, and
Chateaubriand, i. 3 ; his place
as a leader,- i. 3 ; starting-point,
of his mental habits, i. 4 ;
personality of, i. 4 ; influence on
INDEX.
341
the common people, i. 5 ; his
birth and ancestry, i. S ; pedi-
gree, i. 8, n. ; parents, i. 10, 11 ;
influence upon him of his
father's character, i. 11, 12 ;
his reading in childhood, i. 12,
13 ; love of Plutarch, i. 13 ;
early years, i. 13, 14 ; sent to
school at Bossey, i. 15 ; deteri-
oration of his moral cliaractcr
there, i. 17 ; indignation at an
unjust punishment, i. 17, 18;
leaves school, i. 20 ; youthful
life at Geneva, i. 21, 22 ; his
remarks on its character, i. 24 ;
anecdotes of it, i. 22, 24 ; his
leading error as to the educa-
tion of the young, i. 25, 26 ;
religious training, i. 25 ; appren-
ticeship, i. 26 ; boyish doings,
i. 27 ; harshness of his master,
i. 27 ; runs away, i. 29 ; re-
ceived by the priest of Con-
fignon, i. 31 ; sent to Madame
de Warens, i. 34 ; at Turin,
u 35 ; hypocritical conversion
to Roman Catholicism, i. 37;
motive, i. 38; registry of his bap-
tism, i. 38, n. ; his forlorn con-
dition, L 39 ; love of music, i.
39 ; becomes servant to Madame
de Vercellis, i. 39 ; his theft,
lying, and excuses for it, i. 39,
40 ; becomes servant to Count
of Gouvon, i. 42 ; dismissed,
i. 43 ; returns to Madame de
Warens, i. 45 ; his tempera-
ment, i. 46, 47 ; iu training
for the priesthood, bat pro-
nounced too stupid, L 57 ; tries
music, i. 57 ; shamelessly aban-
dons his companion, i. 58 ;
goes to Freiburg, Neuchatel,and
Paris, i. 61, 62 ; conjectural
chronology of his movements
about this time. i. 62, n. ; love
of vagabond life, i. 62-68-,
effect upon him of his inter-
course with the poor, i. 68 ;
becomas clerk to a land sur-
veyor at Chamberi, i. 69 ; life
there, i. 69-72 ; ill-health and
retirement to Les Charmettes,
i. 73 ; his latest recollection of
this time, i. 75-77 ; his " form
of worship," i. 77 ; love of
nature, i. 77, 78 ; notion of
deity, i. 77 ; peculiar intellec-
tual feebleness, i. 81 ; criticism
on himself, i. 83 ; want of logic
in his mental constitution, i.
85 ; effect on him of Voltaire's
Letters on the English, i. 85 ;
self-training, i. 86 ; mistaken
method of it, i. 86, 87 ; ^\Tites
a comedy, i. 89 ; enjoyment
of rural life at Les Charmette^
i. 91, 92 ; robs Madame de
Warens, i. 92 ; leaves her, i.
93 : discrepancy between dates
of his letters and the Confes-
sions, i. 93 ; takes a tutorship
at Lyons, i. 95 ; condemns the
practice of writing Latin, i.
96, n. ; resigns his tutorship,
and goes to Paris, i. 97 ; re-
ception there, i. 98-100 ; ap-
pointed secretary to French
Ambassador at Venice, i. 100-
106 ; in quarantine at Genoa,
i. 104 ; his estimate of French
melod)-, i. 105 ; returns to
Paris, i. 106 ; becomes ac-
quainted with Theresa Le Vas-
seur, i. 106 ; his conduct criti-
cised, L 107-113 ; simple life,
i. 113; letter to her, i. 115-
119; his povertj-, i. 119;
becomes secretary to Madame
Dupin and her son-in-law, M.
de Prancueil, i. 119 ; sends his
children to the foundling bos-
342
INDEX.
pital, i. 120, 121 ; paltry
excuses for the crime, i. 121-
126 ; his pretended marriage
under the name of Renou, i.
129 ; his Discourses, i. 132-
186 (see Discourses) ; writes
essays for academy of Dijon, i.
132 ; origin of first essay, i.
133-137 ; his "visions" for
thirteen years, i. 138 ; evil
effect upon himself of the first
Discourse, i. 13S; ofit,thesecond
Discourse and the Social Con-
tract upon Europe, i. 138; his
own opinion of it, i. 138, 139 ;
influence of Plato upon him,
i. 146 ; second Discourse, 1.
154 ; his " State of Nature,"
i. 159 ; no evidence for it, i.
172 ; influence of Montesquieu
on him, i. 183 ; inconsistency
of his views, i. 124 ; influence
of Geneva upon him, i. 187, 188 ;
his disgust at Parisian philo-
sojjhers, 1. 191, 192; the two
sides of his character, i. 193 ;
associates in Paris, i. 193 ; his
income, i. 196, 197, n. ; post of
cashier, i. 196 ; throws it up,
i. 197, 198 ; determines to earn
his living by copying music, i.
198, 199 ; change of manners,
i. 201 ; dislike of the manners
of his time, i. 202, 203 ; assump-
tion of a seeming cynicism, i.
206 ; Grimm's rebuke of it, i.
206 ; Rousseau's protest against
atheism, i. 208, 209 ; composes
a musical interlude, the Village
Soothsayer, i. 212 ; his nervous-
ness loses him the chance of
a pension, i. 213 ; his moral
simplicity, i. 214, 215 ; revisits
Geneva, i. 216 ; re-conversion
to Protestantism, i. 220 ; his
friends at Geneva, i. 227 ; their
effect upon him, i. 227 ; returns
to Palis, i. 227 ; the Hermitage
offered him by Madame
d'Epinay, i. 229, 230 (and ib.
n.) ; retires to it against the
protests of his friends, i. 231,
his love of nature, i. 234, 235,
236 ; first days at the Hermi-
tage, i. 237 ; rural delirium, i.
237 ; dislike of society, i. 242 ;
literary scheme, i. 242, 243 ;
remarks on Saint Pierre, i. 246 ;
violent mental crisis, i. 247 ;
employs his illness in writing
to Voltaire on Providence, i.
250, 251 ; his intolerance of
vice in others, i. 254 ; acquaint-
ance with Madame de Hou-
detot, i. 255-269 ; source of
his irritability, i. 270, 271 ;
blind enthusiasm of his ad-
mirers, i. 273, also ih. n. ;
quarrels with Diderot, i. 275 ;
Grimm's account of them, i.
276 ; quarrels with Madame
d'Epinay, i. 276, 288; relations
with Grimm, i. 279 ; want of
sympathy between the two,
i. 279 ; declines to accompany
Madame d'Epinay to Geneva,
i. 285 ; quairels with Grimm,
i. 285 ; leaves the Hermitage,
i. 289, 290 ; aims in music,
i. 291 ; letter on French music,
i. 293, 294 ; writes on music
in the Encyclopedia, i. 296 ;
his Musical Dictionary, i. 296 ;
scheme and principles of his
new musical notation, i. 269 ; ex-
plained, i. 298, 299 ; its practi-
cal value, i. 299 ; his mistake,
i. 300 ; minor objections, L
300 ; his temperament and
Genevan spirit, i. 303 ; com-
pared with Voltaire, i. 304,
305 ; had a more spiritual
INDEX.
343
element than Voltaire, i. 306 ;
its influence iu France, i. 307 ;
early relations with Voltaire, i.
308 ; letter to him on his poem
on the earthquake at Lisbon,
i. 312, 313, 314 ; reasons in a
circle, i. 316 ; continuation of
argument against Voltaire, 1.
316, 317 ; curious notion about
religion, i. 317 ; quarrels with
Voltaire, i. 318, 319 ; denounces
him as a " trumpet of impiety,"
L 320, 71. ; letter to D'Alembert
on Stage Plays, i. 321 ; true
answer to his theorj', i. 323,
324 ; contrasts Parij: and Gen-
eva, i. 327, 328 ; his patriotism,
L 329, 330, 331 ; censure of
love as a poetic theme, L 334,
335 ; on Social Position of
Women, i. 335 ; Voltaire and
D'Alembert's criticism on his
Letter on Stage Plays, i. 336,
337 ; final break with Diderot,
i. 336 ; antecedents of his
highest creative efl"orts, ii. 1 ;
friends at Montmorency, ii. 2 :
reads the New lleloisa to the
Marechale de Luxembourg, ii.
2 ; unwillingness to receive
gifts, iL 5 ; his relations with
the Duke and Duchess de
Luxembourg, iL 7 ; misunder-
stands the friendliness of Ma-
dame de Boufflers, ii. 7 ; calm
life at Montmorency, ii. S ;
literary jealousy, iL 8 ; last of
his peaceful days, ii. 9 ; advice
to a young man against the
contemplative life, ii. 10 ; offen-
sive form of his "good sense"
concerning persecution of Pro-
testants, iL 11, 12 ; cause of
his unwQlingness to receive
gifts, 13, 14 ; owns his un-
grateful nature, ii. 15 ; ill-
humoured banter, ii. 15 ; hia
constant bodily suffering, iL
16; thinks of suiciile, ii. 16;
correspondence with the readers
of the New Heloisa, ii. 19, 20 ;
the New Heloisa, criticism on,
ii. 20-55 (see New Heloisa) ; his
publishing diflBculties, ii. 56 ;
no taste for martyrdom, ii. 59,
60 ; curious ilLscussion between,
iL 59 ; and Malesherbes, iL 60 ;
indebted to Malesherbes in the
publication of Emilius, iL 61,
62 ; suspects Jesuits, .Jansenists,
and philosophers of plotting to
crush the book, ii. 6-3 ; himself
counted among the latter, ii.
65 ; Emilius ordered to be
burnt by public executioner,
on the charge of irreligious
tendency, and its author to be
arrested, ii. 65 ; his flight, ii.
67 ; literary composition on the
journey to Switzerland, iL 69 ;
contrast between him and Vol-
taire, iL 70 ; explanation of his
"natural ingratitude," ii. 71 ;
reaches the canton of Berue,
and ordered to quit it, ii. 72 ;
Emilius and Social Contract
condenmed to be publicly burnt
it Geneva, and author arrested
if he came tiiere, iL 72, 73 ;
takes refuge at Metiers, in
dominions of Frederick of
Prussia, ii. 73 ; characterLstic
letters to the king, ii. 74, 77 ;
declines pecuniary help from
him, iL 75 ; his home and
habits at Motiers, ii. 77, 78 ;
Voltaire supposed to have
stirred up animosity against
him at Geneva, ii. 81 ; Arch-
bishop of Paris writes against
him, ii. 83 ; his reply, and char-
acter as a controversialist, iL
344
INDKX.
83-90; life at Val de Travers
(Metiers), ii. 91-95 ; his gener-
osity, li. 93 ; corresponds with
the Prince of Wurtemberg on
the education of the prince's
daughter, ii. 95, 96 ; on Gibbon,
ii. 96 ; visit fi-om Bosvvell, ii.
98 ; invited to legislate for
Corsica, ii. 99, n. ; irrges Boswell
to go there, ii. 100 ; denounces
its sale by the Genoese, ii. 102 ;
renounces his citizenship of
Geneva, ii. 103 ; his Letters
from the Mountain, ii. 104 ;
the letters condemned to he
bm-ned at Paris and the Plague, ii.
105 ;libelupou,ii. 105; religious
difficulties with his ])astor, ii.
106 ; ill-treatment of, in parish,
ii. 106 ; obliged to leave it,
ii. 108 ; his next retreat, ii. 108 ;
account iu the Reveries of his
short stay there, ii. 109-115 ;
expelled by government of
Berne, ii. 116 ; makes an ex-
traordinary request to it, ii.
116, 117 ; difficulties in find-
ing a home, ii. 117 ; short stay
at Strasburg, ii. 117, n. ; decides
on going to England, ii. 118 ; his
Social Contract, and criticism
on, ii. 119, 196 (see Social
Contract) ; scanty acquaintance
with hi.story, ii. 129 ; its effects
on his political ■RTitings, ii.
129, 136 ; his object in writing
Emilius, ii. 198 ; his confession
of faith, under the character of
the Savoyard Vicar(see Emilius),
ii. 257-280 ; excitement caused
by his appearance in Paris in
1765, ii. 282 ; leaves for Bug-
land in company with Hume,
ii. 283 ; recejition in Lomion,
ii. 283, 284 ; George iii. gives
him a peusiou, ii. 284 ; his love
for his dog, ii. 286 ; finds a
home at Wootton, ii. 286 ;
quarrels with Hume, ii. 287 ;
jiarticulars in connection with
it, ii. 287-296 ; his approaching
insanity at tliis period, ii. 296 ;
the preparatory conditions of
it, ii. 297-301 ; begins wTiting
the Confessions, ii. 301 ; their
character, ii. 301 - 304 ; life at
Wootton, ii. 305, 306 ; sudden
flight thence, ii. 306 ; kindness
of Mr. Davenport, ii. 306, 307 ;
his delusion, ii. 307 ; returns
to France, ii. 308 ; received at
Fleury by the elder Mirabeau,
ii. 310, 311; the prince of
Conti next receives him at
Trye, ii. 312 ; composes the
second part of the Confessions
here, ii. 312; delusion returns,
ii. 312, 313 ; leaves Ti-ye, and
wanders about the country, ii.
312, 313 ; esti-angement from
Tlieresa,ii. 313 ; goes to Paris, ii.
314 ; writes his Dialogues there,
ii. 31 4 ; again earas his living by
copying music, ii. 315 ; daily life
in, ii. 315, 316 ; Bemardin St.
PieiTe's account of him, ii. 317-
321 ; his veneration for Fenelon,
ii. 321 ; his unsociality, ii. 322 ;
checks a detractor of Voltaire,
ii. 324 ; draws up his Con-
siderations on the Government
of Poland, ii. 324 ; estimate of
the Spanish, ii. 324 ; his poverty,
ii. 325 ; accepts a home at
Ermenonville from M. Girardin,
ii. 326 ; his painful condition,
ii. 326 ; sudden death, ii. 326 ;
cause of it unkno\\Ti, ii. 326 (see
alsoi6. w.) ;hisinterment,ii. 326 ;
finally removed to Paris, ii. 328.
Sainte Bedve on Rousseau and
INDEX.
345
Madame d'Epinay, i. 279, n. ;
ou Rousseau, ii. 40.
Saint Gennaiu, M. de, Rousseau's
letter to, L 123.
Saint Just, ii. 132, 133; his
political regulations, ii. 133, n. ;
base of his system, ii. 136 ;
against the atheists, ii. 179.
Saint Lambert, i. 244 ; offers
Rousseau a home in Lorraine,
IL 117.
Saint Pierre, Abbe de, Ri)usseau
arranges papers of, i. 244 ; his
views concerning reasou, ib. ;
boldness of his observations, i.
245.
Saint Pierre, Bemardiu de, account
of his visit to Rousseau at Paris,
iL 317-321.
Sand, Madame G., i. 81, n. ; Savoy
landscape, i. 99, n. ; ancestrj'
of, L 121, n.
Savages, code of morals of, i. 178-
179, n.
Savage state, advantages of, Rous-
seau's letter to Voltaire, i. 312.
Savoy, priests of, proselytisers, i.
30, 31, 33 (also ib. n.)
Savoyard Vicar, the, origin of
character of, ii. 257-2S0 (see
Emilius).
Schiller on Rousseau, ii. 192 (also
t&. n.) ; Rousseau's influence on,
ii. 315.
Ser\-etus, ii. 180.
Simplification, the revolutionary
process and ideal of, i. 4 ; in
reference to Rousseau's music,
L 291.
Social conscience, theory and de-
anition of, ii. 234, 235 ; the
great agent in fostering, ii.
237.
Social Contract, the, ill effect of,
on Europe, i. 138 ; beginning
of its composition, i. 177 ; ideas
of, i. 188 ; its harmful dreama,
i. 246 ; influence of, ii. I ; price
of, and difficulties in publish-
ing, ii. 59 ; ordered to be burnt
at Geneva, ii. 72, 73, 104 ; de-
tailed criticism of, ii. 119-196 :
Rousseau diametrically opposed
to the dominant belief of his
day in human perfectibility, ii.
119 ; object of the work, ii.
120 ; main position of the two
Discourses given up in it, ii. 1 20 ;
influenced by Locke, ii. 120 ; its
uncritical, illogical principles,
ii. 123, 124 ; its impracticable-
ness, iL 128 ; nature of his
illu.stration.s, ii. 128-133; the
"gospel of the Jacobins," ii.
132, 133 ; the desperate absur-
dity of its assumptions gave it
power in the circumstances of
the times, ii. 135-141 ; some of
its maxims very convenient for
ruling Jacobins, ii. 142 ; its
central conception, the sove-
reignty of peoples, ii. 144 ;
Rousseau not its inventor, ii.
144, 145 ; this to be distin-
guished from doctrine of right
of subjects to depose princes,
ii. 146 ; Social Contract idea of
govemiueiit, probably derived
from Locke, ii. 150 ; falseness
of it, ii. 153, 154 ; origin of
society, ii. 154 ; ill effects on
Rousseau's political speculation,
ii. 155 ; what constitutes the
sovereignty, ii. 158 ; Ron.sseau'a
Social Contract different from
that of Hobbes, ii. 1 59 ; Locke's
indefiniteness on, ii. 160; attri-
butes of sovereignty, ii. 163 ,
confederation, ii. 164, 165 ; his
distinction between Ujrant and
despot, ii. 169, n. ; distinguishe.s
cnnstitutiou of the state troui
346
INDEX.
that of the government, ii. 170 ;
scheme of an elective aristo-
cracy, ii. 172 ; similarity to the
English form of government, ii.
173 ; the state in respect to re-
ligion, ii. 173 ; habitually illo-
gical form of his statements, ii.
173, 174 ; duty of sovereign to
establish civil profession of
faith, ii. 175, 176 ; infringe-
ment of it to be punished, even
by death, ii. 176 ; Rousseau's
Hobbism, ii. 177 ; denial of his
social compact theory, ii. 183,
184 ; futility of his disquisi-
tions on, ii. 185, 186 ; his de-
claration of general duty of
rebellion (arising out of the
universal breach of social com-
pact) considered, ii. 188 ; it
makes government impossible,
ii. 188 ; he urges that usurped
authority is another valid
reason for rebellion, ii. 190 ;
practical evils of this, ii. 192 ;
historical effect of the Social
Contract, ii. 192-195.
Social quietism of some parts of
New Heloisa, ii. 49.
Socialism : Jlorelly, and De Mably,
ii. 52 ; what it is, ii. 159.
Socialistic theory of Morelly, i.
158, 159 (also i. 158, n.)
Society, Aristotle on, i. 174 ;
D'Alembert's statements on, i.
174, n. ; Parisian, Rousseau
on, i. 209 ; dislike of, i. 242 ;
Rousseau's origin of, ii. 153 ;
true grounds of, ii. 155, 156.
Socrate-s, i. 131, 140, 232; ii.
72, 273.
Solitude, eighteenth century no-
tions of, i. 231, 232.
Solon, ii. 133.
Sorbonne, the, condemns Emilius,
ii. 82.
Spectator, the, Rousseau's liking
for, i. 86.
Spinoza, dangerous speculations
of, i. 143.
Stael, Madame de, i. 217, n.
Stage players, how treated ir
France, i. 322.
Stage plays (see Plays).
State of Nature, Rousseau's, i.
159, 160 ; Hobbes on, i. 161
(see Nature).
Suicide, Rousseau on, ii. 16 ; a
mistake to pronounce him in-
capable of, ii. 19.
Switzerland, i. 330.
Tacitus, i. 177.
Theatre, Rousseau's letter, object-
ing to the, i. 133 ; his error in
the matter, i. 134.
Theology, metaphysical, Des-
cartes' influence on, i. 226.
Theresa (see Le Vasseui-).
Thought, school of, division be-
tween rationalists and emotion-
alists, i. 337.
Tonic Sol-fa notation, close corre-
spondence of the, to Rousseau's
system, i. 299.
Tronchin on Voltaire, i. 319, n.,
821.
Turgot, L 89 ; his discourses at
the Sorbonne in 1750, i. 155 ;
the one sane eminent French-
man of eighteenth century, i.
202 : his unselfish toil, i. 233
ii. 193 ; mentioned, ii. 246, 294.
Turin, Rousseau at, i. 34-43 ;
leaves it, i. 45 ; tries to learn
Latin at, i. 91.
Turretiui and other rationalisers,
i. 226 ; his works, i. 226. n.
Universk, constitution of, dis-
cussion on, i. 311-317.
INDEX.
347
Vaoaboxd life, Rousseau's love
of, i. 63, 68.
Val de Travers, ii. 77 ; Rousseau's
life in, ii. 91-95.
Vasseur, Theresa Le, Rousseau's
first acquaintance with, i. 106,
107, also ib. n. ; their life to-
gether, i. 110-113 ; well be-
friended, IL 80, n. ; her evil
character, ii. 326.
Vauvenargues on emotional in-
stinct, ii. 34.
Venice, Rousseau at, L 100-106.
Vercellis, Madame de, Rousseau
servant to, i. 39.
Verdelin, Madame de, her kind-
ness to Theresa, ii. 80, n.; to
Rousseau, ii 118, n.
Village Soothsayer, the [Devin du
Village), composed at Passy,
performed at Fontainebleau and
Paris, L 212 ; marked a re-
volution in French Music, L
291.
Voltaire, L 2, 21, 63 ; effect on
Rousseau of his Letters on the
English, i. 86 ; spreads a deroga-
tory report about Rousseau, i.
101, 71. ; his "Princesse de Na-
varre,"!. 119 ; criticism on Rous-
seau's first Discourse, i. 147 ;
effect on his work of his com-
mon sense, i. 155 ; avoids the
society of Paris, i. 202 ; his
conversion to Romanism, L 220,
221 ; strictures on Homer and
Shakespeare, i. 280 ; his posi-
tion in the eighteenth century,
L 301 ; general difference be-
tween, and Rousseau, L 301 ;
clung to the rationalistic school
of his day, i. 305 ; on Rousseau's
second Discourse, i. 308 ; his
poem on the earthquake of
Lisbon, i. 309, 310 ; his sym-
pathy with suffering, i. 311,
312 ; entreated by Rousseau to
draw up a civil profession of
religious faith, i. 317 ; de-
nounced by Rousseau as a
"trumpet of impiety," i. 317,
320, n. ; his satire and mockery
irritated Rousseau, i. 319 ;
what he was to his contempor-
aries, i. 321 ; the great play-
writer of the time, L 321 ; his
criticism of Rousseau's Letter
on the Theatre, i. 336 ; his in-
dignation at WTong, ii. 11 ;
ridicule of the New Heloisa, ii.
34 ; less courageous than Rous-
seau, ii. 65 ; contrast between
the two, i. 99, ii. 75 ; supposed
to have stirred up animosity at
Geneva against Rousseau, iL SI ;
denies it, ii. 81 ; his notion of
howthematterwouldend, ii. 81 ;
his fickleness, ii. 83 ; on Rous-
seau's connection with Corsica,
ii. 101 ; his Philosophical Dic-
tionary burnt by order at Paris,
ii. 105 ; his opinion of Emilius,
iL 257 ; prime agent in intro-
ducing English deism into
France, ii. 262 ; suspected by
Rousseau of having written the
pretended letter from the King
of Prussia, ii. 288 ; last visit to
Paris, ii. 324.
Walking, Rousseau's love of, i.
63.
Walpole, Horace, writer of the
pretended letter from the King
of Prussia, ii. 288, n. ; advises
Hume not to publish his ac-
count of Rousseau's quarrel
with him, ii. 295.
War arising out of the succession
to the crown of Poland, i. 72.
Warens, Madame de, Rousseau's
introduction to, i. 34 ; her per-
348
EVF^
INDEX.
sonal appearauce, i. 34 ; receives
Rousseau into lier house, i. 43 ;
her early life, i. 48 ; character
of, i. 49-r)l ; goes to Paris, i. 59 ;
seceives Rousseau at Chamberi,
and gets him employment, i.
69 ; her household, i. 70 ; re-
moves to Les Charmettes, i. 73 ;
cultivates Rousseau's taste for
letters, i. 85 ; Saint Louis, her
patron saint, i. 91 ; re\isited
by Rousseau in 1754, i. 21(! ;
her death in poverty and wretch-
edness, i. 217, 218 (also L
219, n.)
Wesleyanism, ii. 258.
Women, Condorcet on social posi
tion of, i. 335 ; D'Alembert and
Condorcet on, i. 335.
Wootton, Rousseau's home at, ii.
286.
World, divine government of,
Rodsseaxi vindicates, i. 312.
Wiirtemberg, correspondence be-
ween Prince of, and Rousseau,
on the education of the little
princess, ii. 95 ; becomes reign-
ing duke, ii. 95, n. ; seekspermis-
sion for Rousseau to live in
Vienna, ii. 117.
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