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Title: Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU
(VOLUME 1 AND 2) ***

ROUSSEAU
BY

JOHN MORLEY
VOL. I and II.

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905
All rights reserved
First printed in this form 1886
Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905

NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
This work differs from its companion volume in offering something more
like a continuous personal history than was necessary in the case of such a
man as Voltaire, the story of whose life may be found in more than one
English book of repute. Of Rousseau there is, I believe, no full biographical
account in our literature, and even France has nothing more complete under
this head than Musset-Pathay's Histoire de la Vie et des Ouvrages de J.J.
Rousseau (1821). This, though a meritorious piece of labour, is extremely
crude and formless in composition and arrangement, and the interpreting
portions are devoid of interest.
The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have been made is
that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published in 1825 by Dalibon.
In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from the originals, which had
been deposited in the library of Neuchâtel by Du Peyrou, the letters
addressed to Rousseau by various correspondents. These two interesting
volumes, which are entitled Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis, are mostly
referred to under the name of their editor.
February, 1873.

The second edition in 1878 was revised; some portions were considerably
shortened, and a few additional footnotes inserted. No further changes have
been made in the present edition.
January, 1886.

VOLUME I.

VOLUME II.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER I.

Preliminary.

PAGE
The Revolution 1
Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor 2
His distinction among revolutionists 4
His personality 5

CHAPTER II.

Youth.

PAGE
Birth and descent 8
Predispositions 10
First lessons 11
At M. Lambercier's 15
Early disclosure of sensitive temperament 19
Return to Geneva 20
Two apprenticeships 26
Flight from Geneva 30
Savoyard proselytisers 31
Rousseau sent to Anncey, and thence to Turin 34
Conversion to Catholicism 35

Takes service with Madame de Vercellis 39
Then with the Count de Gouvon 42
Returns to vagabondage 43
And to Madame de Warens 45

CHAPTER III.

Savoy.

PAGE
Influence of women upon Rousseau 46
Account of Madame de Warens 48
Rousseau takes up his abode with her 54
His delight in life with her 54
The seminarists 57
To Lyons 58
Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuchâtel, and elsewhere 60
Through the east of France 62
Influence of these wanderings upon him 67
Chambéri 69
Household of Madame de Warens 70
Les Charmettes 73
Account of his feeling for nature 79
His intellectual incapacity at this time 83
Temperament 84
Literary interests, and method 85
Joyful days with his benefactress 90
To Montpellier: end of an episode 92
Dates 94

CHAPTER IV.

Theresa Le Vasseur.

PAGE
Tutorship at Lyons 95
Goes to Paris in search of fortune 97
His appearance at this time 98
Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice 100
His journey thither and life there 103
Return to Paris 106
Theresa Le Vasseur 107
Character of their union 110
Rousseau's conduct towards her 113
Their later estrangements 115
Rousseau's scanty means 119
Puts away his five children 120
His apologies for the crime 122
Their futility 126
Attempts to recover the children 128
Rousseau never married to Theresa 129
Contrast between outer and inner life 130

CHAPTER V.

The Discourses.

PAGE
Local academies in France 132
Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse 133
How far the paradox was original 135

His visions for thirteen years 136
Summary of the first Discourse 138-145
Obligations to Montaigne 145
And to the Greeks 145
Semi-Socratic manner 147
Objections to the Discourse 148
Ways of stating its positive side 149
Dangers of exaggerating this positive side 151
Its excess 152
Second Discourse 154
Ideas of the time upon the state of nature 155
Their influence upon Rousseau 156
Morelly, as his predecessor 156
Summary of the second Discourse 159-170
Criticism of its method 171
Objection from its want of evidence 172
Other objections to its account of primitive nature 173
Takes uniformity of process for granted 176
In what the importance of the second Discourse consisted 177
Its protest against the mockery of civilisation 179
The equality of man, how true, and how false 180
This doctrine in France, and in America 182
Rousseau's Discourses, a reaction against the historic method 183
Mably, and socialism 184

CHAPTER VI.

Paris.

PAGE

Influence of Geneva upon Rousseau 187
Two sides of his temperament 191
Uncongenial characteristics of Parisian society 191
His associates 195
Circumstances of a sudden moral reform 196
Arising from his violent repugnance for the manners of the time 202
His assumption of a seeming cynicism 207
Protests against atheism 209
The Village Soothsayer at Fontainebleau 212
Two anedotes of his moral singularity 214
Revisits Geneva 216
End of Madame de Warens 217
Rousseau's re-conversion to Protestantism 220
The religious opinions then current in Geneva 223
Turretini and other rationalisers 226
Effect upon Rousseau 227
Thinks of taking up his abode in Geneva 227
Madame d'Epinay offers him the Hermitage 229
Retires thither against the protests of his friends 231

CHAPTER VII.

The Hermitage.

PAGE
Distinction between the old and the new anchorite 234
Rousseau's first days at the Hermitage 235
Rural delirium 237
Dislike of society 242
Meditates work on Sensitive Morality 243

Arranges the papers of the Abbé de Saint Pierre 244
His remarks on them 246
Violent mental crisis 247
First conception of the New Heloïsa 250
A scene of high morals 254
Madame d'Houdetot 255
Erotic mania becomes intensified 256
Interviews with Madame d'Houdetot 258
Saint Lambert interposes 262
Rousseau's letter to Saint Lambert 264
Its profound falsity 265
Saint Lambert's reply 267
Final relations with him and with Madame d'Houdetot 268
Sources of Rousseau's irritability 270
Relations with Diderot 273
With Madame d'Epinay 276
With Grimm 279
Grimm's natural want of sympathy with Rousseau 282
Madame d'Epinay's journey to Geneva 284
Occasion of Rousseau's breach with Grimm 285
And with Madame d'Epinay 288
Leaves the Hermitage 289

CHAPTER VIII.

Music.

PAGE
General character of Rousseau's aim in music 291
As composer 292

Contest on the comparative merits of French and Italian music 293
Rousseau's Letter on French Music 293
His scheme of musical notation 296
Its chief element 298
Its practical value 299
His mistake 300
Two minor objections 300

CHAPTER IX.

Voltaire And D'Alembert.

PAGE
Position of Voltaire 302
General differences between him and Rousseau 303
Rousseau not the profounder of the two 305
But he had a spiritual element 305
Their early relations 308
Voltaire's poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon 309
Rousseau's wonder that he should have written it 310
His letter to Voltaire upon it 311
Points to the advantages of the savage state 312
Reproduces Pope's general position 313
Not an answer to the position taken by Voltaire 314
Confesses the question insoluble, but still argues 316
Curious close of the letter 318
Their subsequent relations 319
D'Alembert's article on Geneva 321
The church and the theatre 322
Jeremy Collier: Bossuet 323

Rousseau's contention on stage plays 324
Rude handling of commonplace 325
The true answer to Rousseau as to theory of dramatic morality 326
His arguments relatively to Geneva 327
Their meaning 328
Criticism on the Misanthrope 328
Rousseau's contrast between Paris and an imaginary Geneva 329
Attack on love as a poetic theme 332
This letter, the mark of his schism from the party of the philosophers 336

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
VOLUME II.

CHAPTER I.

Montmorency—The New Heloïsa.
Conditions preceding the composition of the New Heloïsa 1
The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg 2
Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances 4
Peaceful life at Montmorency 9
Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau 12
His want of gratitude for commonplace service 13
Bad health, and thoughts of suicide 16
Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville 17
Relation of the New Heloïsa to Rousseau's general doctrine 20
Action of the first part of the story 25
Contrasted with contemporary literature 25
And with contemporary manners 27
Criticism of the language and principal actors 28, 29
Popularity of the New Heloïsa 31
Its reactionary intellectual direction 33

Action of the second part 35, 36
Its influence on Goethe and others 38
Distinction between Rousseau and his school 40
Singular pictures of domesticity 42
Sumptuary details 44
The slowness of movement in the work justified 46
Exaltation of marriage 47
Equalitarian tendencies 49
Not inconsistent with social quietism 51
Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment 54
Circumstances of the publication of the New Heloïsa 55
Nature of the trade in books 57
Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius 61
Rousseau's suspicions 62
The great struggle of the moment 64
Proscription of Emilius 67
Flight of the author 67

CHAPTER II.

Persecution.
Rousseau'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 Paris 83
Its dialectic 86
The ministers of Neuchâtel 90
Rousseau's singular costume 92
His throng of visitors 93
Lewis, prince of Würtemberg 95
Gibbon 96
Boswell 98
Corsican affairs 99
The feud at Geneva 102
Rousseau renounces his citizenship 105
The Letters from the Mountain 106
Political side 107
Consequent persecution at Motiers 107
Flight to the isle of St. Peter 108
The fifth of the Rêveries 109
Proscription by the government of Berne 116

Rousseau's singular request 116
His renewed flight 117
Persuaded to seek shelter in England 118

CHAPTER III.

The Social Contract.
Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility 119
Abandonment of the position of the Discourses 121
Doubtful idea of equality 121
The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method 124
Yet it has glimpses of relativity 127
Influence of Greek examples 129
And of Geneva 131
Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just 132
Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory 135
Why the Social Contract made fanatics 137
Verbal quality of its propositions 138
The doctrine of public safety 143
The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples 144
Its early phases 144
Its history in the sixteenth century 146
Hooker and Grotius 148

Locke 149
Hobbes 151
Central propositions of the Social Contract—

1. Origin of society in compact 154
Different conception held by the Physiocrats 156

2. Sovereignty of the body thus constituted 158
Difference from Hobbes and Locke 159
The root of socialism 160
Republican phraseology 161

3. Attributes of sovereignty 162

4. The law-making power 163
A contemporary illustration 164
Hints of confederation 166

5. Forms of government 168
Criticism on the common division 169
Rousseau's preference for elective aristocracy 172

6. Attitude of the state to religion 173
Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction 176
Its effect at the French Revolution 179
Its futility 180

Another method of approaching the philosophy of government—

Origin of society not a compact 183

The true reason of the submission of a minority to a majority 184

Rousseau fails to touch actual problems 186

The doctrine of resistance, for instance 188

Historical illustrations 190

Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany 193

Socialist deductions from it 194

CHAPTER IV.

Emilius.
Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time 197
Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of naturalism
199
I.—Locke, on education 202
Difference between him and Rousseau 204
Exhortations to mothers 205
Importance of infantile habits 208
Rousseau's protest against reasoning with children 209
Criticised 209
The opposite theory 210
The idea of property 212
Artificially contrived incidents 214
Rousseau's omission of the principle of authority 215
Connected with his neglect of the faculty of sympathy 219

II.—Rousseau's ideal of living 221
The training that follows from it 222
The duty of knowing a craft 223
Social conception involved in this moral conception 226

III.—Three aims before the instructor 229
Rousseau's omission of training for the social conscience 230
No contemplation of society as a whole 232

Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius 233
The sphere and definition of the social conscience 235

IV.—The study of history 237
Rousseau's notions upon the subject 239

V.—Ideals of life for women 241
Rousseau's repudiation of his own principles 242
His oriental and obscurantist position 243
Arising from his want of faith in improvement 244
His reactionary tendencies in this region eventually neutralised 248

VI.—Sum of the merits of Emilius 249
Its influence in France and Germany 251
In England 252

CHAPTER V.

The Savoyard Vicar.
Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists 256
The good side of the religious reaction 258
Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence 259
Earlier forms of deism 260
The deism of the Savoyard Vicar 264
The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity 265
A divinity for fair weather 268
Religious self-denial 269
The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission 270
His position towards Christianity 272

Its effectiveness as a solvent 273
Weakness of the subjective test 276
The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
conviction 276
The true satisfaction of the religious emotion 277

CHAPTER VI.

England.
Rousseau's English portrait 281
His reception in Paris 282
And in London 283
Hume's account of him 284
Settlement at Wootton 286
The quarrel with Hume 287
Detail of the charges against Hume 287-291
Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick 291
Baselessness of the whole delusion 292
Hume's conduct in the quarrel 293
The war of pamphlets 295
Common theory of Rousseau's madness 296
Preparatory conditions 297
Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence 299
The Confessions 301

His life at Wootton 306
Flight from Derbyshire 306
And from England 308

CHAPTER VII.

The End.
The elder Mirabeau 309
Shelters Rousseau at Fleury 311
Rousseau at Trye 312
In Dauphiny 314
Return to Paris 314
The Rêveries 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
INDEX

ROUSSEAU
BY

JOHN MORLEY
VOL. I.

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Born 1712
Fled from Geneva March, 1728
Changes religion at Turin April, "
With Madame de Warens, including various intervals,
April, 1740
until
Goes to Paris with musical schemes 1741
Secretary at Venice Spring, 1743
Paris, first as secretary to M. Francueil, then { 1744
as composer, and copyist { to
{ 1756
The Hermitage April 9, 1756
Montmorency Dec. 15, 1757
Yverdun June 14, 1762
Motiers-Travers July 10, 1762
Isle of St. Peter Sept., 1765
Strasburg Nov., "
Paris December, "
Arrives in England Jan. 13, 1766
Leaves Dover May 22, 1767
Fleury June, "
Trye July, "
Dauphiny Aug., 1768
Paris June, 1770
Death July 2, 1778

PRINCIPAL WRITINGS.

Discourse on the Influence of Learning and Art Published 1750
Discourse on Inequality " 1754
Letter to D'Alembert " 1758
New Heloïsa (began 1757, finished in winter of 1759-60 " 1761
Social Contract " 1762
Emilius " 1762
Letters from the Mountain " 1764
Confessions (written 1766-70) { Pt. I 1781
{ Pt. II 1788
Rêveries (written 1777-78).

Comme dans les étangs assoupis sous les bois,
Dans plus d'une âme on voit deux choses à la fois:
Le ciel, qui teint les eaux à peine remuées
Avec tous ses rayons et toutes ses nueés;
Et la vase, fond morne, affreux, sombre et dormant,
Où des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement.
Hugo.

ROUSSEAU.

CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.

Christianity is the name for a great variety of changes which took place
during the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of thinking and feeling
about their spiritual relations to unseen powers, about their moral relations
to one another, about the basis and type of social union. So the Revolution
is now the accepted name for a set of changes which began faintly to take a
definite practical shape first in America, and then in France, towards the
end of the eighteenth century; they had been directly prepared by a small
number of energetic thinkers, whose speculations represented, as always,
the prolongation of some old lines of thought in obedience to the impulse of
new social and intellectual conditions. While one movement supplied the
energy and the principles which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the
Roman empire, the other supplies the energy and the principles which
already once, between the Seven Years' War and the assembly of the States
General, saved human progress in face of the political fatuity of England
and the political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of
the various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to be
trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human intelligence
stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their beneficent results
with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm. Faith in a divine power,
devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of ecstatic, unspeakable reward,
these were the springs of the old movement. Undivided love of our fellows,
steadfast faith in human nature, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration
towards improvement, and generous contentment in the hope that others
may reap whatever reward may be, these are the springs of the new.
There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of the
revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the pressure of
an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one set of doctrines
and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants. Voltaire was a
revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, and Rousseau in a third, just
as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton, Robespierre, represented three

different aspirations and as many methods. Rousseau was the most directly
revolutionary of all the speculative precursors, and he was the first to apply
his mind boldly to those of the social conditions which the revolution is
concerned by one solution or another to modify. How far his direct
influence was disastrous in consequence of a mischievous method, we shall
have to examine. It was so various that no single answer can comprehend
an exhaustive judgment. His writings produced that glow of enthusiastic
feeling in France, which led to the all-important assistance rendered by that
country to the American colonists in a struggle so momentous for mankind.
It was from his writings that the Americans took the ideas and the phrases
of their great charter, thus uniting the native principles of their own direct
Protestantism with principles that were strictly derivative from the
Protestantism of Geneva. Again, it was his work more than that of any other
one man, that France arose from the deadly decay which had laid hold of
her whole social and political system, and found that irresistible energy
which warded off dissolution within and partition from without. We shall
see, further, that besides being the first immediately revolutionary thinker in
politics, he was the most stirring of reactionists in religion. His influence
formed not only Robespierre and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only
Jacobinism, but the Catholicism of the Restoration. Thus he did more than
any one else at once to give direction to the first episodes of revolution, and
force to the first episode of reaction.
There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought, nor an
eye for the exigencies of practical organisation, but simply depth and
fervour of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the indefinable gift of
touching many hearts with love of virtue and the things of the spirit. The
Christian organisations which saved western society from dissolution owe
all to St. Paul, Hildebrand, Luther, Calvin; but the spiritual life of the west
during all these generations has burnt with the pure flame first lighted by
the sublime mystic of the Galilean hills. Aristotle acquired for men much
knowledge and many instruments for gaining more; but it is Plato, his
master, who moves the soul with love of truth and enthusiasm for
excellence. There is peril in all such leaders of souls, inasmuch as they
incline men to substitute warmth for light, and to be content with aspiration
where they need direction. Yet no movement goes far which does not count
one of them in the number of its chiefs. Rousseau took this place among

those who prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama, whose fifth act
is still dark to us.
At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing undiscernible
amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of understanding life. The
social changes desired by the various assailants of the old order are only the
expression of a deeper change in moral idea, and the drift of the new moral
idea is to make life simpler. This in a sense is at the bottom of all great
religious and moral movements, and the Revolution emphatically belongs
to the latter class. Like such movements in the breast of the individual,
those which stir an epoch have their principle in the same craving for
disentanglement of life. This impulse to shake off intricacies is the mark of
revolutionary generations, and it was the starting-point of all Rousseau's
mental habits, and of the work in which they expressed themselves. His
mind moved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact that he dealt
principally with government and education, the two great agencies which,
in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers, surround external
life and internal character with complexity. Simplification of religion by
clearing away the overgrowth of errors, simplification of social relations by
equality, of literature and art by constant return to nature, of manners by
industrious homeliness and thrift,—this is the revolutionary process and
ideal, and this is the secret of Rousseau's hold over a generation that was
lost amid the broken maze of fallen systems.

The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides. It has
deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of those
who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous men and
our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constant demands on the
patience or pity of those who study his life. Yet in no other instance is the
common eagerness to condense all predication about a character into a
single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate. If it is indispensable
that we should be for ever describing, naming, classifying, at least it is well,
in speaking of such a nature as his, to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the
pedantic formulas of unreal ethics, and to be as sure as we know how to
make ourselves, that each of the sympathies and faculties which together

compose our power of spiritual observation, is in a condition of free and
patient energy. Any less open and liberal method, which limits our
sentiments to absolute approval or disapproval, and fixes the standard either
at the balance of common qualities which constitutes mediocrity, or at the
balance of uncommon qualities which is divinity as in a Shakespeare, must
leave in a cloud of blank incomprehensibleness those singular spirits who
come from time to time to quicken the germs of strange thought and shake
the quietness of the earth.
We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, in reflecting
that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has given no
thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn children and
trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it was Rousseau
who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for one more of
the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud, it was truly
said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of thought, as we
shall see, and he was only continuing work which others had prepared. But
he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in Rousseau that polite
Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faint reverberation from out of
the vague and cavernous shadow in which the common people move.
Science has to feel the way towards light and solution, to prepare, to
organise. But the race owes something to one who helped to state the
problem, writing up in letters of flame at the brutal feast of kings and the
rich that civilisation is as yet only a mockery, and did furthermore inspire a
generation of men and women with the stern resolve that they would rather
perish than live on in a world where such things can be.

CHAPTER II
YOUTH.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of old
French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city of
refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither to
establish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before the first
visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mother city of a
new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mother city of the old.
Three generations in a direct line separated Jean Jacques from Didier
Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the first emigrant.[1] Thus
Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family dates from the appearance of
Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have exerted the same kind of
influence upon them as it did, in conjunction with the rest of the
surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens of the ideal state of the
Reformation. It is computed by the historians that out of three thousand
families who composed the population of Geneva towards the end of the
seventeenth century, there were hardly fifty who before the Reformation
had acquired the position of burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions
which thus planted a colony of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with
a new doctrine and newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of
character and manners. People declared they could recognise in the men of
Geneva neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor
Swiss gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in
government, a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries,
which marked them with a stamp unlike that of any other community.[2]
Towards the close of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and
rudeness was sensibly modified under the influence of the great
neighbouring monarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the
rapid decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use. The movement had not
gone far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners
and spirit of his country their special quality and individual note.

The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful,
and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden
name, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most touching
and pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit beginning of a life
preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. "I cost my mother her life," he
wrote, "and my birth was the first of my woes."[3] Destiny thus touches us
with magical finger, long before consciousness awakens to the forces that
have been set to work in our personality, launching us into the universe with
country, forefathers, and physical predispositions, all fixed without choice
of ours. Rousseau was born dying, and though he survived this first crisis
by the affectionate care of one of his father's sisters, yet his constitution
remained infirm and disordered.
Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having
unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some wise
and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately cast in
the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid sensibility was
stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of his first companion.
Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a reversion to an old French type.
In all the Genevese there was an underlying tendency of this kind. "Under a
phlegmatic and cool air," wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen
against the inflammatory effects of the drama, "the Genevese hide an ardent
and sensitive character, that is more easily moved than controlled."[4] And
some of the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be
taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac Rousseau's
restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious sense of personal
dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not common in Geneva,
fortunately for the stability of her society and the prosperity of her citizens.
This disorder of spirit descended in modified form to the son; it was
inevitable that he should be indirectly affected by it. Before he was seven
years old he had learnt from his father to indulge a passion for the reading
of romances. The child and the man passed whole nights in a fictitious
world, reading to one another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in
imaginary situations, until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a
sense of the conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry out in
confusion that he was the more childish of the two.

The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the young
brain. "I had no idea of real things," he said, "though all the sentiments were
already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me by conception, everything
by sensation. These confused emotions, striking me one after another, did
not warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but they gradually shaped in me
a reason of another cast and temper, and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas
of human life, of which neither reflection nor experience has ever been able
wholly to cure me."[5] Thus these first lessons, which have such
tremendous influence over all that follow, had the direct and fatal effect in
Rousseau's case of deadening that sense of the actual relations of things to
one another in the objective world, which is the master-key and prime law
of sanity.
In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques
and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of history
and biography. The romances had been the possession of the mother; the
more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her father. Such
books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History of the Church
and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau than the
admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father during the hours of
work, and read over again to himself during all hours, those stories of free
and indomitable souls which are so proper to kindle the glow of generous
fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of his life; he read him in the late
days when he had almost ceased to read, and he always declared Plutarch to
be nearly the only author to whom he had never gone without profit.[6] "I
think I see my father now," he wrote when he had begun to make his mark
in Paris, "living by the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the
sublimest truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along
with the tools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receiving
instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little fruit."[7] This
did little to implant the needed impressions of the actual world. Rousseau's
first training continued to be in an excessive degree the exact reverse of our
common method; this stirs the imagination too little, and shuts the young
too narrowly within the strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader
of Plutarch at the age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a
Roman, and became the personage whose strokes of constancy and
intrepidity transported him with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle,

and raised his voice to heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as
he told the tale of Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his
arm over a hot chafing-dish.[8]
Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away into
Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen for
ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he
commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years
were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the
side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying
curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy about
affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented interest, as she
sang the simple airs of the common people. The impression of this kind and
cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to the end; her tone of voice,
her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair. The constant recollection of her
shows, among many other signs, how he cherished that conception of the
true unity of a man's life, which places it in a closely-linked chain of active
memories, and which most of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment
and poor fragmentariness of days. When the years came in which he might
well say, I have no pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and
suspicion and diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he
could still often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of
his aunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes.[10]
This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in the
course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that he saw
unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had kinsfolk in the
Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather than give way, in
circumstances which compromised his personal honour and the free justice
of the republic. So his house was broken up, and his son was sent to school
at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722), under the care of a minister,
"there to learn along with Latin all the medley of sorry stuff with which,
under the name of education, they accompany Latin."[11] Rousseau tells us
nothing of the course of his intellectual instruction here, but he marks his
two years' sojourn under the roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in
that fateful acquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more

important than literary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the tree of
nascent experience, men usually keep strict silence. Rousseau is the only
person that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole world as a part of his
own biography the ignoble circumstances of the birth of sensuality in
boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while he told of the playmate
with which unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, which waxes and
strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find the
playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean grip is not
to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fume of the satyr.
It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive a part, that most of the
spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it is here that the flesh spreads
gross clouds over the firmament of the spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from
talk about the high matters of will and conscience, of purity of heart and the
diviner mind, and hurry to the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself
by its own innate healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in
the old legend of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve,
prevents us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer
forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous, if
it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it needs
hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from calling cynical
or shameless, he has told the whole story of this lifelong depravation. In the
present state of knowledge, which in the region of the human character the
false shamefacedness of science, aided and abetted by the mutilating hand
of religious asceticism, has kept crude and imperfect, there is nothing very
profitable to be said on all this. When the great art of life has been more
systematically conceived in the long processes of time and endeavour, and
when more bold, effective, and far-reaching advance has been made in
defining those pathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously
studied, as distinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worth
registering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to be silent,
in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do best in
chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are allowed to play
without monition or watching among the deep open graves of temperament;
and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience, unlike the physician
and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of things, did not spare himself

nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to which the body condemns its high
tenant, the soul.[12]
The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the
knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and existent.
Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken the teeth of a
comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not even the most
terrible punishment could wring from him an untrue confession of guilt.
The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence of falsehood, which is
exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no credit, but in a furious and
invincible resentment against the violent pressure that was unjustly put
upon him. "Picture a character, timid and docile in ordinary life, but ardent,
impetuous, indomitable in its passions; a child always governed by the
voice of reason, always treated with equity, gentleness, and consideration,
who had not even the idea of injustice, and who for the first time
experiences an injustice so terrible, from the very people whom he most
cherishes and respects! What a confusion of ideas, what disorder of
sentiments, what revolution in heart, in brain, in every part of his moral and
intellectual being!" He had not learnt, any more than other children, either
to put himself in the place of his elders, or to consider the strength of the
apparent case against him. All that he felt was the rigour of a frightful
chastisement for an offence of which he was innocent. And the association
of ideas was permanent. "This first sentiment of violence and injustice has
remained so deeply engraved in my soul, that all the ideas relating to it
bring my first emotion back to me; and this sentiment, though only relative
to myself in its origin, has taken such consistency, and become so
disengaged from all personal interest, that my heart is inflamed at the sight
or story of any wrongful action, just as much as if its effect fell on my own
person. When I read of the cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle
atrocities of some villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to
poniard such wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the
deed.... This movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the
profound recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too
fast bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously."[13]
To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all this
may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a tranquil
appeal to the real history of one's own strongest impressions may disclose

their roots in facts of childish experience, which remoteness of time has
gradually emptied of the burning colour they once had. This childish
discovery of the existence in his own world of that injustice which he had
only seen through a glass very darkly in the imaginary world of his reading,
was for Rousseau the angry dismissal from the primitive Eden, which in
one shape and at one time or another overtakes all men. "Here," he says,
"was the term of the serenity of my childish days. From this moment I
ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and I feel even at this day that the
reminiscence of the delights of my infancy here comes to an end.... Even
the country lost in our eyes that charm of sweetness and simplicity which
goes to the heart; it seemed sombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a
veil, hiding its beauties from our sight. We no longer tended our little
gardens, our plants, our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the
earth, shouting for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown."
Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the whole
course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate description by as
overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of a constitutional
infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of reaction against
moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many unavoidable forms by
all save the dullest natures, when they first come into contact with the sharp
tooth of outer circumstance. Indeed, a man must be either miraculously
happy in his experiences, or exceptionally obtuse in observing and feeling,
or else be the creature of base and cynical ideals, if life does not to the end
continue to bring many a repetition of that first day of incredulous
bewilderment. But the urgent demands for material activity quickly recall
the mass of men to normal relations with their fellows and the outer world.
A vehement objective temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by
one of these penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud
and collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims, without
taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of self-collection
in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and depressed spirit, like
Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any of these reacting kinds of
force, and the first stroke of cruelty or oppression is the going out of a
divine light.
Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three
years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning

something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he
showed special inclination.[14] It was a question whether he was to be
made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his
after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of the three;
"for I thought it a fine thing," he says, "to preach." The uncle was a man of
pleasure, and as often happens in such circumstances, his love of pleasure
had the effect of turning his wife into a pietist. Their son was Rousseau's
constant comrade. "Our friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we
were only together, the simplest amusements were a delight." They made
kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their
grandfather, in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful
imitative spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not
disturbed by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an
Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and
composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an
elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe
energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in the
biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. These ended in
appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly for the bigger
battalions, that the release of their enemies from school was the signal for
the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this is an old story in every
biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails to touch us, either in the way
of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life should have gone somewhat too
hardly with a man, then in the way of irony, which is not less real and
poetic than the eironeia of a Greek dramatist, for being concerned with
more unheroic creatures.
And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier
schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
Genevese youth in after years. "In my time," he says admiringly, "children
were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to keep.... Timid
and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty, combative among
themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of; they defied one
another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned home sweating, out of
breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you will, but they made men
who have zeal in their heart to serve their country and blood to shed for her.

May we be able to say as much one day of our fine little gentlemen, and
may these men at fifteen not turn out children at thirty."[15]
Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own
words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life unhappily
did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable balance of
impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used to spend
the day at Pâquis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his aunts, and who
carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day I was in the drying-
room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their brightness pleased my eye;
I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and I was moving them up and
down with much satisfaction along the smooth cylinder, when young Fazy
placed himself in the wheel and gave it a half-quarter turn so adroitly, that I
had just the ends of my two longest fingers caught, but this was enough to
crush the tips and tear the nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly
turned back the wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the
extremity of consternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought
me to cease my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain,
I was touched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the pond, where he
helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. He
entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I promised him that I would not,
and Ï kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew the origin
of the scar. I was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and for more than
two months was unable to use my hand. But I persisted that a large stone
had fallen and crushed my fingers."[16]
The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of
sensibility in its concluding words. "I was playing at ball at Plain Palais,
with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over the
game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a stroke so
well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed my brains out.
I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation like that of this poor lad,
as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had killed me. He threw
himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms, while his tears poured
down his cheeks, and he uttered shrill cries. I returned his embrace with all
my force, weeping like him, in a state of confused emotion which was not
without a kind of sweetness. Then he tried to stop the blood which kept
flowing, and seeing that our two handkerchiefs were not enough, he

dragged me off to his mother's; she had a small garden hard by. The good
woman nearly fell sick at sight of me in this condition; she kept strength
enough to dress my wound, and after bathing it well, she applied flower-de-
luce macerated in brandy, an excellent remedy much used in our country.
Her tears and those of her son, went to my very heart, so that I looked upon
them for a long while as my mother and my brother."[17]
If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and easy,
then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women lie floundering
would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the field of human
experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the discipline of this primitive
goodness. For character in a state of society is not a tree that grows into
uprightness by the law of its own strength, though an adorable instance here
and there of rectitude and moral loveliness that seem intuitive may
sometimes tempt us into a moment's belief in a contrary doctrine. In
Rousseau's case this serious problem was never solved; there was no
deliberate preparation of his impulses, prepossessions, notions; no foresight
on the part of elders, and no gradual acclimatisation of a sensitive and
ardent nature in the fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in
the frigid zone of our relations with other people. It was one of the most
elementary of Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that
it is their education by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant
capacity for virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems
never to have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than the fact that
he himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed to follow
without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own temperament.
Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the experiment to
complete itself within these very rudimentary conditions.
Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a
religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was possessed
also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three aunts were all in
their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at Bossey, "although
Churchman and preacher," was still a sincere believer and nearly as good in
act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so hearty, so discreet, so
reasonable, that his pupils, far from being wearied by the sermon, never
came away without being touched inwardly and stirred to make virtuous
resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion was rather more tiresome,

because she made a business of it.[18] It would be a distinct error to
suppose that all this counted for nothing, for let us remember that we are
now engaged with the youth of the one great religious writer of France in
the eighteenth century. When after many years Rousseau's character
hardened, the influences which had surrounded his boyhood came out in
their full force and the historian of opinion soon notices in his spirit and
work a something which had no counterpart in the spirit and work of men
who had been trained in Jesuit colleges. At the first outset, however, every
trace of religious sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was left
unprotected against the shocks of the world and the flesh.
At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, but that
respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and insufferable way in
which it has struck many other boys of genius in all countries. Contrary to
the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was ignominiously dismissed by his
master[19] for dulness and inaptitude; his fellow-clerks pronounced him
stupid and incompetent past hope. He was next apprenticed to an engraver,
[20] a rough and violent man, who seems to have instantly plunged the boy
into a demoralised stupefaction. The reality of contact with this coarse
nature benumbed as by touch of torpedo the whole being of a youth who
had hitherto lived on pure sensations and among those ideas which are
nearest to sensations. There were no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau's
universe. "The vilest tastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my
simple amusements, without even leaving the least idea behind. I must, in
spite of the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate."
The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritable sense, as
the process, on its negative side, of counteracting the inborn. There are two
kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two degrees, of the
constitution in which the reflective part is weak. There are the men who live
on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certain fulness of blood and
active energy of muscle. There are others who do so passively, not
searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The former by their sheer force
and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world where reflection is a first
condition, still go far. The latter succumb, and as reflection does nothing for
them, and as their sensations in such a world bring them few blandishments,
they are tolerably early surrounded with a self-diffusing atmosphere of

misery. Rousseau had none of this energy which makes oppression bracing.
For a time he sank.
It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into
exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life led
him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are despicable
by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He told lies as readily
as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He cunningly found a means of
opening his master's private cabinet, and of using his master's best
instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in idle and capricious tasks.
When the man, with all the ravity of an adult moralist, describes these
misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain ugliness of mien, and excites a
strong disgust which, when the misdeeds themselves are before us in actual
life, we experience in a far more considerate form. The effect of calm,
retrospective avowal is to create a kind of feeling which is essentially
unlike our feeling at what is actually avowed. Still it is clear that his
unlucky career as apprentice brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness,
slovenliness, untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider
vices. The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull
smouldering kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain
sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which Rousseau
gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the web and stuff
of life, and these days of transition from childhood to full manhood in every
case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the education of home and family,
and they presage definitely what is to come. The roots of character, good or
bad, are shown for this short space, and they remain unchanged, though
most people learn from their fellows the decent and useful art of covering
them over with a little dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine
customs and a silence which is not oblivion.
After a time the character of Jean Jacques was absolutely broken down. He
says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his
master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were terrible to
him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an overmastering
physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to an end. He was
now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades into sports for
which he had little inclination, though he admits that once engaged in them
he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond the others. Such

pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and on two occasions
Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His master when he
presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting as we may
imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a second sin
in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always does. "Half a
league from the town," says Rousseau, "I hear the retreat sounded, and
redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top of my speed: I
arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beats violently, I see from a
distance the soldiers at their post, and call out with choking voice. It was
too late. Twenty paces from the outpost sentinel, I saw the first bridge
rising. I shuddered, as I watched those terrible horns, sinister and fatal
augury of the inevitable lot which that moment was opening for me."[21]
In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon,
we underestimate the unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as
this in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this will is
inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to the fulfilment
of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this, wrote the
unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in the bosom of my
religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, a mild and
peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformity of work
which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I should have been a
good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good friend, good
craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my condition,
perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life obscure and simple,
but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully in the midst of my own
people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have been regretted as long as
any memory of me was left."[22]
As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need seldom
be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who declares
that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity, and we perhaps
owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of aberration
uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most respectable
sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out of this or that
kingdom, of which in truth their own composition finally disinherited them
at the moment when they were conceived in a mother's womb. The first of

the famous Five Propositions of Jansen, which were a stumbling-block to
popes and to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century foolishness, put this
clear and permanent truth into a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect
that there are some commandments of God which righteous and good men
are absolutely unable to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God
does not give them so much grace that they are able to observe them.
If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day and its
prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire delight. The
whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of romance were
instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their realisation. He roamed
for two or three days among the villages in the neighbourhood of Geneva,
finding such hospitality as he needed in the cottages of friendly peasants.
Before long his wanderings brought him to the end of the territory of the
little republic. Here he found himself in the domain of Savoy, where dukes
and lords had for ages been the traditional foes of the freedom and the faith
of Geneva, Rousseau came to the village of Confignon, and the name of the
priest of Confignon recalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old
feud. This feud had come to take new forms; instead of midnight
expeditions to scale the city walls, the descendants of the Savoyard
marauders of the sixteenth century were now intent with equivocal good
will on rescuing the souls of the descendants of their old enemies from
deadly heresy. At this time a systematic struggle was going on between the
priests of Savoy and the ministers of Geneva, the former using every effort
to procure the conversion of any Protestant on whom they could lay hands.
[23] As it happened, the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in
this good work.[24] He made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him
of the heresies of Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave
him some dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the
nature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for
the entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much. "I was too
good a guest," writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, "to be
a good theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent, was
such a triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushed to
oppose so capital a host."[25] So it was agreed that he should be put in a
way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept Rousseau's
assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid complaisance. He

admits that any one who should have seen the artifices to which he resorted,
might have thought him very false. But, he argues, "flattery, or rather
concession, is not always a vice; it is oftener a virtue, especially in the
young. The kindness with which a man receives us, attaches us to him; it is
not to make a fool of him that we give way, but to avoid displeasing him,
and not to return him evil for good." He never really meant to change his
religion; his fault was like the coquetting of decent women, who sometimes,
to gain their ends, without permitting anything or promising anything, lead
men to hope more than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow
some austere reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to
his friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all dogmatic
religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to believe; their
priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man to their faith, are
wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his worldly interests. All this is
most just; the occasion for such a strain of remark, though so apposite on
one side, is hardly well chosen to impress us. We wonder, as we watch the
boy complacently hoodwinking his entertainer, what has become of the
Roman severity of a few months back. This nervous eagerness to please,
however, was the complementary element of a character of vague ambition,
and it was backed by a stealthy consciousness of intellectual superiority,
which perhaps did something, though poorly enough, to make such
ignominy less deeply degrading.
The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the
burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and
counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose
minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21,
1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage,
whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He
expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant of
days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a person
not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing air, a
fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the letters he
brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was decided after
consultation that the heretic should be sent to a monastery at Turin, where
he might be brought over in form to the true Church. At the monastery not
only would the spiritual question of faith and the soul be dealt with, but at

the same time the material problem of shelter and subsistence for the body
would be solved likewise. Elated with vanity at the thought of seeing before
any of his comrades the great land of promise beyond the mountains,
heedless of those whom he had left, and heedless of the future before him
and the object which he was about, the young outcast made his journey over
the Alps in all possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement
which hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye
seemed the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I
imagined rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams,
bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade,
voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a
charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward without
knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval as more
perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life. It was the first
of the too rare occasions when his usually passive sensuousness was stung
by novelty and hope into an active energy.
The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth found
himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary monastery,
among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who pass their time
in going from one monastery to another through Spain and Italy, professing
themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being supported while the process
of their conversion was going slowly forward. At the Hospice of the
Catechumens the work of his conversion was begun in such earnest as the
insincerity of at least one of the parties to it might allow. It is needless to
enter into the circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The
mischievous zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such
hollow and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of
them was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought
up in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost this
abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with which he
was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not bear the idea
of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his present destitute
condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the holy deed I was
about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit." "The sophism which
destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent pieces of moralising, which
bring ignoble action into a relief that exaggerates our condemnation, "is that

of most men, who complain of lack of strength when it is already too late
for them to use it. It is only through our own fault that virtue costs us
anything; if we could be always sage, we should rarely feel the need of
being virtuous. But inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on
without resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the
hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we could
easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards only
make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink into the
abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But in spite
of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee too weak to
come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to avoid falling
into it.'"[28] So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as happens to the pious
soul "too hot for certainties in this our life," to find rest in liberty of private
judgment and an open Bible, but simply as a means of getting food,
clothing, and shelter.[29] The boy was clever enough to make some show of
resistance, and he turned to good use for this purpose the knowledge of
Church history and the great Reformation controversy which he had picked
up at M. Lambercier's. He was careful not to carry things too far, and
exactly nine days after his admission into the Hospice, he "abjured the
errors of the sect."[30] Two days after that he was publicly received into the
kindly bosom of the true Church with all solemnity, to the high edification
of the devout of Turin, who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by
contributions to the extent of twenty francs in small money.
With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of the
Catechumens thrust him out of their doors into the broad world. The youth
who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself at night
sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege of resting in
the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, her husband, her
five or six children, and various other lodgers. This rough awakening
produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which, beneath all
fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy with the
homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a carter, and
was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent Rousseau from
recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch readiness to befriend. He
passed his days in wandering about the streets of Turin, seeing the wonders
of a capital, and expecting some adventure that should raise him to

unknown heights. He went regularly to mass, watched the pomp of the
court, and counted upon stirring a passion in the breast of a princess. À
more important circumstance was the effect of the mass in awakening in his
own breast his latent passion for music; a passion so strong that the poorest
instrument, if it were only in tune, never failed to give him the liveliest
pleasure. The king of Sardinia was believed to have the best performers in
Europe; less than that was enough to quicken the musical susceptibility
which is perhaps an invariable element in the most completely sensuous
natures.
When the end of the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, he tried
to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on him,
gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and
grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her client
away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not magical.[31]
Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural fury of an Italian
husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any other cause than a
shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.
The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of
princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey or
footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he passed
three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here was marked
by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful discussion. When
Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured ribbon was missing;
Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his possession. They asked him
whence he had taken it. He replied that it had been given to him by Marion,
a young and comely maid in the house. In her presence and before the
whole household he repeated his false story, and clung to it with a bitter
effrontery that we may well call diabolic, remembering how the nervous
terror of punishment and exposure sinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want
of moral courage, really denotes in the young an excruciating physical
struggle, often so keen that the victim clutches after liberation with the
spontaneous tenacity and cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters.
Undisciplined sensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its
shapes, and at this epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded
his apprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towards
degeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was the

slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness. "Never," he says,
in his account of this hateful action, "was wickedness further from me than
at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it is contradictory
and yet it is true that my affection for her was the cause of what I did. She
was present to my mind, and I threw the blame from myself on to the first
object that presented itself. When I saw her appear my heart was torn, but
the presence of so many people was too strong for my remorse. I feared
punishment very little; I only feared disgrace, but I feared that more than
death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I would fain have
buried myself in the depths of the earth; invincible shame prevailed over all,
shame alone caused my effrontery, and the more criminal I became, the
more intrepid was I made by the fright of confessing it. I could see nothing
but the horror of being recognised and declared publicly to my face a thief,
liar, and traducer."[32] When he says that he feared punishment little, his
analysis of his mind is most likely wrong, for nothing is clearer than that a
dread of punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strong feeling
with him at this time. However that may have been, the same over-excited
imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led him into so
abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties. It led him to
conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen Marion in consequence of
his calumny against her, and this dreadful thought haunted him to the end of
his life. In the long sleepless nights he thought he saw the unhappy girl
coming to reproach him with a crime that seemed as fresh to him as if it had
been perpetrated the day before.[33] Thus the same brooding memory
which brought back to him the sweet pain of his gentle kinswoman's
household melody, preserved the darker side of his history with equal
fidelity and no less perfect continuousness. Rousseau expresses a hope and
belief that this burning remorse would serve as expiation for his fault; as if
expiation for the destruction of another soul could be anything but a fine
name for self-absolution. We may, however, charitably and reasonably think
that the possible consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were
not actual, but were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her
reproachful spirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that
the whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we
who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at further
length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy who
happened to grow up into a man of genius.[34]

After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or cellar of
his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue, Rousseau again
found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese person of quality.
This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him with a certain unusual
considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt the narrative. His son
condescended to teach the youth Latin, and Rousseau presumed to entertain
a passion for one of the daughters of the house, to whom he paid silent
homage in the odd shape of attending to her wants at table with special
solicitude. In this situation he had, or at least he supposed that he had, an
excellent chance of ultimate advancement. But advancement here or
elsewhere means a measure of stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his
youth was the archtype of the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva
visited him,[35] and as almost any incident is stimulating enough to fire the
restlessness of imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the
Count of Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his
prospects, the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded
quickly into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination
again went over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the
streams, began to absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious
satisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how
far more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age
and taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay other than
as it might please them. "It would be madness to sacrifice such a piece of
good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow, difficult, doubtful of
execution, and which, even if they should one day be realised, were not
with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of true pleasure and freedom
in youth."[36]
On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he was
dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their homeward
wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what they should
eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy fountain; they
hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by this wonder they
should receive all that they might need. Their hopes were not fulfilled. The
exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse them from their reckoning.
Before long it was accidentally broken, and to their secret satisfaction, for it
had lost its novelty. Their naked, vagrancy was thus undisguised. They

Didier Rousseau.
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Jean
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David. Noah.
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Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean François.
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Jean Jacques. Jean. Theodore.

(Musset-Pathay, ii. 283.)
[2] Picot's Hist. de Genève, iii. 114.
[3] Conf., i. 7.
[4] Lettre à D'Alembert, p. 187. Also Nouv. Hél., VI. v. 239.
[5] Conf., i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 356.
[6] Rêveries, iv. p. 189. "My master and counsellor, Plutarch," he says,
when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. Corr., i. 265.
[7] Dedication of the Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité, p. 201. (June,
1754.)
[8] Conf., i. 1.
[9] Ib, i. 12.
[10] The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to her
(Madame Gonceru)—one in 1754 (Corr., i. 204), another as late as 1770
(vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (Oeuvr. et Corr. Inéd., 392).
[11] Conf., i. 17-32.

[12] See also Conf., i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, n. 2.
[13] Conf., i. 27-31.
[14] Conf., i. 38-47.
[15] Lettre à D'Alembert(1758), 178, 179.
[16] Rêveries, iv. 211, 212.
[17] Conf. 212, 213.
[18] Conf., ii. 102, 103.
[19] M. Masseron.
[20] M. Ducommun.
[21] Conf., i. 69.
[22] Conf., i. 72.
[23] J. Gaberel's Histoire de l'Église de Genève (Geneva, 1853-62), vol. iii.
p. 285.
[24] There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to the
effect that the Sieur de Pontverre "is attracting many young men from this
town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought to be warned."
(Gaberel, iii. 224.)
[25] Conf., ii. 76.
[26] Conf., ii. 77.
[27] Conf., ii. 90-97.
[28] Conf., ii. 107
[29] See Émile, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a Calvinist,
finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without resource, "changed his
religion to get bread."

[30] In the Confessions (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the period a
month; but the extract from the register of his baptism (Gaberel's Hist. de
l'Église de Genève, iii. 224), which has been recently published, shows that
this is untrue: "Jean Jacques Rousseau, de Genève (Calviniste), entré à
l'hospice à l'âge de 16 ans, le 12 avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le
21; et le 23 du même mois lui fut administré le saint baptême, ayant pour
parrain le sieur André Ferrero et pour marraine Françoise Christine Rora
(ou Rovea)."
A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up "for two
months," but this is not true even on his own showing.
[31] Madame Basile. Conf., ii. 121-135.
[32] Conf. ii. ad finem.
[33] Conf., ii. 144.
[34] Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7) makes
the object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no evidence in the
matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself.
[35] Bacle, by name.
[36] Conf., iii. 168.
[37] Conf., iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situation is given in
Émile, Bk. iv. 125.

CHAPTER III.
SAVOY.

The commonplace theory which the world takes for granted as to the
relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave the power and guidance
of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a true account of the normal
state, there is at any rate a kind of temperament among the many types of
men, in which it seems as if the elements of character remain mere futile
and dispersive particles, until compelled into unity and organisation by the
creative shock of feminine influence. There are men, famous or obscure,
whose lives might be divided into a number of epochs, each defined and
presided over by the influence of a woman. For the inconstant such a
calendar contains many divisions, for the constant it is brief and simple; for
both alike it marks the great decisive phases through which character has
moved.
Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of
susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment was neither
robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectual demand for the
bright and vivacious sympathies in which women sometimes excel. It had
neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy which makes close emotional
companionship an essential condition of freedom of faculty and
completeness of work. There is a certain close and sickly air round all his
dealings with women and all his feeling for them. We seem to move not in
the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the fiery flames of lust, but among
the humid heats of some unknown abode of things not wholesome or manly.
"I know a sentiment," he writes, "which is perhaps less impetuous than
love, but a thousand times more delicious, which sometimes is joined to
love, and which is very often apart from it. Nor is this sentiment friendship
only; it is more voluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of
the same sex could be its object; at least I have been a friend, if ever man
was, and I never felt this about any of my friends."[38] He admits that he
can only describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly ruled
by elements that defy definition, and in Rousseau's case the sentiment

which he could not describe was a paramount trait of his mental
constitution. It was as a voluptuous garment; in it his imagination was
cherished into activity, and protected against that outer air of reality which
braces ordinary men, but benumbs and disintegrates the whole vital
apparatus of such an organisation as Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of
this feeling about women, his character might very possibly have remained
sterile. That feeling was the complementary contribution, without which
could be no fecundity.
When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread and
a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the sensual
moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of manhood. This
unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights, was banished, or at
least soothed into a happier humour, by the influence of a person who is one
of the most striking types to be found in the gallery of fair women.

I.

A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which deals with a
rather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is graceful, simple, and
pathetic, painted the portrait of a creature for whom no moralist with a
reputation to lose can say a word; and we may, if we choose, fool ourselves
by supposing her to be without a counterpart in the better-regulated world
of real life, but, in spite of both these objections, she is an interesting and
not untouching figure to those who like to know all the many-webbed stuff
out of which their brothers and sisters are made. The Manon Lescaut of the
unfortunate Abbé Prevost, kindly, bright, playful, tender, but devoid of the
very germ of the idea of that virtue which is counted the sovereign
recommendation of woman, helps us to understand Madame de Warens.
There are differences enough between them, and we need not mistake them
for one and the same type. Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because
romance has fewer limitations than real life; but if we think of her in
reading of Rousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman
tends to soften our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten our
conception of a character that eludes the instruments of a commonplace
analysis.[39]

She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early disagreed with
her husband, from whom she eventually went away, abandoning family,
religion, country, and means of subsistence, with all gaiety of heart. The
King of Sardinia happened to be keeping his court at a small town on the
southern shores of the lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madame de
Warens to Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy,[40] gave
a zest to the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport in that great
spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense of the reformed
church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for the faith of his house,
conferred on the new convert a small pension for life; but as the tongues of
the scandalous imputed a less pure motive for such generosity in a
parsimonious prince, Madame de Warens removed from the court and
settled at Annecy. Her conversion was hardly more serious than Rousseau's
own, because seriousness was no condition of her intelligence on any of its
sides or in any of its relations. She was extremely charitable to the poor, full
of pity for all in misfortune, easily moved to forgiveness of wrong or
ingratitude; careless, gay, open-hearted; having, in a word, all the good
qualities which spring in certain generous soils from human impulse, and
hardly any of those which spring from reflection, or are implanted by the
ordering of society. Her reason had been warped in her youth by an
instructor of the devil's stamp;"[41] finding her attached to her husband and
to her duties, always cold, argumentative, and impregnable on the side of
the senses, he attacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the
union of the sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect indifference,
provided only that decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace of
mind of persons concerned be not disturbed.[42] This execrable lesson,
which greater and more unselfish men held and propagated in grave books
before the end of the century, took root in her mind. If we accept Rousseau's
explanation, it did so the more easily as her temperament was cold, and thus
corroborated the idea of the indifference of what public opinion and private
passion usually concur in investing with such enormous weightiness. "I will
even dare to say," Rousseau declares, "that she only knew one true pleasure
in the world, and that was to give pleasure to those whom she loved."[43]
He is at great pains to protest how compatible this coolness of temperament
is with excessive sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor
practical observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so
anxious to prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its

energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or volatility;
whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light or as slowly as
sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that of Madame de Warens is
inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which belongs to the other
sort, but it is essentially bound up with sensibility, or readiness of
sympathetic answer to every cry from another soul. It is the slow, brooding,
smouldering nature, like Rousseau's own, in which we may expect to find
the tropics.
To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor soul
like Madame de Warens is as if one should denounce flagrant want of moral
purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was incessant,
but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and confusion. She
inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent much time in search
after secret elixirs and the like. "Quacks, taking advantage of her weakness,
made themselves her master, constantly infested her, ruined her, and
wasted, in the midst of furnaces and chemicals, intelligence, talents, and
charms which would have made her the delight of the best societies."[44]
Perhaps, however, the too notorious vagrancy of her amours had at least as
much to do with her failure to delight the best societies as her indiscreet
passion for alchemy. Her person was attractive enough. "She had those
points of beauty," says Rousseau, "which are desirable, because they reside
rather in expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a
soft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not see a
finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands."[45] She was full of tricks and
whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup and meats at
dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly swooned, and her
disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an hour or so she took her
first morsel.[46] On the whole, if we accept the current standard of sanity,
Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so little flighty; but a
monotonous world can afford to be lenient to people with a slight craziness,
if it only has hearty benevolence and cheerfulness in its company, and is
free from egoism or rapacious vanity.
This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was
decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain
breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738. It
was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He acquired

during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it was, and his
principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the poor and of the
world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was revolutionised, and the
recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of grandeur, of palaces, princesses,
and a glorious career full in the world's eye, were replaced by a new
conception of blessedness of life, which never afterwards faded from his
vision, and which has held a front place in the imagination of literary
Europe ever since. The notions or aspirations which he had picked up from
a few books gave way to notions and aspirations which were shaped and
fostered by the scenes of actual life into which he was thrown, and which
found his character soft for their impression. In one way the new pictures of
a future were as dissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had
been, and the sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a
man to compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as the mental life
among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.
Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy
was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in
him, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over gardens
and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. "It was the first
time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows. Always shut
in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and the dull gray of
the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty was to me! It brightened
all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted the landscape among the
kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if she had brought it there
expressly for me. I placed myself there in all peacefulness with her; she was
present to me everywhere among the flowers and the verdure; her charms
and those of spring were all mingled together in my eyes. My heart, which
had hitherto been stifled, found itself more free in this ample space, and my
sighs had more liberal vent among these orchard gardens."[47] Madame de
Warens was the semi-divine figure who made the scene live, and gave it
perfect and harmonious accent. He had neither transports nor desires by her
side, but existed in a state of ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing
what. "I could have passed my whole life and eternity itself in this way,
without an instant of weariness. She is the only person with whom I never
felt that dryness in conversation, which turns the duty of keeping it up into a
torment. Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an inexhaustible

stream of chatter, which never came to an end until it was interrupted from
without. I only felt all the force of my attachment for her when she was out
of my sight. So long as I could see her I was merely happy and satisfied, but
my disquiet in her absence went so far as to be painful. I shall never forget
how one holiday, while she was at vespers, I went for a walk outside the
town, my heart full of her image and of an eager desire to pass all my days
by her side. I had sense enough to see that for the present this was
impossible, and that the bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief. This
gave to my musing a sadness which was free from everything sombre, and
which was moderated by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which has
always moved me to a singular degree, the singing of the birds, the glory of
the weather, the sweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic dwellings in
which my imagination placed our common home;—all this so struck me
with a vivid, tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw myself as in an
ecstasy transported into the happy time and the happy place where my
heart, possessed of all the felicity that could bring it delight, without even
dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share joys inexpressible."[48]
There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful now
and this delicious future. The harshness of circumstance is ever interposing
with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen the first of all
problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submitted to the
observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens,[49] and his verdict
corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before
Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. He pronounced
that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not thoroughly inept,
at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas, almost without
attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that the honour of one
day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of fortune to which he
had any right to aspire.[50] So he was sent to the seminary, to learn Latin
enough for the priestly offices. He began by conceiving a deadly antipathy
to his instructor, whose appearance happened to be displeasing to him. A
second was found,[51] and the patient and obliging temper, the affectionate
and sympathetic manner of his new teacher made a great impression on the
pupil, though the progress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory
in one case as in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle
impressionableness to physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is

rapidly effaced by press of more urgent considerations, but which
Rousseau's strongly sensuous quality retained, that he should have
remembered, and thought worth mentioning years afterwards, that the first
of his two teachers at the seminary of Annecy had greasy black hair, a
complexion as of gingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the
second had the most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair
hair and large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that
he was one of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While
at Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and
benevolent priest,[52] and uniting the two good men thirty years after he
conceived and drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar.[53]
Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil was not
even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in intellectual faculty. It
was next decided to try music, and Rousseau ascended for a brief space into
the seventh heaven of the arts. This was one of the intervals of his life of
which he says that he recalls not only the times, places, persons, but all the
surrounding objects, the temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a
certain local impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the
old transports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent
Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps of
the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass, nor a
fair little abbé who played the violin in the choir.[54] Yet he was in so
dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his good-will nor his
assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, not even music. His teacher,
one Le Mâitre, belonged to that great class of irregular and disorderly
natures with which Rousseau's destiny, in the shape of an irregular and
disorderly temperament of his own, so constantly brought him into contact.
Le Mâitre could not work without the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus
his passion for his art landed him a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon
him by the precentor of the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and left
Annecy in a furtive manner along with Rousseau, whom the too
comprehensive solicitude of Madame de Warens despatched to bear him
company. They went together as far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician
happened to fall into an epileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for help,
informed the crowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a moment
when no one was thinking about him, turned the street corner and finally

disappeared, the musician being thus "abandoned by the only friend on
whom he had a right to count."[55] It thus appears that a man maybe
exquisitely moved by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the fairness of
smiling gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a qualm of
misgiving of leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange place. It has
ceased to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are done by
people with an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature.
At the moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and
Madame de Warens. "It is not," he says in words of profound warning,
which many men have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy
dawn that swell into huge purgatorial æons,—"it is not when we have just
done a bad action, that it torments us; it is when we recall it long after, for
the memory of it can never be thrust out."[56]

II.

When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise and
dismay that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for an indefinite
time to Paris. He never knew the secret of this sudden departure, for no
man, he says, was ever so little curious as to the private affairs of his
friends. His heart, completely occupied with the present, filled its whole
capacity and entire space with that, and except for past pleasures no empty
corner was ever left for what was done with.[57] He says he was too young
to take the desertion deeply to heart. Where he found subsistence we do not
know. He was fascinated by a flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose
company he wasted many hours, and the precious stuff of youthful
opportunity. He passed a summer day in joyful rustic fashion with two
damsels whom he hardly ever saw again, but the memory of whom and of
the holiday that they had made with him remained stamped in his brain, to
be reproduced many a year hence in some of the traits of the new Heloïsa
and her friend Claire.[59] Then he accepted an invitation from a former
waiting-woman of Madame de Warens to attend her home to Freiburg. On
this expedition he paid an hour's visit to his father, who had settled and
remarried at Nyon. Returning from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where,
with an audacity that might be taken for the first presage of mental
disturbance, he undertook to teach music. "I have already," he says, "noted
some moments of inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself.

Behold me now a teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an
air. Without the least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it
before all the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I
gave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de
Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his
house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to work to
compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I knew all
about it." The performance came off duly, and the strange impostor
conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master. Never since
the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted the ears of men.[60]
Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars, but the friendly tavern-
keeper who had first taken him in did not lack either hope or charity. "How
is it," Rousseau cried, many years after this, "that having found so many
good people in my youth, I find so few in my advanced life? Is their stock
exhausted? No; but the class in which I have to seek them now is not the
same as that in which I found them then. Among the common people, where
great passions only speak at intervals, the sentiments of nature make
themselves heard oftener. In the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and
under the mask of sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks."[61]
From Lausanne he went to Neuchâtel, where he had more success, for,
teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was marked
enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles falling
in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing Europe in
search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy Sepulchre, he at once
attached himself to him in the capacity of interpreter. In this position he
remained for a few weeks, until the French minister at Soleure took him
away from the Greek monk, and despatched him to Paris to be the attendant
of a young officer.[62] A few days in the famous city, which he now saw for
the first time, and which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all
other wonders disappointed them,[63] convinced him that here was not
what he sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of
Madame de Warens and more familiar lands.
The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
which we may date in the summer of 1732,[64] was always counted by
Rousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem
grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of

redeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money.
He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back
again to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in the
stead of books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of letters has
been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to literature for the
most characteristic part of his work. He was formed by life; not by life in
the sense of contact with a great number of active and important persons, or
with a great number of persons of any kind, but in the rarer sense of free
surrender to the plenitude of his own impressions. A world composed of
such people, all dispensing with the inherited portion of human experience,
and living independently on their own stock, would rapidly fall backwards
into dissolution. But there is no more rash idea of the right composition of a
society than one which leads us to denounce a type of character for no
better reason than that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces.
There is very little danger of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless
lunar or other great physical influences arise to work a vast change in the
cerebral constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious vis
inertioe of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricity beyond
bounds spreading too far. At present, however, it is enough, without going
into the general question, to notice the particular fact that while the other
great exponents of the eighteenth century movement, Hume, Voltaire,
Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength of understanding by the
study and practice of literature, Rousseau, the leader of the reaction against
that movement, was wandering a beggar and an outcast, craving the rude
fare of the peasant's hut, knocking at roadside inns, and passing nights in
caves and holes in the fields, or in the great desolate streets of towns.
If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all the
significance that it now has for us. But where others would have found
affliction, he had consolation, and where they would have lain desperate
and squalid, he marched elate and ready to strike the stars. "Never," he says,
"did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much, as in the journeys
that I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about it which
animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am still; my
body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the country, the
succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the freedom of the
alehouse, the absence of everything that could make me feel dependence, or

recall me to my situation—all this sets my soul free, gives me a greater
boldness of thought. I dispose of all nature as its sovereign lord; my heart,
wandering from object to object, mingles and is one with the things that
soothe it, wraps itself up in charming images, and is intoxicated by
delicious sentiment. Ideas come as they please, not as I please: they do not
come at all, or they come in a crowd, overwhelming me with their number
and their force. When I came to a place I only thought of eating, and when I
left it I only thought of walking. I felt that a new paradise awaited me at the
door, and I thought of nothing but of hastening in search of it."[65]
Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not degrade:
—"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the answer [as to the
return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the open air, sleeping
stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench, as tranquilly as on a
bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious night outside the town
[Lyons], in a road which ran by the side of either the Rhone or the Saône, I
forget which of the two. Gardens raised on a terrace bordered the other side
of the road. It had been very hot all day, and the evening was delightful; the
dew moistened the parched grass, the night was profoundly still, the air
fresh without being cold; the sun in going down had left red vapours in the
heaven, and they turned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace
sheltered nightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of
ecstasy, surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of it all,
and only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone. Absorbed in the
sweetness of my musing, I prolonged my ramble far into the night, without
ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I found it out. I lay down
luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or false doorway made in the wall of the
terrace; the canopy of my bed was formed by overarching tree-tops; a
nightingale was perched exactly over my head, and I fell asleep to his
singing. My slumber was delicious, my awaking more delicious still. It was
broad day, and my opening eyes looked on sun and water and green things,
and an adorable landscape. I rose up and gave myself a shake; I felt hungry
and started gaily for the town, resolved to spend on a good breakfast the
two pieces of money which I still had left. I was in such joyful spirits that I
went along the road singing lustily."[66]
There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural sentiment
spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the external

world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world of many-
hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no
existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the
product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and which
only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by accident. He
did not feel in order to write, but felt without any thought of writing. He
dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies, among them that of marshal of
France, but the fame of authorship never entered into his dreams. When the
time for authorship actually came, his work had all the benefit of the
absence of self-consciousness, it had all the disinterestedness, so to say,
with which the first fresh impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.
One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as illustrating,
too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so much more real
and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of its aspects, than
the way of the other revolutionists of the century. One day, when he had lost
himself in wandering in search of some site which he expected to find
beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant, half dead with hunger and
thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing more restoring than coarse barley
bread and skimmed milk. Presently, after seeing what manner of guest he
had, the worthy man descended by a small trap into his cellar, and brought
up some good brown bread, some meat, and a bottle of wine, and an
omelette was added afterwards. Then he explained to the wondering
Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none of the mysteries of the French
fisc, that he hid away his wine on account of the duties, and his bread on
account of the taille, and declared that he would be a ruined man if they
suspected that he was not dying of hunger. All this made an impression on
Rousseau which he never forgot. "Here," he says, "was the germ of the
inextinguishable hatred which afterwards grew up in my heart against the
vexations that harass the common people, and against all their oppressors.
This man actually did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the
sweat of his brow, and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as
reigned around him."[67]
It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company, that
Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old order, and

changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a deadly affair of
ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had wanted bread,
who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept in dens, who
had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw the
goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all never
tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them as the
most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his experiences,
might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the matter, and to protest
to the few who usurp literature and policy with their ideas, aspirations,
interests, that it is not they but the many, whose existence stirs the heart and
fills the eye with the great prime elements of the human lot.

III.

It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived at
Chambéri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in the
dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had
procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the
government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only
temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk, who
had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how
little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight
hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and ill-
smelling fellow-workers.[68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any set of
circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them. So now
he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by that musical
instruction in which he had made so many singular and grotesque
endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a possible thing
were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there, but he could not
bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the fixing of an hour. In time
this experiment for a subsistence came to the same end as all the others. He
next rushed to Besançon in search of the musical instruction which he
wished to give to others, but his baggage was confiscated at the frontier, and
he had to return.[69] Finally he abandoned the attempt, and threw himself
loyally upon the narrow resources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted
in some singularly indefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite

and miscellaneous affairs,—if we are here, as so often, to give the name of
affairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road to ruin.
The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame de
Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was her
factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words, firm,
thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of his mistress admitted
him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when Madame de Warens
thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of youth, Rousseau was
delivered from them in an equivocal way by solicitous application of the
same maxims of comprehension. "Although Claude Anet was as young as
she was, he was so mature and so grave, that he looked upon us as two
children worthy of indulgence, and we both looked upon him as a
respectable man, whose esteem it was our business to conciliate. Thus there
grew up between us three a companionship, perhaps without another
example like it upon earth. All our wishes, our cares, our hearts were in
common; nothing seemed to pass outside our little circle. The habit of
living together, and of living together exclusively, became so strong that if
at our meals one of the three was absent, or there came a fourth, all was
thrown out; and in spite of our peculiar relations, a tête-à-tête was less
sweet than a meeting of all three."[70] Fate interfered to spoil this striking
attempt after a new type of the family, developed on a duandric base.
Claude Anet was seized with illness, a consequence of excessive fatigue in
an Alpine expedition in search of plants, and he came to his end.[71] In him
Rousseau always believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever
possessed, "a rare and estimable man, in whom nature served instead of
education, and who nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great
men."[72] The day after his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost
friend to Madame de Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction,
when suddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he
should inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly a handsome black
coat. A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always somewhat
nauseously called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought and
washed away its last traces.[73] After all, those men and women are
exceptionally happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought
standing against themselves in that unwritten chapter of their lives which

even the most candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast
recollection.
Shortly after his return to Chambéri, a wave from the great tide of European
affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the February of 1733,
Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in the choice of a
successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France was for Stanislaus, the
father-in-law of Lewis XV., while the Emperor Charles VI. and Anne of
Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony. Stanislaus was compelled to
flee, and the French Government, taking up his quarrel, declared war
against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The first act of this war, which was
to end in the acquisition of Naples and the two Sicilies by Spanish
Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the despatch of a French
expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars, the husband of one of
Voltaire's first idols. This took place in the autumn of 1733, and a French
column passed through Chambéri, exciting lively interest in all minds,
including Rousseau's. He now read the newspapers for the first time, with
the most eager sympathy for the country with whose history his own name
was destined to be so permanently associated. "If this mad passion," he
says, "had only been momentary, I should not speak of it; but for no visible
reason it took such root in my heart, that when I afterwards at Paris played
the stern republican, I could not help feeling in spite of myself a secret
predilection for the very nation that I found so servile, and the government I
made bold to assail."[74] This fondness for France was strong, constant,
and invincible, and found what was in the eighteenth century a natural
complement in a corresponding dislike of England.[75]
Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath became
asthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered from a slow
feverishness from which he never afterwards became entirely free.[76] His
mind was as feverish as his body, and the morbid broodings which active
life reduces to their lowest degree in most young men, were left to make
full havoc along with the seven devils of idleness and vacuity. An instinct
which may flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep down in us all,
suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseau prevailed upon
Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for the fresh fields, and to
deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude from the adventurers who made
her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modest farm-house to which they

retired, still stands. The modern traveller, with a taste for relieving an
imagination strained by great historic monuments and secular landmarks,
with the sight of spots associated with the passion and meditation of some
far-shining teacher of men, may walk a short league from where the gray
slate roofs of dull Chambéri bake in the sun, and ascending a gently
mounting road, with high leafy bank on the right throwing cool shadows
over his head, and a stream on the left making music at his feet, he sees an
old red housetop lifted lonely above the trees. The homes in which men
have lived now and again lend themselves to the beholder's subjective
impression; they seemed to be brooding in forlorn isolation like some life-
wearied gray-beard over ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les
Charmettes a pitiful melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of
the scene, the sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the
little vineyard with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the
yellow stunted vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the sky
far across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty,
silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a
scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a pathetic
spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy, and disorder,
and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to this perturbed
spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those inmost vibrations which in
truth make up all the short divine part of a man's life.[77]
"No day passes," he wrote in the very year in which he died, "in which I do
not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief time in my life,
when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, and when I may say
in a true sense that I lived. I may almost say, like the prefect when disgraced
and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in the country, 'I have passed
seventy years on the earth, and I have lived but seven of them.' But for this
brief and precious space, I should perhaps have remained uncertain about
myself; for during all the rest of my life I have been so agitated, tossed,
plucked hither and thither by the passions of others, that, being nearly
passive in a life so stormy, I should find it hard to distinguish what
belonged to me in my own conduct,—to such a degree has harsh necessity
weighed upon me. But during these few years I did what I wished to do, I
was what I wished to be."[78] The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be
described in words. It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with

every sense gratified and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection
within doors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude,
freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens,—these were the
conditions of Rousseau's ideal state. "If my happiness," he says, in language
of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, I might then
describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was neither said
nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt without my being able
to point to any other object of my happiness than the very feeling itself? I
arose with the sun and I was happy; I went out of doors and I was happy; I
saw Maman and I was happy; I left her and I was happy; I went among the
woods and hills, I wandered about in the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in
the garden, I gathered fruit, I helped them indoors, and everywhere
happiness followed me. It was not in any given thing, it was all in myself,
and could never leave me for a single instant."[79] This was a true garden
of Eden, with the serpent in temporary quiescence, and we may count the
man rare since the fall who has found such happiness in such conditions,
and not less blessed than he is rare. The fact that he was one of this chosen
company was among the foremost of the circumstances which made
Rousseau seem to so many men in the eighteenth century as a spring of
water in a thirsty land.
All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hours
together in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence that they
would follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever he would,
and the moment that he appeared in the garden two or three of them would
instantly settle on his arms or his head. The bees, too, gradually came to put
the same trust in him, and his whole life was surrounded with gentle
companionship. He always began the day with the sun, walking on the high
ridge above the slope on which the house lay, and going through his form of
worship. "It did not consist in a vain moving of the lips, but in a sincere
elevation of heart to the author of the tender nature whose beauties lay
spread out before my eyes. This act passed rather in wonder and
contemplation than in requests; and I always knew that with the dispenser
of true blessings, the best means of obtaining those which are needful for
us, is less to ask than to deserve them."[80] These effusions may be taken
for the beginning of the deistical reaction in the eighteenth century. While
the truly scientific and progressive spirits were occupied in laborious

preparation for adding to human knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau
walked with his head in the clouds among gods, beneficent authors of
nature, wise dispensers of blessings, and the like. "Ah, madam," he once
said, "sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight
over my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there
is no God. But look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head
erect, and an inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it scatters the mists
that cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glittering scene of nature,
disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I find my faith again,
and my God, and my belief in him. I admire and adore him, and I prostrate
myself in his presence."[81] As if that settled the question affirmatively, any
more than the absence of such theistic emotion in many noble spirits settles
it negatively. God became the highest known formula for sensuous
expansion, the synthesis of all complacent emotions, and Rousseau filled up
the measure of his delight by creating and invoking a Supreme Being to
match with fine scenery and sunny gardens. We shall have a better occasion
to mark the attributes of this important conception when we come to
Emilius, where it was launched in a panoply of resounding phrases upon a
Europe which was grown too strong for Christian dogma, and was not yet
grown strong enough to rest in a provisional ordering of the results of its
own positive knowledge. Walking on the terrace at Les Charmettes, you are
at the very birth-place of that particular Être Suprême to whom Robespierre
offered the incense of an official festival.
Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by the
prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and he used
now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether this cruel
destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose softness of heart inspired
her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphic doctor, had
abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatory because she did
not know what to do with the souls of the wicked, being unable either to
damn them, or to instal them among the good until they had been purified
into goodness. In truth it must be confessed, says Rousseau, that alike in
this world and the other the wicked are extremely embarrassing.[82] His
own search after knowledge of his fate is well known. One day, amusing
himself in a characteristic manner by throwing stones at trees, he began to
be tormented by fear of the eternal pit. He resolved to test his doom by

throwing a stone at a particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he missed,
then perdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw; as he had
chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far away, all
was well.[83] As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly phantoms of theology,
he passed his days in a state of calm. Even when illness brought it into his
head that he should soon know the future lot by more assured experiment,
he still preserved a tranquillity which he justly qualifies as sensual.
In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which acquired such a
decisive place in his character during his life at Les Charmettes, it is to be
remembered that it was entirely devoid of that stormy and boisterous
quality which has grown up in more modern literature, out of the violent
attempt to press nature in her most awful moods into the service of the great
revolt against a social and religious tradition that can no longer be endured.
Of this revolt Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural aspects was
connected with this attitude, but he did not seize those of them which the
poet of Manfred, for example, forced into an imputed sympathy with his
own rebellion. Rousseau always loved nature best in her moods of
quiescence and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods
in men. He liked rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear the sight of
the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him with
melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the ruins of castles.
[84] It is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed so in his eyes;
he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and precipices.[85] This
does not affect the fact that he never moralised appalling landscape, as post-
revolutionary writers have done, and that the Alpine wastes which throw
your puniest modern into a rapture, had no attraction for him. He could
steep himself in nature without climbing fifteen thousand feet to find her. In
landscape, as has been said by one with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly
a great artist, and you can, if you are artistic too, follow him with
confidence in his wanderings; he understood that beauty does not require a
great stage, and that the effect of things lies in harmony.[86] The humble
heights of the Jura, and the lovely points of the valley of Chambéri, sufficed
to give him all the pleasure of which he was capable. In truth a man cannot
escape from his time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth
century in being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for
objects inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and no

sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of the
littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the unseen forces
which make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice and heard the
water roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for hours enjoying the
physical sensation of dizziness with which it turned his brain, with a break
now and again for hurling large stones, and watching them roll and leap
down into the torrent, with as little reflection and as little articulate emotion
as if he had been a child.[87]
Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a man into
body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a function of the
body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotional side, his
thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact and at the roots these
qualities are not two but one, with temperament for the common
substratum. During this period of his life the whole of Rousseau's true force
went into his feelings, and at all times feeling predominated over reflection,
with many drawbacks and some advantages of a very critical kind for
subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one who came into contact
with him in the way of testing his capacity for being instructed pronounced
him hopeless. He had several excellent opportunities of learning Latin,
especially at Turin in the house of Count Gouvon, and in the seminary at
Annecy, and at Les Charmettes he did his best to teach himself, but without
any better result than a very limited power of reading. In learning one rule
he forgot the last; he could never master the most elementary laws of
versification; he learnt and re-learnt twenty times the Eclogues of Virgil, but
not a single word remained with him.[88] He was absolutely without verbal
memory, and he pronounces himself wholly incapable of learning anything
from masters. Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing
and fencing; he could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of
instruction he was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on
the first day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut
himself up in his room, and worked night and day over the books with
indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to the café
to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves and combinations had
got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but clouds on the board, and as
often as he repeated the experiment he only found himself weaker than
before. Even in music, for which he had a genuine passion and at which he

worked hard, he never could acquire any facility at sight, and he was an
inaccurate scorer, even when only copying the score of others.[89]
Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are very
slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise until after
the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligence do not belong
to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I am carried away, but I
am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united with such vivacity of feeling,
possesses me not only in conversation, but when I am alone and working.
My ideas arrange themselves in my head with incredible difficulty; they
circulate there in a dull way and ferment until they agitate me, fill me with
heat, and give me palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly,
I could not write a single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still,
the chaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly and
after long and confused agitation."[90]
So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two persons,
we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that his intelligence must
be exactly what he describes its process to have been. The slow-burning
ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was most conscious of
fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and deliberate generation of
ideas. The same soft passivity, the same receptiveness, which made his
emotions like the surface of a lake under sky and breeze, entered also into
the working of his intellectual faculties. But it happens that in this region, in
the attainment of knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even
receptiveness implies a distinct and active energy, and hence the very
quality of temperament which left him free and eager for sensuous
impressions, seemed to muffle his intelligence in a certain opaque and
resisting medium, of the indefinable kind that interposes between will and
action in a dream. His rational part was fatally protected by a non-
conducting envelope of sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their
passage, and even cut off the direct and true impress of those objects and
their relations, which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right
in his avowal that objects generally made less impression on him than the
recollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before his eyes,
and had only his intelligence in cases where memories were concerned; and

that of what was said or done in his presence, he felt and penetrated
nothing.[91] In other words, this is to say that his material of thought was
not fact but image. When he plunged into reflection, he did not deal with
the objects of reflection at first hand and in themselves, but only with the
reminiscences of objects, which he had never approached in a spirit of
deliberate and systematic observation, and with those reminiscences,
moreover, suffused and saturated by the impalpable but most potent
essences of a fermenting imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with
the patient energy, the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened
instruments, the systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles
of the genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a
summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a
succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work can be
done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those who
chase her with logical forceps. But one should always try to discover how a
teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful toil, or by the easy
bequest of generous phantasy.
To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the intellectual
interest which must have been an instinct in one who became so
consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition, Rousseau,
during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as well as he
knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the cultivation of the
mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to his own account, it
was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first drew him seriously to
study, and nothing which that illustrious man wrote at this time escaped
him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with the desire of writing with
elegance, and of imitating "the fine and enchanting colour of Voltaire's
style"[92]—an object in which he cannot be held to have in the least
succeeded, though he achieved a superb style of his own. On his return
from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in some small way to cultivate a
taste for letters in him, though he had lost the enthusiasm of his childhood
for reading. Saint Evremond, Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator
happened to be in his room, and he turned over their pages. The Spectator,
he says, pleased him greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de
Warens was what he calls protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever
of the great Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she

could ever persuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years later than this he
began to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first
time to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence
that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and a
body of doctrine.
His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read an
introduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclopædia and tried to
learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to study subjects
apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom long application was so
fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy himself for half an hour
on any one matter, especially if following the ideas of another person.[94]
He began his morning's work, after an hour or two of dispersive chat, with
the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding,
Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found these authors in a
condition of such perpetual contradiction among themselves, that he formed
the chimerical design of reconciling them with one another. This was
tedious, so he took up another method, on which he congratulated himself
to the end of his life. It consisted in simply adopting and following the ideas
of each author, without comparing them either with one another or with
those of other writers, and above all without any criticism of his own. Let
me begin, he said, by collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate
clear, until my head is well enough stocked to enable me to compare and
choose. At the end of some years passed "in never thinking exactly, except
after other people, without reflecting so to speak, and almost without
reasoning," he found himself in a state to think for himself. "In spite of
beginning late to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it had lost
its vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was hardly accused
of being a servile disciple."[96]
To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say that this
mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, and developing
thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the most mischievous, where
it is not the most impotent, fashion in which intellectual exercise can well
be taken. It is exactly the use of the judicial faculty, criticising, comparing,
and defining, which is indispensable in order that a student should not only
effectually assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even know what those ideas
come to and how much they are worth. And so when he works at ideas of

his own, a judicial faculty which has been kept studiously slumbering for
some years, is not likely to revive in full strength without any preliminary
training. Rousseau was a man of singular genius, and he set an
extraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would have been very
different if he had ever mastered any one system of thought, or if he had
ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means. Instead of this, his debt
to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal, and his obligation an
obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the worst way of acquiring an
intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the vital continuity of temper and
method. It is a small thing to accept this or that of Locke's notions upon
education or the origin of ideas, if you do not see the merit of his way of
coming by his notions. In short, Rousseau has distinctions in abundance,
but the distinction of knowing how to think, in the exact sense of that term,
was hardly among them, and neither now nor at any other time did he go
through any of that toilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation to which
the ablest of his contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot,
Condorcet, Hume, all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that
"the sensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more
proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of books."
[97]
Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, and which
wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work, already
engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaire implanted
in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceive at all, that
there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidently took pains with the
form of expression and thought about it, in obedience to some inborn
harmonious predisposition which is the source of all veritable eloquence,
though there is no strong trace now nor for many years to come of any
irresistible inclination for literary composition. We find him, indeed, in
1736 showing consciousness of a slight skill in writing,[98] but he only
thought of it as a possible recommendation for a secretaryship to some great
person. He also appears to have practised verses, not for their own sake, for
he always most justly thought his own verses mediocre, and they are even
worse; but on the ground that verse-making is a rather good exercise for
breaking one's self to elegant inversions, and learning a greater ease in
prose.[99] At the age of one and twenty he composed a comedy, long

afterwards damned as Narcisse. Such prelusions, however, were of small
importance compared with the fact of his being surrounded by a moral
atmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It is not in the study of
Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of constant mood and old habit
that such a style as Rousseau's has its growth.
It was the custom to return to Chambéri for the winter, and the day of their
departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and tearful for
Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the trees, the flowers;
he had to be torn away from it as from a loved companion. At the first
melting of the winter snows they left their dungeon in Chambéri, and they
never missed the earliest song of the nightingale. Many a joyful day of
summer peace remained vivid in Rousseau's memory, and made a mixed
heaven and hell for him long years after in the stifling dingy Paris street,
and the raw and cheerless air of a Derbyshire winter.[100] "We started early
in the morning," he says, describing one of these simple excursions on the
day of St. Lewis, who was the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de
Warens, "together and alone; I proposed that we should go and ramble
about the side of the valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet
visited. We sent our provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day.
We went from hill to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often
in the shade, resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for whole
hours; chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offering
unheard prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the bliss of
this day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, and the little
streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves, the air was pure,
the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity reigned in our own
hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage, and we shared it with
his family. These Savoyards are such good souls! After dinner we sought
shade under some tall trees, where, while I collected dry sticks for making
our coffee, Maman amused herself by botanising among the bushes, and the
expedition ended in transports of tenderness and effusion."[101] This is one
of such days as the soul turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all
has seized it, and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of
irrecoverable things.
He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de Warens with an inalterable
fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her with all the

dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to him something
dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell was this. He was
attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the disorder of the happy.
One symptom of his disease was the conviction derived from the rash
perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from a polypus in the
heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if he did not spend Madame
de Warens' money, he was only leaving it for adventurers and knaves, he
proceeded to Montpellier to consult the physicians, and took the money for
his expenses out of his benefactress's store, which was always slender
because it was always open to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an
intrigue with a travelling companion, whom critics have compared to the
fair Philina of Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being
unable to discover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery
was dull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the
weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated
whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to
Chambéri. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the
iron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan
virtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps learnt
a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom he describes as
tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled. Another triple alliance
seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom his travelling diversions
had made a Pharisee for the hour. He protested, but Madame de Warens was
a woman of principle, and declined to let Rousseau, who had profited by the
doctrine of indifference, now set up in his own favour the contrary doctrine
of a narrow and churlish partiality. So a short, delicious, and never-
forgotten episode came to an end: this pair who had known so much
happiness together were happy together no more, and the air became
peopled for Rousseau with wan spectres of dead joys and fast gathering
cares.
The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books of the
Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted more than
once. The inversion of order is less serious than the contradictions between
the dates of the Confessions and the more authentic and unmistakable dates
of his letters. For instance, he describes a visit to Geneva as having been
made shortly before Lautrec's temporary pacification of the civic troubles of

that town; and that event took place in the spring of 1738. This would throw
the Montpellier journey, which he says came after the visit to Geneva, into
1738, but the letters to Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier
are dated in the autumn and winter of 1737.[102] Minor verifications attest
the exactitude of the dates of the letters,[103] and we may therefore
conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his place taken and lost
his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part of 1738. In the tenth of
the Rêveries he speaks of having passed "a space of four or five years" in
the bliss of Les Charmettes, and it is true that his connection with it in one
way and another lasted from the middle of 1736 until about the middle of
1741. But as he left for Montpellier in the autumn of 1737, and found the
obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738, the pure and characteristic felicity
of Les Charmettes perhaps only lasted about a year or a year and a half. But
a year may set a deep mark on a man, and give him imperishable taste of
many things bitter and sweet.

FOOTNOTES:
[38] Conf., iii. 177.
[39] Lamartine in Raphael defies "a reasonable man to recompose with any
reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of the
contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of these
elements excludes the other." It is worth while for any who care for this
kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise de
Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of the
seventeenth century.
[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de
Bernex, printed in Mélanges, pp. 139-144.
[41] De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the sexes
began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of religion. In
the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the doctrine that it
is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the gratification of this appetite
in a man as to decline to give food and drink to the starving. Picot's Hist. de
Genève, vol. ii.

[42] Conf., v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.
[43] Conf., v. 345.
[44] Conf., ii. 83.
[45] Ib. ii. 82.
[46] Ib. iii. 179. See also 200.
[47] Conf., iii. 177, 178.
[48] Conf., iii. 183.
[49] M. d'Aubonne.
[50] Conf., iii 192.
[51] M. Gatier.
[52] M. Gaime.
[53] Conf., iii. 204.
[54] Ib. iii. 209, 210.
[55] Conf., iii. 217-222.
[56] Conf., iv. 227.
[57] Ib. iii. 224.
[58] One Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards (1755) in
Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was a crapulent
debauchee. Ib. viii. 221.
[59] Mdlles. de Graffenried and Galley. Conf., iv. 231.
[60] Ib. iv. 254-256.
[61] Conf., iv. 253.
[62] While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a room
which had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau (b. 1670

—d. 1741), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on counting the first
of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau, Pierre [b. 1725—d.
1785], who wrote plays and did other work now well forgotten. There are
some lines imperfectly commemorative of the trio—
Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme,
Connus de Paris jusqu'à Rome,
Sont différens; voici par où;
Rousseau de Paris fut grand homme;
Rousseau de Genève est un fou;
Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.
Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire, Jan. 30,
1750. Corr., i. 145.
[63] The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the great
Roman structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. Conf., vi. 446.
[64] Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to Chambéri,
after his first visit to Paris [Conf., v. 305], and the only objection to this is
his mention of the incident of the march of the French troops, which could
not have happened until the winter of 1733, as having taken place "some
months" after his arrival. Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes
the return in the spring of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is
this: Returns from Turin towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until
the spring of 1731; passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuchâtel; first visits
Paris in spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732. But a
precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions is impossible; Rousseau
wrote them three and thirty years after our present point [in 1766 at
Wootton], and never claimed to be exact in minuteness of date. Fortunately
such matters in the present case are absolutely devoid of importance.
[65] Conf., iv. 279, 280.
[66] Conf., iv. 290, 291,
[67] Conf., iv. 281-283.
[68] Conf., v. 325.

[69] Conf., v. 360-364. Corr., i. 21-24.
[70] Conf., v. 349, 350.
[71] Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to the return
of the French troops at the peace [Ib. v. 365] would place it in 1735.
[72] Ib. v. 356
[73] Ib.
[74] Conf., v. 315, 316.
[75] Ib. iv. 276. Nouv. Hél., II. xiv. 381, etc.
[76] He refers to the ill-health of his youth, Conf., vii. 32, and describes an
ominous head seizure while at Chambéri, Ib. vi. 396.
[77] Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the fifth
book. The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used to be, and
has gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant, including his poor
clavecin and his watch. In an outside wall, Hérault de Sechelles, when
Commissioner from the Convention in the department of Mont Blanc,
inserted a little white stone with two most lapidary stanzas inscribed upon
it, about génie, solitude, fierté, gloire, vérité, envie, and the like.
[78] Rêveries, x. 336 (1778).
[79] Conf., vi. 393.
[80] Conf., vi. 412.
[81] Mém, de Mdme. d'Epinay, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition: Charpentier.
1865.)
[82] Conf., vi. 399.
[83] Ib. vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's Life, p.
126.
[84] Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. Oeuvres (Ed. 1818), xii. 70, etc.

[85] Conf., iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of the Valais, in
the Nouv. Hél., Pt. I. Let. xxiii.
[86] George Sand in Mademoiselle la Quintinie (p. 27), a book containing
some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy landscape.
[87] Conf., iv. 298.
[88] Conf., vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383, 384. Also vii.
53.
[89] Conf., v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay, ii.
151.
[90] Ib. iii. 192, 193.
[91] Conf., iv. 301; iii. 195.
[92] Conf., v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to the correspondence
between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instances how little we can
trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, though their substantial veracity
is confirmed by all the collateral evidence that we have.
[93] Ib. iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de Warens,
see also Ib. vii. 46.
[94] Conf., vi. 409.
[95] Ib. vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking "et cetera."
[96] Conf., vi. 414
[97] Conf., iv. 295. See also v. 346.
[98] Corr., 1736, pp. 26, 27.
[99] Conf., iv. 271, where he says further that he never found enough
attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it.
[100] The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in
Derbyshire, in the winter of 1766-1767.
[101] Conf., vi. 422.

[102] Corr., i. 43, 46, 62, etc.
[103] Musset-Pathay, i. 23, n.

CHAPTER IV.
THERESA LE VASSEUR.

Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delight perish,
are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, or even to
perceive that life has gone out of it. The sight of simple hearts trying to
coax back a little warm breath of former days into a present that is stiff and
cold with indifference, is touching enough. But there is a certain grossness
around the circumstances in which Rousseau now and too often found
himself, that makes us watch his embarrassment with some composure. One
cannot easily think of him as a simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much
relief as he, when he resolves after making all due efforts to thrust out the
intruder and bring Madame de Warens over from theories which had
become too practical to be interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a
tutorship at Lyons. His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the
philosophic abbé of the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable
Condillac (1714-80).
The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has ever
been written, was not successful in the practical and far more arduous side
of that master art.[104] We have seen how little training he had ever given
himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and self-control, and we
know this to be the indispensable quality in all who have to shape young
minds for a humane life. So long as all went well, he was an angel, but
when things went wrong, he is willing to confess that he was a devil. When
his two pupils could not understand him, he became frantic; when they
showed wilfulness or any other part of the disagreeable materials out of
which, along with the rest, human excellence has to be ingeniously and
painfully manufactured, he was ready to kill them. This, as he justly admits,
was not the way to render them either well learned or sage. The moral
education of the teacher himself was hardly complete, for he describes how
he used to steal his employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he
enjoyed in the secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand
and some dear romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of

this kind more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These
are surely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng of
worthier memories.
It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the deadly
drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former days. "What
rendered my present condition insupportable was the recollection of my
beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my fountain, my orchard, and
above all of her for whom I felt myself born and who gave life to it all. As I
thought of her, of our pleasures, our guileless days, I was seized by a
tightness in my heart, a stopping of my breath, which robbed me of all
spirit."[105] For years to come this was a kind of far-off accompaniment,
thrumming melodiously in his ears under all the discords of a miserable life.
He made another effort to quicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his
usual promptitude in escaping from the irksome, after a residence of
something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740—spring of 1741), he made his
way back to his old haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens
persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a
few months, his desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he
should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation
which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for
the second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had
become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]
It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him. His plan of musical
notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no member
of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb, inarticulate,
and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which his critics by the
free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and objections which
he perceived that they did not at all understand. His experience on this
occasion suggested to him the most just reflection, how even without
breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any one thing is
preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible enlightenment
conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without study of the special
matter in question. It astonished him that all these learned men, who knew
so many things, could yet be so ignorant that a man should only pretend to
be a judge in his own craft.[107]

His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered
himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. He had a
few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future. He was
presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering gallantry
habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of them, declaring his
passion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of one, and the wife of
another, of the richest men in France, and the attentions of a man whose
acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by inviting him to dine in the
servants' hall, were not pleasing to her.[108] She forgave the impertinence
eventually, and her stepson, M. Francueil, was Rousseau's patron for some
years.[109] On the whole, however, in spite of his own account of his social
ineptitude, there cannot have been anything so repulsive in his manners as
this account would lead us to think. There is no grave anachronism in
introducing here the impression which he made on two fine ladies not many
years after this. "He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he is
without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usages of
society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely intelligent. He has a brown
complexion, while eyes that overflow with fire give animation to his
expression. When he has spoken and you look at him, he appears comely;
but when you try to recall him, his image is always extremely plain. They
say that he has bad health, and endures agony which from some motive of
vanity he most carefully conceals. It is this, I fancy, which gives him from
time to time an air of sullenness."[110] The other lady, who saw him at the
same time, speaks of "the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job for
you, but with wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his history is as
queer as his person, and that is saying a good deal.... Madame Maupeou and
I tried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face,' said she (for it is certain he
is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays a great part in his
romance.' 'No,' said I, 'his nose tells me that it is vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis both
one and the other.'"[111]
One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post of
secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743 our
much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment in the
famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of which there are
not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rank foremost in the
short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seen not to have been

decisive at all, but mere interruptions conducting nowhither. In truth the
critical moments with us are mostly as points in slumber. Even if the
ancient oracles of the gods were to regain their speech once more on the
earth, men would usually go to consult them on days when the answer
would have least significance, and could guide them least far. That one of
the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as it happened one of the men of
most extraordinary genius also, should have got a footing in the train of the
ambassador of a great government, would naturally seem to him and others
as chance's one critical stroke in his life. In reality it was nothing. The
Count of Montaigu, his master, was one of the worst characters with whom
Rousseau could for his own profit have been brought into contact. In his
professional quality he was not far from imbecile. The folly and weakness
of the government at Versailles during the reign of Lewis XV., and its
indifference to competence in every department except perhaps partially in
the fisc, was fairly illustrated in its absurd representative at Venice. The
secretary, whose renown has preserved his master's name, has recorded
more amply than enough the grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is
for once eager to assert his own efficiency, and declares that he rendered
many important services for which he was repaid with ingratitude and
persecution.[112] One would be glad to know what the Count of Montaigu's
version of matters was, for in truth Rousseau's conduct in previous posts
makes us wonder how it was that he who had hitherto always been
unfaithful over few things, suddenly touched perfection when he became
lord over many.
There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid quality, of
which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing among
men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking trait. For
instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three shoes are
equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair which is more
worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his shoes in threes.
[113] It was natural enough that such a master and such a secretary should
quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringing quality which we have
noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau's hungry youthful time, had
been hardened out of him by circumstance or the strengthening of inborn
fibre. He would now neither dine in a servants' hall because a fine lady
forgot what was due to a musician, nor share his fees with a great

ambassador who forgot what was due to himself. These sordid disputes are
of no interest now to anybody, and we need only say that after a period of
eighteen months passed in uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his
count in extreme dudgeon, and the diplomatic career which he had
promised to himself came to the same close as various other careers had
already done.
He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation at
the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and laying
memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He assures us that it
was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left in his soul the
germ of exasperation against preposterous civil institutions, "in which the
true common weal and real justice are always sacrificed to some seeming
order or other, which is in fact destructive of all order, and only adds the
sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity
of the strong."[114]
One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the
memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with
most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to his
new post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the felucca,
or passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may notice in
passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of the fact, nor
does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left the least mark in any
line of his writings. He always disliked it, and thought of it with
melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the want of space and air
in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and preferred to go alone to the
lazaretto, though it had neither window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed,
nor even a truss of straw to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the
whole barrack to himself. "I manufactured," he says, "a good bed out of my
coats and shirts, sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out
of my old cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and
a table of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, and arranged
some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I made myself so
comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows, I was nearly
as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my lodgings in Paris. My
meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers, with bayonets at their
musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my dining-room, the landing

did for table and the lower step for a seat, and when my dinner was served,
they rang a little bell as they withdrew, to warn me to seat myself at table.
Between my meals, when I was neither writing nor reading, nor busy with
my furnishing, I went for a walk in the Protestant graveyard, or mounted
into a lantern which looked out on to the port, and whence I could see the
ships sailing in and out. I passed a fortnight in this way, and I could have
spent the whole three weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's
weariness."[115]
These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but
his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable
periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain gaiety
in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that an earlier
century would have counted unholy.[116] He rarely sought pleasure in those
of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had a guilty renown, but
he has left one singular anecdote, showing the degree to which profound
sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's work in a man, and how a
stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one from sin more effectually
than an ethical precept.[117] It is pleasanter to think of him as working at
the formation of that musical taste which ten years afterwards led him to
amaze the Parisians by proving that French melody was a hollow idea born
of national self-delusion. A Venetian experiment, whose evidence in the
special controversy is less weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was
among the facts which persuaded him that Italian is the language of music.
An Armenian who had never heard any music was invited to listen first of
all to a French monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau
observed in the Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the
performance of the French piece. The first notes of the Italian were no
sooner struck, than his eyes and whole expression softened; he was
enchanted, surrendered his whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the
music, and could never again be induced to listen to the performance of any
French air.[118]
More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the defects
of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind to political
speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a book that was to be
called Institutions Politiques.[119] The work, as thus designed and named,

was never written, but the idea of it, after many years of meditation, ripened
first in the Discourse on Inequality, and then in the Social Contract.
If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in his
life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event which
counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by came to
regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but which he
persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven permitted
him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him to bear his
many sore burdens.[120]
He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the Sorbonne,
where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in Paris.[121]
Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who used to sit
at table with her mistress and the guests of the house. The company was
rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abbés, and other people
to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come neither by
nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the conversation in merry
Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her serving-woman gave a
zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved with pity for a maid
defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he advanced to some
warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur took each other for better
for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently effective. This was the
beginning of a union which lasted for the length of a generation and more,
down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical ending.[122] She thought she
saw in him a worthy soul; and he was convinced that he saw in her a
woman of sensibility, simple and free from trick, and neither of the two, he
says, was deceived in respect of the other. Her intellectual quality was
unique. She could never be taught to read with any approach to success. She
could never follow the order of the twelve months of the year, nor master a
single arithmetical figure, nor count a sum of money, nor reckon the price
of a thing. A month's instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the
hours of the day on the dial-plate. The words she used were often the direct
opposites of the words that she meant to use.[123]
The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who have
no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery between
purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is the stake, as

intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by it. When the match
is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance is time wasted. The
crude talk in which the unwise deliver their judgments upon the conditions
of success in the relations between men and women, has flowed with
unprofitable copiousness as to this not very inviting case. People construct
an imaginary Rousseau out of his writings, and then fetter their elevated,
susceptible, sensitive, and humane creation, to the unfortunate woman who
could never be taught that April is the month after March, or that twice four
and a half are nine. Now we have already seen enough of Rousseau to know
for how infinitely little he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small
store he set either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was
touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by moral
fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of analysing a
character, bringing its several elements into the balance, computing the
more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its influence as a whole,
indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or agitation around him like
soft light and warmth and the fostering air. The deepest ignorance, the
dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties of apprehension, were nothing to
him in man or woman, provided he could only be sensible of that
indescribable emanation from voice and eye and movement, that silent
effusion of serenity around spoken words, which nature has given to some
tranquillising spirits, and which would have left him free in an even life of
indolent meditation and unfretted sense. A woman of high, eager,
stimulating kind would have been a more fatal mate for him than the most
stupid woman that ever rivalled the stupidity of man. Stimulation in any
form always meant distress to Rousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy
valleys was not dearer to him than the subtle inhalations of softened and
close enveloping companionship, in which the one needful thing is not
intellectual equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the
thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day. This is not the
highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the point of view
of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned with the
conditions of productive energy. He only sought to live, to be himself, and
he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind of nature was
the best supplement for his own. As he said in an apophthegm with a deep
melancholy lying at the bottom of it,—you never can cite the example of a
thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man himself knows anything

about it.[124] "By the side of people we love," he says very truly,
"sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the heart, and we have little
occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with my Theresa as pleasantly as
with the finest genius in the universe."[125]
Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a
stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of
gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to think
that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate than he
was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two. She was a
person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he. And he
always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the plain people
from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the more
hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners and a
complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the
arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no
deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be, it
is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his partnership—and many
others as well as he are said to have found in this term a limit to the
conditions of the original contract,—Rousseau had perfect and entire
contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends pronounced as mean,
greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding.
Granting that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for
his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau himself,
whose connection with her was from beginning to end entirely voluntary? If
he attached himself deliberately to an unworthy object by a bond which he
was indisputably free to break on any day that he chose, were not the effects
of such a union as much due to his own character which sought, formed,
and perpetuated it, as to the character of Theresa Le Vasseur? Nothing, as he
himself said in a passage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa,
shows the true leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of
attachments which he forms.[127]
It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to charge a
mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this particular way.
Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer persons. He was at
least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was with his countess, or
Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not have been what he was,

nor have played the part that he did play in the eighteenth century, if he had
felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a kitchen wench. The selection was
probably not very deliberate; as it happened, Theresa served as a standing
illustration of two of his most marked traits, a contempt for mere literary
culture, and a yet deeper contempt for social accomplishments and social
position. In time he found out the grievous disadvantages of living in
solitude with a companion who did not know how to think, and whose stock
of ideas was so slight that the only common ground of talk between them
was gossip and quodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace,
refinement, and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a
sombre life so various, went for nothing with him. What his friends missed
in her, he did not seek and would not have valued; and what he found in her,
they were naturally unable to appreciate, for they never were in the mood
for detecting it. "I have not seen much of happy men," he wrote when near
his end, "perhaps nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts,
and of all the objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which has
always given most contentment to myself."[128] This moderate conception
of felicity, which was always so characteristic with him, as an even,
durable, and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accounts for his
prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elation in
their ideal would assuredly have found hostile even to the most modest
contentment.
"The heart of my Theresa," he wrote long after the first tenderness had
changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into indifference on hers,
"was that of an angel; our attachment waxed stronger with our intimacy, and
we felt more and more each day that we were made for one another. If our
pleasures could be described, their simplicity would make you laugh; our
excursions together out of town, in which I would munificently expend
eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our modest suppers at my
window, seated in front of one another on two small chairs placed on a
trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure. Here the window did duty
for a table, we breathed the fresh air, we could see the neighbourhood and
the people passing by, and though on the fourth story, could look down into
the street as we ate. Who shall describe, who shall feel the charms of those
meals, consisting of a coarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of
cheese, and a pint of wine which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious

seasoning there is in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul!
We used sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of
the time."[129]
Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear
the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the
burden on their lives.[130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner of
accepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this
woman present him in a better light than those with any other person
whatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry,
jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually trustful,
affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even occurs to us
that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the morbid perversity
of his relations with the rest of the world. People of a certain kind not
seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for bare love of
singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to feel an eccentric
pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a woman who to everybody
else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with the bulk of his fellows
may contrive to save his self-respect and confirm his conviction that they
are all in the wrong, by preserving attachment to some one to whom general
opinion is hostile; the private argument being that if he is capable of this
degree of virtue and friendship in an unfavourable case, how much more
could he have practised it with others, if they would only have allowed him.
Whether this kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau
could always refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady
kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among the most
odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother
had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes, including that
worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he bore with them all for
years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur until she had poisoned
the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity and lying to render
him contemptible to all his friends.
In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a
change in her affections. "I began to feel," he says, at a date of sixteen or
seventeen years from our present point, "that she was no longer for me what
she had been in our happy years, and I felt it all the more clearly as I was
still the same towards her."[131] This was in 1762, and her estrangement

grew deeper and her indifference more open, until at length, seven years
afterwards, we find that she had proposed a separation from him. What the
exact reasons for this gradual change may have been we do not know, nor
have we any right in ignorance of the whole facts to say that they were not
adequate and just. There are two good traits recorded of the woman's
character. She could never console herself for having let her father be taken
away to end his days miserably in a house of charity.[132] And the
repudiation of her children, against which the glowing egoism of maternity
always rebelled, remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We
may suppose that there was that about household life with Rousseau which
might have bred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was.
Among other things which must have been hard to endure, we know that in
composing his works he was often weeks together without speaking a word
to her.[133] Perhaps again it would not be difficult to produce some
passages in Rousseau's letters and in the Confessions, which show traces of
that subtle contempt for women that lurks undetected in many who would
blush to avow it. Whatever the causes may have been, from indifference she
passed to something like aversion, and in the one place where a word of
complaint is wrung from him, he describes her as rending and piercing his
heart at a moment when his other miseries were at their height. His patience
at any rate was inexhaustible; now old, worn by painful bodily infirmities,
racked by diseased suspicion and the most dreadful and tormenting of the
minor forms of madness, nearly friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet
kept unabated the old tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and
expressed it in words of such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting
strength, as may touch even those whom his books leave unmoved, and
who view his character with deepest distrust. "For the six-and-twenty years,
dearest, that our union has lasted, I have never sought my happiness except
in yours, and have never ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by
what I did lately,[134] that your honour and happiness were one as dear to
me as the other. I see with pain that success does not answer my solicitude,
and that my kindness is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet to me
to show. I know that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with which
you were born will never change in you; but as for those of tenderness and
attachment which were once reciprocal between us, I feel that they now
only exist on my side. Not only, dearest of all friends, have you ceased to
find pleasure in my company, but you have to tax yourself severely even to

remain a few minutes with me out of complaisance. You are at your ease
with all the world but me. I do not speak to you of many other things. We
must take our friends with their faults, and I ought to pass over yours, as
you pass over mine. If you were happy with me I could be content, but I see
clearly that you are not, and this is what makes my heart sore. If I could do
better for your happiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not
possible. I have left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to your
felicity. At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed with
distress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finish my
days in closest union with you. You know my lot,—it is such as one could
not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it. I never had, my
dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it was to pour
out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to you, they were
soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no more. My every
resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only; my soul cannot
exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy except with you. It is
certain that if you fail me and I am forced to live alone, I am as a dead man.
But I should die a thousand times more cruelly still, if we continued to live
together in misunderstanding, and if confidence and friendship were to go
out between us. It would be a hundred times better to cease to see each
other; still to live, and sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice
may be necessary on my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I
shall be content. We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes;
let us not blot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and
purity of those we have passed together."[135] Think ill as we may of
Rousseau's theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct,
yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's
formulæ, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic
retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the great master's
symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity on the heart.
In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair had been stained by crimes
shortly after its beginning. In the estrangement of father and mother in their
late years we may perhaps hear the rustle and spy the pale forms of the
avenging spectres of their lost children.
At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed,
Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical

diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly
pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some
minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau had
set to music—that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaïre owed his
seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money, and he fell
back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of the valet in it, to
Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil, for which he received
the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On one occasion he
returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the arrival of a
remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came to him by the
death of his father.[137] He found the letter, and was opening it with
trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame at his want of
self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece, undressed, slept
better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning, he had forgotten all
about the letter until it caught his eye. He was delighted to find that it
contained his money, but "I can swear," he adds, "that my liveliest delight
was in having conquered myself." An occasion for self-conquest on a more
considerable scale was at hand. In these tight straits, he received grievous
news from the unfortunate Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what
to do; the mother acquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and
the new-born child was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for
foundlings. Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with
the same heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and
reluctance on the part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away,
and with such entire absence of any precaution with a view to their
identification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of the day of
their birth.[138]
People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from the
economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of hospitals for
foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the theologian who
sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human heart and the fall
of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways, one of them
courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good reason to
believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was fully
warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the universe.[139]
Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that civilisation may one

day reach a point when a plea like this shall count for an aggravation rather
than a palliative; when a higher conception of the duties of humanity,
familiarised by the practice of adoption as well as by the spread of both
rational and compassionate considerations as to the blameless little ones,
shall have expelled what is surely as some red and naked beast's emotion of
fatherhood. What may be an excellent reason for repudiating a woman, can
never be a reason for abandoning a child, except with those whom reckless
egoism has made willing to think it a light thing to fling away from us the
moulding of new lives and the ensuring of salutary nurture for growing
souls.
We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the
greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given us,
almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the result of
heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed selfishness of
the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern, where the talk
turned mostly upon topics which men with much self-respect put as far
from them, as men with little self-respect will allow them to do. "I formed
my fashion of thinking from what I perceived to reign among people who
were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I said to myself, Since it is the
usage of the country, as one lives here, one may as well follow it. So I made
up my mind to it cheerfully, and without the least scruple."[140] By and by
he proceeded to cover this nude and intelligible explanation with finer
phrases, about preferring that his children should be trained up as workmen
and peasants rather than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his
supposing that in sending them to the hospital for foundlings he was
enrolling himself a citizen in Plato's Republic.[141] This is hardly more
than the talk of one become famous, who is defending the acts of his
obscurity on the high principles which fame requires. People do not turn
citizens of Plato's Republic "cheerfully and without the least scruple," and if
a man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to
the hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to
drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was given to
his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious mania.
Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself that his
determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a thousand
times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being spoiled by their

mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and finally being taught
to hate and betray their father by his plotting enemies.[142] This is
obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives which led to the
abandonment of the children and justified the act to himself at the time,
with the circumstances that afterwards reconciled him to what he had done;
for now he neither had any enemies plotting against him, nor did he
suppose that he had. As for his wife's family, he showed himself quite
capable, when the time came, of dealing resolutely and shortly with their
importunities in his own case, and he might therefore well have trusted his
power to deal with them in the case of his children. He was more right
when in 1770, in his important letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted that
example, necessity, the honour of her who was dear to him, all united to
make him entrust his children to the establishment provided for that
purpose, and kept him from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties.
"In this, far from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me
that I did what I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than
my heart, which bitterly belies it."[143] This coincides with the first
undisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been already
quoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words which sounds
through nearly all his other references to this great stain upon his life,
excepting one, and this is the only further document with which we need
concern ourselves. In that,[144] which was written while the unholy work
was actually being done, he states very distinctly that the motives were
those which are more or less closely connected with most unholy works,
motives of money—the great instrument and measure of our personal
convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control in placing personal
convenience behind duty to other people. "If my misery and my misfortunes
rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so dear, that is a calamity to pity me
for, rather than a crime to reproach me with. I owe them subsistence, and I
procured a better or at least a surer subsistence for them than I could myself
have provided; this condition is above all others." Next comes the
consideration of their mother, whose honour must be kept. "You know my
situation; I gained my bread from day to day painfully enough; how then
should I feed a family as well? And if I were compelled to fall back on the
profession of author, how would domestic cares and the confusion of
children leave me peace of mind enough in my garret to earn a living?
Writings which hunger dictates are hardly of any use, and such a resource is

speedily exhausted. Then I should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to
tricks ... in short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for which I am
penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, and their
mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for them to be
orphans than to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why have I not married,
you will ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It was not fitting for me
to contract an eternal engagement; and it will never be proved to me that
my duty binds me to it. What is certain is that I have never done it, and that
I never meant to do it. But we ought not to have children when we cannot
support them. Pardon me, madame; nature means us to have offspring, since
the earth produces sustenance enough for all; but it is the rich, it is your
class, which robs mine of the bread of my children.... I know that
foundlings are not delicately nurtured; so much the better for them, they
become more robust. They have nothing superfluous given to them, but
they have everything that is necessary. They do not make gentlemen of
them, but peasants or artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or
ride on horseback, but they would have strong unwearied legs. I would
neither make authors of them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in
handling the pen, but the plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for
leading a healthy, laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the delight
of seeing them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace.
Alas, as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and I
deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that
Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as
powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter, with its
talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths of the children
of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic sentences by which the
writer in after times gained so famous a name. It is at any rate clear from
this that the real motive of the abandonment of the children was wholly
material. He could not afford to maintain them, and he did not wish to have
his comfort disturbed by their presence.
There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and
unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to
remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the
structure of the family was undermined alike in practice and speculation,
were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than they, did not erect

his own criminality into a social theory, but was tolerably soon overtaken
by a remorse which drove him both to confess his misdeed, and to admit
that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity of the offence owes half the
blackness with which it has always been invested by wholesome opinion, to
the fact that the offender was by and by the author of the most powerful
book by which parental duty has been commended in its full loveliness and
nobility. And at any rate, let Rousseau be a little free from excessive
reproach from all clergymen, sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst
to uphold the common and rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless
propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the despatch of children to
public institutions, still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately
falls in burdens on others than the offenders, and which turns the family
into a scene of squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental
influence that is far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it
in public institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without
regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if
afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on the
one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of a poverty-stricken
home on the other, we should not hesitate to give people who act as
Rousseau acted, all that credit for self-denial and high moral courage which
he so audaciously claimed for himself. It really seems to be no more
criminal to produce children with the deliberate intention of abandoning
them to public charity, as Rousseau did, than it is to produce them in
deliberate reliance on the besotted maxim that he who sends mouths will
send meat, or any other of the spurious saws which make Providence do
duty for self-control, and add to the gratification of physical appetite the
grotesque luxury of religious unction.
In 1761 the Maréchale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau's
children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of
identification, and the author of Emitius and his sons and daughters lived
together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau with singular
honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness of the charitable
endeavours to restore them to him. "The success of your search," he wrote,
"could not give me pure and undisturbed pleasure; it is too late, too late....
In my present condition this search interested me more for another person
[Theresa] than myself; and considering the too easily yielding character of

the person in question, it is possible that what she had found already formed
for good or for evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may
doubt, in spite of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether
Rousseau was of a nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the
bright blank eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns
and changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all
things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and
immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa five-and-
twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147] but we hardly
have to understand that any ceremony took place which anybody but
himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. What happened appears
to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two guests, one of them
the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his wife. "This good and
seemly engagement was contracted," he says, "in all the simplicity but also
in all the truth of nature, in the presence of two men of worth and honour....
During the short and simple act, I saw the honest pair melted in tears."[148]
He had at this time whimsically assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote
to a friend that of course he had married in this name, for he adds, with the
characteristic insertion of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not
names that are married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy
ceremony names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have
sufficed, since I recognise no other. If it were a question of property to be
assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that is not
our case."[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage according to the
truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites as more
sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words about property
that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He and Theresa were on
profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,[150] and Rousseau is not
the only person by many thousands who has deceived himself into thinking
that some form of words between man and woman must magically
transform the substance of their characters and lives, and conjure up new
relations of peace and steadfastness.

We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to
return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after stable-
boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but sat
contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the window of
their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with "confidence, intimacy,
gentleness of soul," and that general comfort of sensation which, as we
know to our cost, is by no means an invariable condition either of duty done
externally or of spiritual growth within. It is perhaps hard for us to feel that
we are in the presence of a great religious reactionist; there is so little sign
of the higher graces of the soul, there are so many signs of the lowering
clogs of the flesh. But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and
expands like the plants of the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one
of the chief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to
be able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most important
of all realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates if we can never
forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's if we can only
think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we can simply
remember that he denied his master. Our vision is only blindness, if we can
never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of deep mystic aspiration
behind the vile outer life of a man, or to believe that this coarse Rousseau,
scantily supping with his coarse mate, might yet have many glimpses of the
great wide horizons that are haunted by figures rather divine than human.

FOOTNOTES:
[104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost sagacious;
witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M. de Mably, and
printed in the volume of his Works entitled Mélanges, pp. 106-136. In the
matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that Rousseau rashly or otherwise
condemns the practice of writing it, as a vexatious superfluity (p. 132).
[105] Conf., vi. 471.
[106] Ib., vi. 472-475; vii. 8.
[107] Conf., vii. 18, 19.

[108] Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord Chesterfield's
Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a proper person with
whom his son might in a regular and business-like manner open the
elevating game of gallant intrigue.
[109] M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the editors
of the Encyclopædia by procuring information for them as to salt-works
(D'Alembert's Discours Préliminaire). His son M. Dupin de Francueil, it
may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain between two
famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau's death, he married
(in the chapel of the French embassy in London) Aurora de Saxe, a natural
daughter of the marshal, himself the natural son of August the Strong, King
of Poland. From this union was born Maurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin
was the father of Madame George Sand. M. Francueil died in 1787.
[110] Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.
[111] Ib. vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.
[112] Conf., vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau's
handwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate at
Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spread the
report that Rousseau had been the ambassador's private attendant. For
Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see Corr., v. 75 (Jan. 5, 1767); also iv. 150.
[113] Bernardin de St. Pierre, Oeuv., xii. 55 seq.
[114] Conf., vii. 92.
[115] Conf., vii. 38, 39.
[116] Lettres de la Montagne, iii. 266.
[117] Conf., vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's opinion
of one of these stories, see Lockhart's Life of Scott, vi. 132. (Ed. 1837.)
[118] Lettre sur la Musique Française (1753), p. 186.
[119] Conf., ix. 232.
[120] Ib. vii. 97.

[121] Hôtel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running between
the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still squalid hostelry is
now visible as Hôtel J.J. Rousseau. There is some doubt whether he first
saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk. vii. of the Confessions is
for the latter date (see also Corr., ii. 207), but in the well-known letter to her
in 1769 (Ib. vi. 79), he speaks of the twenty-six years of their union. Their
so-called marriage took place in 1768, and writing in that year he speaks of
the five-and-twenty years of their attachment (Ib. v. 323), and in the
Confessions (ix. 249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also in the
letter to Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving 1745 in one
place (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with less than his usual care
paid no attention to the discrepancy.
[122] Conf., vii. 97-100.
[123] Conf., vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be
interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: "Mesiceuras ancor mien re
mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous la goies e
latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e rus pour vous,
e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous paleu ces paes mes le
vre ... ge sui avestous lamities e la reu conec caceu posible e la tacheman
mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bon amiess theress le vasseur." Of
which dark words this is the interpretation:—"Mais il sera encore mieux
remis quand je sera auprès de vous, et de vous témoigner toute la joie et la
tendresse de mon coeur que vous connaissez que j'ai toujours eue pour
vous, et qui ne finira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur qui vous parle, c'est
pas mes lèvres.... Je suis avec toute l'amitié et la reconnaissance possibles,
et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre humble et bonne amie, Thérèse
Le Vasseur." (Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis, ii. 450.) Certainly it was
not learning and arts which hindered Theresa's manners from being pure.
[124] Oeuv. et Corr. Inéd., 365.
[125] Conf., vii. 102. See also Corr., v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). On the other
hand, Conf., ix. 249.
[126] M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on Rousseau,
speaks of him as "a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance with a tavern
servant" (Rev. des Deux Mondes, Nov. 1852, p. 759); but surely Rousseau

had unclassed himself long before, in the houses of Madame Vercellis,
Count Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by his repudiation, from
the time when he ran away from Geneva, of nearly every bourgeois virtue
and bourgeois prejudice.
[127] Conf., vii. 11. Also footnote.
[128] Rêveries, ix. 309.
[129] Conf., viii. 142, 143.
[130] The other day I came for the first time upon the following in the
sayings of Madame de Lambert:—"Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautes qui
nous perdent; c'est la manière de se conduire aprés les avoir faites." [1877.]
[131] Conf., xii. 187, 188.
[132] Ib., viii. 221.
[133] Bernardin de St. Pierre, Oeuv., xii. 103. See Conf., xii 188, and Corr.,
v. 324.
[134] Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called their marriage,
and which had taken place in 1768.
[135] Corr., vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769.
[136] Composed in 1745. The Fêtes de Ramire was represented at Versailles
at the very end of this year.
[137] Some time in 1746-7. Conf., vii. 113, 114.
[138] Probably in the winter of 1746-7. Corr., ii. 207. Conf., vii. 120-124.
Ib., viii. 148. Corr., ii. 208. June 12, 1761, to the Maréchale de
Luxembourg.
[139] George Sand,—in an eloquent piece entitled À Propos des Charmettes
(Revue des Deux Mondes, November 15, 1863), in which she expresses her
own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseau declares that he had
never hitherto had the least reason to suspect Theresa's fidelity. Corr., ii.
209

[140] Conf., vii. 123.
[141] Ib., viii. 145-151.
[142] Rêveries, ix. 313. The same reason is given, Conf., ix. 252; also in
Letter to Madame B., January 17, 1770 (Corr., vi. 117).
[143] Corr., vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770.
[144] Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. Corr., i. 151.
[145] Corr., i. 151-155
[146] August 10, 1761. Corr., ii. 220. The Maréchale de Luxembourg's note
on the subject, to which this is a reply, is given in Rousseau, ses Amis et ses
Ennemis, i. 444.
[147] Conf., x. 249. See above, p. 106, n.
[148] To Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. Corr., v. 324. See also D'Escherny, quoted
in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170.
[149] To Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. Corr., v. 360.
[150] To Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. Corr., v. 116-119.

CHAPTER V.
THE DISCOURSES.

The busy establishment of local academies in the provincial centres of
France only preceded the outbreak of the revolution by ten or a dozen years;
but one or two of the provincial cities, such as Bordeaux, Rouen, Dijon, had
possessed academies in imitation of the greater body of Paris for a much
longer time. Their activity covered a very varied ground, from the mere
commonplaces of literature to the most practical details of material
production. If they now and then relapsed into inquiries about the laws of
Crete, they more often discussed positive and scientific theses, and rather
resembled our chambers of agriculture than bodies of more learned
pretension. The academy of Dijon was one of the earliest of these excellent
institutions, and on the whole the list of its theses shows it to have been
among the most sensible in respect of the subjects which it found worth
thinking about. Its members, however, could not entirely resist the
intellectual atmosphere of the time. In 1742 they invited discussion of the
point, whether the natural law can conduct society to perfection without the
aid of political laws.[151] In 1749 they proposed this question as a theme
for their prize essay: Has the restoration of the sciences contributed to
purify or to corrupt manners? Rousseau was one of fourteen competitors,
and in 1750 his discussion of the academic theme received the prize.[152]
This was his first entry on the field of literature and speculation. Three
years afterwards the same academy propounded another question: What is
the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by the natural law?
Rousseau again competed, and though his essay neither gained the prize,
nor created as lively an agitation as its predecessor had done, yet we may
justly regard the second as a more powerful supplement to the first.
It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which pieces that
have moved a world were originally composed, and Rousseau's account of
the generation of his thoughts as to the influence of enlightenment on
morality, is remarkable enough to be worth transcribing. He was walking
along the road from Paris to Vincennes one hot summer afternoon on a visit

to Diderot, then in prison for his Letter on the Blind (1749), when he came
across in a newspaper the announcement of the theme propounded by the
Dijon academy. "If ever anything resembled a sudden inspiration, it was the
movement which began in me as I read this. All at once I felt myself
dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of vivid ideas thronged into
my mind with a force and confusion that threw me into unspeakable
agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddiness like that of intoxication. A
violent palpitation oppressed me; unable to walk for difficulty of breathing,
I sank under one of the trees of the avenue, and passed half an hour there in
such a condition of excitement, that when I arose I saw that the front of my
waistcoat was all wet with my tears, though I was wholly unconscious of
shedding them. Ah, if I could ever have written the quarter of what I saw
and felt under that tree, with what clearness should I have brought out all
the contradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I should have
demonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institutions only is he
made bad."[153] Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize, and to
give full flight to the ideas which had come to him in this singular way.
[154]
People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea that
perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentiment is
surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the academicians of
Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if you are asked
whether a given result has or has not followed from certain circumstances,
the mere form of the question suggests No quite as readily as Yes. The
originality lay not in the central contention, but in the fervour, sincerity, and
conviction of a most unacademic sort with which it was presented and
enforced. There is less originality in denouncing your generation as wicked
and adulterous than there is in believing it to be so, and in persuading the
generation itself both that you believe it and that you have good reasons to
give. We have not to suppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency
celestial or infernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau.
Rousseau had been thinking of politics ever since the working of the
government of Venice had first drawn his mind to the subject. What is the
government, he had kept asking himself, which is most proper to form a
sage and virtuous nation? What government by its nature keeps closest to
the law? What is this law? And whence?[155] This chain of problems had

led him to what he calls the historic study of morality, though we may doubt
whether history was so much his teacher as the rather meagrely nourished
handmaid of his imagination. Here was the irregular preparation, the hidden
process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itself with an
exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for an inward
revolution with no precursive sign.
Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a
life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but which in
that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the Social
Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if you
consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper breadth, is
marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to it is given to
us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the wide-spreading oak. Such a
transport does not come to us of cool and rational western temperament, but
more often to the oriental after lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in
violent reactions on the road to Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques
detected oriental quality in his own nature,[156] and so far as the union of
ardour with mysticism, of intense passion with vague dream, is to be
defined as oriental, he assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his
mind by the Dijon problem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into
the chaos in his head, revealed to him another universe. From the active
effervescence which thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which
people saw glittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium,
but of which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which would
probably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced to
wish to continue writing after the access was over. Inflamed by the
contemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to his
mind. His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future happiness of
the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it, dictated to him a
language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a moment, he
astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw only
eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those who dwell in
the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of their own."[157]
This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and this
is the only point of view from which we are secure against the vulgarity of
counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious charlatan. He was

possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an enthusiastic vision, an
intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage and prodigious love, an
insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt against the stone and iron of a
reality which he was bent on melting in a heavenly blaze of splendid
aspiration and irresistibly persuasive expression. The last word of this great
expansion was Emilius, its first and more imperfectly articulated was the
earlier of the two Discourses.
Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of the ruin of
his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy moment, has
been constantly treated as the word of affectation and disguised pride. Yet,
vain as he was, it may well have represented his sincere feeling in those
better moods when mental suffering was strong enough to silence vanity.
His visions mastered him for these thirteen years, grande mortalis oevi
spatium. They threw him on to that turbid sea of literature for which he had
so keen an aversion, and from which, let it be remarked, he fled finally
away, when his confidence in the ease of making men good and happy by
words of monition had left him. It was the torment of his own enthusiasm
which rent that veil of placid living, that in his normal moments he would
fain have interposed between his existence and the tumult of a generation
with which he was profoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first
Discourse was the letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and
the Social Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe.
Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though full of
heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and that of all the
products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and the poorest in
numbers and harmony. "For," as he justly adds, "the art of writing is not
learnt all at once."[158] The modern critic must be content to accept the
same verdict; only a generation so in love as this was with anything that
could tickle its intellectual curiousness, would have found in the first of the
two Discourses that combination of speculative and literary merit which
was imputed to Rousseau on the strength of it, and which at once brought
him into a place among the notables of an age that was full of them.[159]
We ought to take in connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of
the Discourse, which the course of controversy provoked from its author,
and which serve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse,
because in truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even

as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in this
wise:—
Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a too
elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of conduct
announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and most
deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as if they
had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what sort of
person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions, fears, reserves,
and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety, arrogance, calumny, and
scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of refinement. So terrible a set of
effects must have a cause. History shows that the cause here is to be found
in the progress of sciences and arts. Egypt, once so mighty, becomes the
mother of philosophy and the fine arts; straightway behold its conquest by
Cambyses, by Greeks, by Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice
conquered Asia, once before Troy, once in its own homes; then came in
fatal sequence the progress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and the
yoke of the Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised to glory
by husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the eve of her ruin
was the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of arbiter of good taste.
China, where letters carry men to the highest dignities of the state, could not
be preserved by all her literature from the conquering power of the ruder
Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians, Scythians, Germans, remain in
history as types of simplicity, innocence, and virtue. Was not he admittedly
the wisest of the Greeks, who made of his own apology a plea for
ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators, and artists? The chosen
people of God never cultivated the sciences, and when the new law was
established, it was not the learned, but the simple and lowly, fishers and
workmen, to whom Christ entrusted his teaching and its ministry.[160]
This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our
presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which eternal
wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom has
covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not destined to
fatuous research. All the secrets that Nature hides from us are so many evils
against which she would fain shelter us.

Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really
inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere deceits,
because if you look nearly into the results of this science of which we talk
so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the results of induction from
history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of superstition; geometry from the
desire of gain; physics from a futile curiosity; all of them, even morals,
from human pride. Are we for ever to be the dupes of words, and to believe
that these pompous names of science, philosophy, and the rest, stand for
worthy and profitable realities?[161] Be sure that they do not.
How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a
thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks are
we to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, if
we do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it? If
celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result; and we
may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are born to be
the guides of others.[162] But the intelligences of common men are neither
celestial nor Socratic.
Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man;
and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what
insects reproduce themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract one
another in space, what curves have conjugate points, points of inflection or
reflection, what in the planetary revolutions are the relations of areas
traversed in equal times—let us ask those who have attained all this sublime
knowledge, by how much the worse governed, less flourishing, or less
perverse we should have been if they had attained none of it? Now if the
works of our most scientific men and best citizens lead to such small utility,
tell us what we are to think of the crowd of obscure writers and idle men of
letters who devour the public substance in pure loss.
Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury, and
luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from the
teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which nations
preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which make the
independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go to costly
establishments where they learn everything except their duties. They remain
ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others not in use

anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing verses which
they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish truth from error,
they possess the art of rendering them indistinguishable to others by
specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity, temperance, courage, humanity,
have no real meaning to them; and if they hear speak of God, it breeds more
terror than awful fear.
Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequality
introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening of
virtue?[163] People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, but
whether he is clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether it is
well written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are these lessons of
wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? To listen to these
sages, would you not take them for a troop of charlatans, all bawling out in
the market-place, Come to me, it is only I who never cheat you, and always
give good measure? One maintains that there is no body, and that
everything is mere representation; the other that there is no entity but
matter, and no God but the universe: one that moral good and evil are
chimeras; the other that men are wolves and may devour one another with
the easiest conscience in the world. These are the marvellous personages on
whom the esteem of contemporaries is lavished so long as they live, and to
whom immortality is reserved after their death. And we have now invented
the art of making their extravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of
typographic characters the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza
will endure for ever. Surely when they perceive the terrible disorders which
printing has already caused in Europe, sovereigns will take as much trouble
to banish this deadly art from their states as they once took to introduce it.
If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give themselves
up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those who feel conscious of
the strength required for advancing their subjects, who have any right to
attempt to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. We ought to
have no tolerance for those compilers who rashly break open the gate of the
sciences, and introduce into their sanctuary a populace that is unworthy
even to draw near to it. It may be well that there should be philosophers,
provided only and always that the people do not meddle with
philosophising.[164]

In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious,
springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, and
debasing the soul: the other "a reasonable ignorance, which consists in
limiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received; a
modest ignorance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiring indifference
only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, or fails to contribute to
its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance, the treasure of a pure soul
at peace with itself, which finds all its blessedness in inward retreat, in
testifying to itself its own innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a
warped and hollow happiness in the opinion of other people as to its
enlightenment."[165]

Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instance as
that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessive preponderance of
literary instruction in the art of education, are due to Montaigne; and in one
way, the Discourse might be described as binding together a number of that
shrewd man's detached hints by means of a paradoxical generalisation. But
the Rousseau is more important than the Montaigne in it. Another remark to
be made is that its vigorous disparagement of science, of the emptiness of
much that is called science, of the deadly pride of intellect, is an
anticipation in a very precise way of the attitude taken by the various
Christian churches and their representatives now and for long, beginning
with De Maistre, the greatest of the religious reactionaries after Rousseau.
The vilification of the Greeks is strikingly like some vehement passages in
De Maistre's estimate of their share in sophisticating European intellect. At
last Rousseau even began to doubt whether "so chattering a people could
ever have had any solid virtues, even in primitive times."[166] Yet
Rousseau's own thinking about society is deeply marked with opinions
borrowed exactly from these very chatterers. His imagination was
fascinated from the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's social
speculations, to which his debt in a hundred details of his political and
educational schemes is well known. What was more important than any
obligation of detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the
Greeks and partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in

moulding a social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall presently
quote the passage in which he holds up for our envy and imitation the
policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he found existing and
constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation to roof.[167] It is true
that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek literary studies in France
from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and Rousseau seems to have
read Plato only through Ficinus's translation. But his example and its
influence, along with that of Mably and others, warrant the historian in
saying that at no time did Greek ideas more keenly preoccupy opinion than
during this century.[168] Perhaps we may say that Rousseau would never
have proved how little learning and art do for the good of manners, if Plato
had not insisted on poets being driven out of the Republic. The article on
Political Economy, written by him for the Encyclopædia (1755), rings with
the names of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project of public education is
recommended by the example of Cretans, Lacedæmonians, and Persians,
while the propriety of the reservation of a state domain is suggested by
Romulus.
It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is the way
in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists on dragging
people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with a great public
reputation of much too well-established a kind to be subjected to the affront
of analysis. It is true that Rousseau himself contributed nothing directly to
that analytic operation which Socrates likened to midwifery, and he set up
graven images of his own in place of the idols which he destroyed. This,
however, did not wholly efface the distinction, which he shares with all who
have ever tried to lead the minds of men into new tracks, of refusing to
accept the current coins of philosophical speech without test or
measurement. Such a treatment of the great trite words which come so
easily to the tongue and seem to weigh for so much, must always be the
first step towards bringing thought back into the region of real matter, and
confronting phrases, terms, and all the common form of the discussion of an
age, with the actualities which it is the object of sincere discussion to
penetrate.
The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on the
principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men in
modern society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merely

be to draw up a list of the gratulatory commonplaces of which we hear quite
enough in the literature and talk of our day. In this direction, perhaps it
suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly one-sided, admitting none of the
conveniences, none of the alleviations of suffering of all kinds, nothing of
the increase of mental stature, which the pursuit of knowledge has brought
to the race. They may or may not counterbalance the evils that it has
brought, but they are certainly to be put in the balance in any attempt at
philosophic examination of the subject. It contains no serious attempt to tell
us what those alleged evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one,
to abuse of the thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying
it. It omits to take into account the various other circumstances, such as
climate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must
enter equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation has
marked the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of its argument
the entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been in the early
history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and innocent virtue, from
which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree caused an inevitable
degeneration. All evidence and all scientific analogy are now well known to
lead to the contrary doctrine, that the history of civilisation is a history of
progress and not of decline from a primary state. After all, as Voltaire said
to Rousseau in a letter which only showed a superficial appreciation of the
real drift of the argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to
literature are only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have
deluged the earth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace,
who contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched
Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed
Augustus. It was not Marot who produced the St. Bartholomew massacre,
nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the wars of the Fronde. What really
makes, and always will make, this world into a valley of tears, is the
insatiable cupidity and indomitable insolence of men, from Kouli Khan,
who did not know how to read, down to the custom-house clerk, who
knows nothing but how to cast up figures. Letters nourish the soul, they
strengthen its integrity, they furnish a solace to it,"—and so on in the sense,
though without the eloquence, of the famous passage in Cicero's defence of
Archias the poet.[169] All this, however, in our time is in no danger of
being forgotten, and will be present to the mind of every reader. The only
danger is that pointed out by Rousseau himself: "People always think they

have described what the sciences do, when they have in reality only
described what the sciences ought to do."[170]
What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a positive as
well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement and overstated a
way, a truth which the literary and speculative enthusiasm of France in the
eighteenth century, as is always the case with such enthusiasm whenever it
penetrates either a generation or an individual, was sure to make men
dangerously ready to forget.[171] This truth may be put in different terms.
We may describe it as the possibility of eminent civic virtue existing in
people, without either literary taste or science or speculative curiosity. Or
we may express it as the compatibility of a great amount of contentment
and order in a given social state, with a very low degree of knowledge. Or
finally, we may give the truth its most general expression, as the
subordination of all activity to the promotion of social aims. Rousseau's is
an elaborate and roundabout manner of saying that virtue without science is
better than science without virtue; or that the well-being of a country
depends more on the standard of social duty and the willingness of citizens
to conform to it, than on the standard of intellectual culture and the extent
of its diffusion. In other words, we ought to be less concerned about the
speculative or scientific curiousness of our people than about the height of
their notion of civic virtue and their firmness and persistency in realising it.
It is a moralist's way of putting the ancient preacher's monition, that they
are but empty in whom is not the wisdom of God. The importance of stating
this is in our modern era always pressing, because there is a constant
tendency on the part of energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate
their energies on a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to
their own course. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions to
the stock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more
serious, to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest, self-denying,
moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and the continuity of
society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their greater command of
specious expression and their control of the organs of public opinion, they
both assume a kind of supreme place in the social hierarchy, and persuade
the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to take so very egregious an
assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's Discourse recalled the truth as
against this sort of error it was full of wholesomeness.

Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of the
verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large, led him
into a general position with reference to scientific and speculative energy,
which seems to involve a perilous misconception of the conditions of this
energy producing its proper results. It is easy now, as it was easy for
Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an epigrammatical manner by how
much men are better or happier for having found out this or that novelty in
transcendental mathematics, biology, or astronomy; and this is very well as
against the discoverer of small marvels who shall give himself out for the
benefactor of the human race. But both historical experience and
observation of the terms on which the human intelligence works, show us
that we can only make sure of intellectual activity on condition of leaving it
free to work all round, in every department and in every remotest nook of
each department, and that its most fruitful epochs are exactly those when
this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen and minute, and this waste,
if you choose to call the indispensable superfluity of force in a natural
process waste, most copious and unsparing. You will not find your highest
capacity in statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor in art, nor in any
other field where that capacity is most urgently needed for the right service
of life, unless there is a general and vehement spirit of search in the air. If it
incidentally leads to many industrious futilities and much learned refuse,
this is still the sign and the generative element of industry which is not
futile, and of learning which is something more than mere water spilled
upon the ground.
We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a dim,
shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the only normal
state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue has been thrust far
back into a secondary place by the love of knowledge, nor the active
curiosity of the understanding dulled, blunted, and made ashamed by soft,
lazy ideals of life as a life only of the affections. Rousseau now and always
fell into the opposite extreme from that against which his whole work was a
protest. We need not complain very loudly that while remonstrating against
the restless intrepidity of the rationalists of his generation, he passed over
the central truth, namely that the full and ever festal life is found in active
freedom of curiosity and search taking significance, motive, force, from a
warm inner pulse of human love and sympathy. It was not given to

Rousseau to see all this, but it was given to him to see the side of it for
which the most powerful of the men living with him had no eyes, and the
first Discourse was only a moderately successful attempt to bring his vision
before Europe. It was said at the time that he did not believe a word of what
he had written.[172] It is a natural characteristic of an age passionately
occupied with its own set of ideas, to question either the sincerity or the
sanity of anybody who declares its sovereign conceptions to be no better
than foolishness. We cannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the
vehemence of controversy carries him rather further than he quite meant to
go, when he declares that if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would
erect on his frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the
first European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first
native who should dare to pass out of it.[173] And there are many other
extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious enough, as
represented in the emblematic vignette with which the essay was printed—
the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who warns a satyr that
it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time and being fain to embrace it,
is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced by the glitter of literature,
insist on delivering themselves up to its study.[174] Rousseau's whole
doctrine hangs compactly together, and we may see the signs of its growth
after leaving his hands in the crude formula of the first Discourse, if we
proceed to the more audacious paradox of the second.

II.

The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
description of the natural state of man, which occupies considerably more
than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein which is only
too familiar to the student of the literature of the time, picturing each habit
and thought, and each step to new habits and thoughts, with the minuteness,
the fulness, the precision, of one who narrates circumstances of which he
has all his life been the close eye-witness. The natural man reveals to us
every motive, every process internal and external, every slightest
circumstance of his daily life, and each element that gradually transformed
him into the non-natural man. One who had watched bees or beetles for
years could not give us a more full or confident account of their doings,
their hourly goings in and out, than it was the fashion in the eighteenth
century to give of the walk and conversation of the primeval ancestor. The
conditions of primitive man were discussed by very incompetent ladies and
gentlemen at convivial supper parties, and settled with complete assurance.
[175]
Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because all his world
was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases and formulas with
reference to it which other people used. He required no more evidence than
they did, as to the reality of the existence of the supposed set of conditions
to which they gave the almost sacramental name of state of nature. He
never thought of asking, any more than anybody else did in the middle of
the eighteenth century, what sort of proof, how strong, how direct, was to be
had, that primeval man had such and such habits, and changed them in such
a way and direction, and for such reasons. Physical science had reached a
stage by this time when its followers were careful to ask questions about
evidence, correct description, verification. But the idea of accurate method
had to be made very familiar to men by the successes of physical science in
the search after truths of one kind, before the indispensableness of applying
it in the search after truths of all kinds had extended to the science of the
constitution and succession of social states. In this respect Rousseau was
not guiltier than the bulk of his contemporaries. Voltaire's piercing common
sense, Hume's deep-set sagacity, Montesquieu's caution, prevented them

from launching very far on to this metaphysical sea of nature and natural
laws and states, but none of them asked those critical questions in relation
to such matters which occur so promptly in the present day to persons far
inferior to them in intellectual strength. Rousseau took the notion of the
state of nature because he found it to his hand; he fitted to it his own
characteristic aspirations, expanding and vivifying a philosophic conception
with all the heat of humane passion; and thus, although, at the end of the
process when he had done with it, the state of nature came out blooming as
the rose, it was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of his time,
artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange ideal under a
familiar name.
Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make some
mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau
in an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly.[176] In 1753
Morelly published a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the
corruption of manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing
out how this corruption is to be amended by return to the empire of nature
and truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be the
central doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that it is
government and institutions which make men what they are. But he was
stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole theory, in a
piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness is admirably
different from Rousseau's rhetoric.[177] It lacked the sovereign quality of
persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly accepts the doctrine that
men are formed by the laws, but insists that moralists and statesmen have
always led us wrong by legislating and prescribing conduct on the false
theory that man is bad, whereas he is in truth a creature endowed with
natural probity. Then he strikes to the root of society with a directness that
Rousseau could not imitate, by the position that "these laws by establishing
a monstrous division of the products of nature, and even of their very
elements—by dividing what ought to have remained entire, or ought to
have been restored to entireness if any accident had divided them, aided and
favoured the break-up of all sociability." All political and all moral evils are
the effects of this pernicious cause—private property. He says of Rousseau's
first Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that the corruption of
manners which he set down to literature and art really came from this

venomous principle of property, which infects all that it touches.[178]
Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle and restored equality or
community of possessions, but Christianity had the radical fault of
involving such a detachment from earthly affections, in order to deliver
ourselves to heavenly meditation, as brought about a necessary
degeneration in social activity. The form of government is a matter of
indifference, provided you can only assure community of goods. Political
revolutions are at bottom the clash of material interests, and until you have
equalised the one you will never prevent the other.[179]
Let us turn from this very definite position to one of the least definite
productions to be found in all literature.

It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on the origin of
inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginary
description, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it was
designed to support. But we have only to remember that Rousseau's object
was to persuade people that the happier state is that in which inequality
does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, and that this was first
the state of nature, and then the state only one degree removed from it, in
which we now find the majority of savage tribes. At the outset he defines
inequality as a word meaning two different things; one, natural or physical
inequality, such as difference of age, of health, of physical strength, of
attributes of intelligence and character; the other, moral or political
inequality, consisting in difference of privileges which some enjoy to the
detriment of the rest, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful.
The former differences are established by nature, the latter are authorised, if
they were not established, by the consent of men.[180] In the state of nature
no inequalities flow from the differences among men in point of physical
advantage and disadvantage, and which remain without derivative
differences so long as the state of nature endures undisturbed. Nature deals
with men as the law of Sparta dealt with the children of its citizens; she
makes those who are well constituted strong and robust, and she destroys all
the rest.

The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest, and inhabited
by animals of every species. Men, scattered among them, imitate their
industry, and so rise to the instinct of the brutes, with this advantage that
while each species has only its own, man, without anything special,
appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable creature, with foes on every
side, is forced to be constantly on the alert, and hence to be always in full
possession of all his faculties, unlike civilised man, whose native force is
enfeebled by the mechanical protections with which he has surrounded
himself. He is not afraid of the wild beasts around him, for experience has
taught him that he is their master. His health is better than ours, for we live
in a time when excess of idleness in some, excess of toil in others, the
heating and over-abundant diet of the rich, the bad food of the poor, the
orgies and excesses of every kind, the immoderate transport of every
passion, the fatigue and strain of spirit,—when all these things have
inflicted more disorders upon us than the vaunted art of medicine has been
able to keep pace with. Even if the sick savage has only nature to hope
from, on the other hand he has only his own malady to be afraid of. He has
no fear of death, for no animal can know what death is, and the knowledge
of death and its terrors is one of the first of man's terrible acquisitions after
abandoning his animal condition.[181] In other respects, such as protection
against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the savage's natural power
of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are moderate in proportion to
his means of satisfying them, forbid us to consider him physically unhappy.
Let us turn to the intellectual and moral side.
If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast during these
primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then do not
forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment against nature,—no trifling
blasphemy in those days—and second, that you are attributing misery to a
free creature with tranquil spirit and healthy body, and that must surely be a
singular abuse of the term. We see around us scarcely any but people who
complain of the burden of their lives; but who ever heard of a savage in full
enjoyment of his liberty ever dreaming of complaint about his life or of
self-destruction?
With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is wrong in
declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing virtue. He is not
vicious, for the reason that he does not know what being good is. It is not

development of enlightenment nor the restrictions of law, but the calm of
the passions and ignorance of vice, which keep them from doing ill. Tanto
plus in illis profitcit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis.
Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes in
him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of the
brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this admirable
quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow all the social
virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energetic in the primitive
condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflection which isolates one. It is
philosophy which teaches the philosopher to say secretly at sight of a
suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I am safe and sound. They may be
butchering a fellow-creature under your window; all you have to do is to
clap your hands to your ears, and argue a little with yourself to hinder
nature in revolt from making you feel as if you were in the case of the
victim.[182] The savage man has not got this odious gift. In the state of
nature it is pity that takes the place of laws, manners, and virtue. It is in this
natural sentiment rather than in subtle arguments that we have to seek the
reluctance that every man would feel to do ill, even without the precepts of
education.[183]
Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state of
society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands lead
each day to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity only
serves to occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence necessarily
extends the debauching of women and the practice of procuring
abortion[184]—this passion in a state of nature, where it is purely physical,
momentary, and without any association of durable sentiment with the
object of it, simply leads to the necessary reproduction of the species and
nothing more.
"Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without industry,
without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of any
kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm them,
perhaps even without ever recognising one of them individually, savage
man, subject to few passions and sufficing to himself, had only the
sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his condition. He was only
sensible of his real wants, and only looked because he thought he had an

interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more progress than his
vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was all the less able to
communicate it; as he did not know even his own children. An art perished
with its inventor. There was neither education nor progress; generations
multiplied uselessly; and as each generation always started from the same
point, centuries glided away in all the rudeness of the first ages, the race
was already old, the individual remained always a child."
This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare the prodigious
diversities in education and manner of life which reign in the different
orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and uniformity of the
savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in the same articles of
food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same things, you will easily
understand to what degree the difference between man and man must be
less in the state of nature than in that of society.[185] Physical inequality is
hardly perceived in the state of nature, and its indirect influences there are
almost non-existent.
Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man
potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into
actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and most
fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of a variety of
external changes. What are these different changes, which may perhaps
have perfected human reason, while they certainly have deteriorated the
race, and made men bad in making them sociable?
What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and the
state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up the happy
uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil, in climate, in seasons,
led to corresponding differences in men's manner of living. Along the banks
of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they invented hooks and lines, and
were eaters of fish. In the forests they invented bows and arrows, and
became hunters. In cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of
beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or some happy chance acquainted them with
fire, a new protection against the rigours of winter. In company with these
natural acquisitions, grew up a sort of reflection or mechanical prudence,
which showed them the kind of precautions most necessary to their security.
From this rudimentary and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of

the existence of a similar nature and similar interests in their fellow-
creatures. Instructed by experience that the love of well-being and comfort
is the only motive of human actions, the savage united with his neighbours
when union was for their joint convenience, and did his best to blind and
outwit his neighbours when their interests were adverse to his own, and he
felt himself the weaker. Hence the origin of certain rude ideas of mutual
obligation.[186]
Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into caves,
they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to dig the
ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was the epoch of
a first revolution, which formed the establishment and division of families,
and which introduced a rough and partial sort of property. Along with
rudimentary ideas of property, though not connected with them, came the
rudimentary forms of inequality. When men were thrown more together,
then he who sang or danced the best, the strongest, the most adroit, or the
most eloquent, acquired the most consideration—that is, men ceased to take
uniform and equal place. And with the coming of this end of equality there
passed away the happy primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice,
hate.
On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and
their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this period
of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just medium
between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our
modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest and the most durable
epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we find it that this state was
the least subject to revolutions and the best for man. "So long as men were
content with their rustic hovels, so long as they confined themselves to
stitching their garments of skin with spines or fish bones, to decking their
bodies with feathers and shells and painting them in different colours, to
perfecting and beautifying their bows and arrows—in a word, so long as
they only applied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts
that needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good,
and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, and
continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent
intercourse. But from the moment that one man had need of the help of
another, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person to have

provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property was introduced,
labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed into smiling fields,
which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and in which they ever saw
bondage and misery springing up and growing ripe with the harvests."[187]
The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in
this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the philosopher it is
iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the human race. It is easy
to see how the latter of the two arts was suggested to men by watching the
reproducing processes of vegetation. It is less easy to be sure how they
discovered metal, saw its uses, and invented means of smelting it, for nature
had taken extreme precautions to hide the fatal secret. It was probably the
operation of some volcano which first suggested the idea of fusing ore.
From the fact of land being cultivated its division followed, and therefore
the institution of property in its full shape. From property arose civil
society. "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think
of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him,
was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders,
miseries, and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one
who, plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out
to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you
forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for all."[188]
Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had only
been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and the consumption
of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced one another. But the
stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantage from his work; the
more ingenious found means of shortening his labour; the husbandman had
more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain; and while working
equally, one got much gain, and the other could scarcely live. This
distinction between Have and Have-not led to confusion and revolt, to
brigandage on the one side and constant insecurity on the other.
Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise to the
most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. This was to
employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons who attacked
it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other institutions
which should be as favourable to property as natural law had been contrary

to it. The man who conceived this project, after showing his neighbours the
monstrous confusion which made their lives most burdensome, spoke in
this wise: "Let us unite to shield the weak from oppression, to restrain the
proud, and to assure to each the possession of what belongs to him; let us
set up rules of justice and peace, to which all shall be obliged to conform,
without respect of persons, and which may repair to some extent the
caprices of fortune, by subjecting the weak and the mighty alike to mutual
duties. In a word, instead of turning our forces against one another, let us
collect them into one supreme power to govern us by sage laws, to protect
and defend all the members of the association, repel their common foes, and
preserve us in never-ending concord." This, and not the right of conquest,
must have been the origin of society and laws, which threw new chains
round the poor and gave new might to the rich; and for the profit of a few
grasping and ambitious men, subjected the whole human race henceforth
and for ever to toil and bondage and wretchedness without hope.
The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was radically
imperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of the sagest lawgivers,
it has always remained imperfect, because it was the work of chance, and
because, inasmuch as it was ill begun, time, while revealing defects and
suggesting remedies, could never repair its vices; people went on
incessantly repairing and patching, instead of which it was indispensable to
begin by making a clean surface and by throwing aside all the old
materials, just as Lycurgus did in Sparta.
Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of nature each man
lived in entire isolation, and therefore physical inequality was as if it did not
exist. After many centuries, accident, in the shape of difference of climate
and external natural conditions, enforcing for the sake of subsistence some
degree of joint labour, led to an increase of communication among men, to a
slight development of the reasoning and reflective faculties, and to a rude
and simple sense of mutual obligation, as a means of greater comfort in the
long run. The first state was good and pure, but the second state was truly
perfect. It was destroyed by a fresh succession of chances, such as the
discovery of the arts of metal-working and tillage, which led first to the
institution of property, and second to the prominence of the natural or
physical inequalities, which now began to tell with deadly effectiveness.
These inequalities gradually became summed up in the great distinction

between rich and poor; and this distinction was finally embodied in the
constitution of a civil society, expressly adapted to consecrate the
usurpation of the rich, and to make the inequality of condition between
them and the poor eternal.
We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition, contains
no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals. Is it
inequality of material possession or inequality of political right? Morelly
tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident, flowing from the first;
that the key to renovation lies in the abolition of the first. Rousseau mixes
the two confusedly together under a single name, bemoans each, but shrinks
from a conclusion or a recommendation as to either. He declares property to
be the key to civil society, but falls back from any ideas leading to the
modification of the institution lying at the root of all that he deplores.
The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearly all
others, turns on Method. "Conjectures become reasons when they are the
most likely that you can draw from the nature of things," and "it is for
philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely facts." In an
inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed. Guesses drawn from the
general nature of things can no longer give us light as to the particular
nature of the things pertaining to primitive men, any more than such
guesses can teach us the law of the movement of the heavenly bodies, or the
foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can deduction from anything but
propositions which have themselves been won by laborious induction, ever
lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has fair pretension to
determine the most probable of the missing facts in the chain of human
history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledge which is science,
was not yet thought of in connection with the movements of our own race
upon the earth. It is to be said, further, that of the two possible ways of
guessing about the early state, the conditions of advance from it, and the
rest, Rousseau's guess that all movement away from it has been towards
corruption, is less supported by subsequent knowledge than the guess of his
adversaries, that it has been a movement progressive and upwards.
This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there are fervent
disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's craving for method
in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly remark on one

or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin with, there is no
certainty as to there having ever been a state of nature of a normal and
organic kind, any more than there is any one normal and typical state of
society now. There are infinitely diverse states of society, and there were
probably as many diverse states of nature. Rousseau was sufficiently
acquainted with the most recent metaphysics of his time to know that you
cannot think of a tree in general, nor of a triangle in general, but only of
some particular tree or triangle.[189] In a similar way he might have known
that there never was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and
abstract, fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, which
comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the kind.
The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different tribes of
savages, in reference to every object that can engage their attention, from
death and the gods and immortality down to the uses of marriage and the art
of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence, are infinitely numerous;
and the more we know about this vast diversity, the less easy is it to think of
the savage state in general. When Rousseau extols the savage state as the
veritable youth of the world, we wonder whether we are to think of the
negroes of the Gold Coast, or the Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris,
Cheyennes or Tierra-del-Fuegians or the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the
veritable youth of the world they counted up to five or only to two; whether
they used a fire-drill, and if so what kind of drill; whether they had the
notion of personal identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade;
and a hundred other points, which we should now require any writer to
settle, who should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and
indivisible, in the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to our
vain admiration.
Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature in
consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such as
living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that the force
of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could the isolated
state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was the
precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew the
primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised one
another, into that semi-social state in which the family was founded?

We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if it ever
subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencies which
are alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coeval with the
appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed, fire, and the
mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths,[190] we could understand
that there was a long stage preliminary to these heavenly gifts. But if the
gods had no part nor lot in it, and if the accidents that slowly led the human
creature into union were as old as that nature, of which indeed they were
actually the component elements, then man must have quitted the state of
nature the very day on which he was born into it. And what can be a more
monstrous anachronism than to turn a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-
conscious, argumentative utilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the
social problem out in his flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of
first principles, that would have entitled him to a chair in the institute of
moral sciences, and entering the social union with the calm and reasonable
deliberation of a great statesman taking a critical step in policy? Aristotle
was wiser when he fixed upon sociability as an ultimate quality of human
nature, instead of making it, as Rousseau and so many others have done, the
conclusion of an unimpeachable train of syllogistic reasoning.[191] Morelly
even, his own contemporary, and much less of a sage than Aristotle, was
still sage enough to perceive that this primitive human machine, "though
composed of intelligent parts, generally operates independently of its
reason; its deliberations are forestalled, and only leave it to look on, while
sentiment does its work."[192] It is the more remarkable that Rousseau
should have fallen into this kind of error, as it was one of his distinctions to
have perceived and partially worked out the principle, that men guide their
conduct rather from passion and instinct than from reasoned enlightenment.
[193] The ultimate quality which he named pity is, after all, the germ of
sociability, which is only extended sympathy. But he did not firmly adhere
to this ultimate quality, nor make any effort consistently to trace out its
various products.
We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse the
composition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantly
warning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticated
with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of
character must always have been substantially identical with such elements

and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of increasingly
complex experience. There is something worth considering in his notion
that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those of
domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough to
enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusions from it.
It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for granted
that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one and the
same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same set of
several stages, following one another in precisely the same order. There is
no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to show that civilisation
varies in origin and process with race and other things, and that though in
all cases starting from the prime factor of sociableness in man, yet the
course of its development has depended on the particular sets of
circumstances with which that factor has had to combine. These are full of
variety, according to climate and racial predisposition, although, as has been
justly said, the force of both these two elements diminishes as the influence
of the past in giving consistency to our will becomes more definite, and our
means of modifying climate and race become better known. There is no
sign that Rousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected
whether the capacity for advance into the state of civil society in any highly
developed form is universal throughout the species, or whether there are not
races eternally incapable of advance beyond the savage state. Progress
would hardly be the exception which we know it to be in the history of
communities if there were not fundamental diversities in the civilisable
quality of races. Why do some bodies of men get on to the high roads of
civilisation, while others remain in the jungle and thicket of savagery; and
why do some races advance along one of these roads, and others advance
by different roads?
Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory with
which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly
varied, intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at all worth
while to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how little his
piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it from a scientific
point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say about the state of nature
was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any more than the Sermon on
the Mount was meant for political economy. The importance of the

Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement denunciation of the existing
social state. To the writer the question of the origin of inequality is
evidently far less a matter at heart, than the question of its results. It is the
natural inclination of one deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his
own time and country, to extol some other time or country, of which he is
happily ignorant enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about
the savage state in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote the
Germania. And here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science and art
upon virtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment of the
unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of the piece, and
to render its enormous influence for a generation after it was written
incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of ideas ever
produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they contained
something which the social or spiritual condition of the men whom they
inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense. Is it not
tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is more normal, offers a better
balance between desire and opportunity, between faculty and performance,
than the permanent state of large classes in western countries, the broken
wreck of civilisation?[194] To admit this is not to conclude, as Rousseau so
rashly concluded, that the movement away from the primitive stages has
been productive only of evil and misery even to the masses of men, the
hewers of wood and the drawers of water; or that it was occasioned, and has
been carried on by the predominance of the lower parts and principles of
human nature. Our provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank
absence of outlook or hope of the millions who come on to the earth that
greets them with no smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a
season, and at last are shovelled silently back under the ground,—our
acquiescence can only be justified in the sight of humanity by the
conviction that this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process,
working forwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human
spirits, but needing much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives,
and immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficent
consummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply
condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often
changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who
think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious inequalities, is
in foundation and substance the perfection of social blessedness, Rousseau

was almost in the right. If the only alternative to the present social order
remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression to some such condition as that
of the islanders of the South Sea, a lover of his fellow-creatures might look
upon the result, so far as it affected the happiness of the bulk of them, with
tolerably complete indifference. It is only the faith that we are moving
slowly away from the existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly away
from the old want of order, that makes the present endurable, and makes
any tenacious effort to raise the future possible.

An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality of
man, for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it may
divide the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according to the
doctrines with which it is confronted. As against the theory that the existing
way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and delights of the earth is a
just representation and fair counterpart of natural inequalities among men in
merit and capacity, the revolutionary theory is true, and the passionate
revolutionary cry for equality of external chance most righteous and
unanswerable. But the issues do not end here. Take such propositions as
these:—there are differences in the capacity of men for serving the
community; the well-being of the community demands the allotment of
high function in proportion to high faculty; the rights of man in politics are
confined to a right of the same protection for his own interests as is given to
the interests of others. As against these principles, the revolutionary
deductions from the equality of man are false. And such pretensions as that
every man could be made equally fit for every function, or that not only
each should have an equal chance, but that he who uses his chance well and
sociably should be kept on a level in common opinion and trust with him
who uses it ill and unsociably, or does not use it at all,—the whole of this is
obviously most illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any set
of men have ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid the penalty.
What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean, and what
his first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is not that all men are
born equal. He never says this, and his recognition of natural inequality
implies the contrary proposition. His position is that the artificial

differences, springing from the conditions of the social union, do not
coincide with the differences in capacity springing from original
constitution; that the tendency of the social union as now organised is to
deepen the artificial inequalities, and make the gulf between those endowed
with privileges and wealth and those not so endowed ever wider and wider.
It would have been very difficult a hundred years ago to deny the truth of
this way of stating the case. If it has to some extent already ceased to be
entirely true, and if violent popular forces are at work making it less and
less true, we owe the origin of the change, among other causes and
influences, not least to the influence of Rousseau himself, and those whom
he inspired. It was that influence which, though it certainly did not produce,
yet did as certainly give a deep and remarkable bias, first to the American
Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the French Revolution.
It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which awaited the idea
of the equality of man in America and in France. In America it has always
remained strictly within the political order, and perhaps with the
considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had, along with
Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, and statesmanlike notions of
national prosperity, in leading to the abolition of slavery, it has brought
forth no strong moral sentiment against the ethical and economic bases of
any part of the social order. In France, on the other hand, it was the starting-
point of movements that have had all the fervour and intensity of religions,
and have made men feel about social inequalities the burning shame and
wrath with which a Christian saw the flourishing temples of unclean gods.
This difference in the interpretation and development of the first doctrine
may be explained in various ways,—by difference of material circumstance
between America and France; difference of the political and social level
from which the principle of equality had to start; and not least by difference
of intellectual temperament. This last was itself partly the product of
difference in religion, which makes the English dread the practical
enforcement of logical conclusions, while the French have hitherto been apt
to dread and despise any tendency to stop short of that.

Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance of Rousseau's
Discourses was the first sign of reaction against the historic mode of inquiry
into society that had been initiated by Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws was
published in 1748, with a truly prodigious effect. It coloured the whole of
the social literature in France during the rest of the century. A history of its
influence would be a history of one of the most important sides of
speculative activity. In the social writings of Rousseau himself there is
hardly a chapter which does not contain tacit reference to Montesquieu's
book. The Discourses were the beginning of a movement in an exactly
opposite direction; that is, away from patient collection of wide multitudes
of facts relating to the conditions of society, towards the promulgation of
arbitrary systems of absolute social dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmatic
socialist of the century, and one of the most dignified and austere
characters, is an important example of the detriment done by the influence
of Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the earlier stages of the conflict
between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785), of whom the remark is to be
made that he was for some years behind the scenes of government as De
Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in affairs, began his inquiries
with Greece and Rome. "You will find everything in ancient history," he
said.[195] And he remained entirely in this groove of thought until
Rousseau appeared. He then gradually left Montesquieu. "To find the duties
of a legislator," he said, "I descend into the abysses of my heart, I study my
sentiments." He opposed the Economists, the other school that was feeling
its way imperfectly enough to a positive method. "As soon as I see landed
property established," he wrote, "then I see unequal fortunes; and from
these unequal fortunes must there not necessarily result different and
opposed interests, all the vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the
brutalisation of intelligence, the corruption of civil manners?" and so forth.
[196] In his most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's
notions developed, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either
from fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a
reasoner. "It is to equality that nature has attached the preservation of our
social faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that legislation will
only be taking useless trouble, unless all its attention is first of all directed
to the establishment of equality in the fortune and condition of citizens."
[197] That is to say not only political equality, but economic communism.
"What miserable folly, that persons who pass for philosophers should go on

repeating after one another that without property there can be no society.
Let us leave illusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and
poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state, while the
second will never love a government or laws that leave them in misery."
[198] This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse and
rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France some twenty
years before. After powerfully helping the process of general dissolution, it
produced the first fruits specifically after its own kind some twenty years
later in the system of Baboeuf.[199]
The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men
who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to exhaust
one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the subversion
of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis. Within a few
months of his profession of profound lament that the first man who made a
claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the arch foe of the
race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the pledge of the
engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social pact, while the first
condition of that pact is that every one should be maintained in peaceful
enjoyment of what belongs to him.[200] We need not impute the apparent
discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always apt to think in a slipshod
manner. He sensibly though illogically accepted wholesome practical
maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical premisses that were in truth
utterly incompatible with them.

FOOTNOTES:
[151] Delandine's Couronnes Académiques, ou Recueil de prix proposés par
les Sociétés Savantes. (Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)
[152] Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the award of
the prize, ii. 365-367.
[153] Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 358. Also Conf., viii 135.
[154] Diderot's account (Vie de Sénèque, sect. 66, Oeuv., iii. 98; also ii. 285)
is not inconsistent with Rousseau's own, so that we may dismiss as
apocryphal Marmontel's version of the story (Mém. VIII.), to the effect that

Rousseau was about to answer the question with a commonplace
affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradox would attract more
attention. It has been said also that M. de Francueil, and various others, first
urged the writer to take a negative line of argument. To suppose this
possible is to prove one's incapacity for understanding what manner of man
Rousseau was.
[155] Conf., ix. 232, 233.
[156] Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues, i. 252.
[157] Dialogues, i. 275, 276.
[158] Conf., viii. 138.
[159] "It made a kind of revolution in Paris," says Grimm. Corr. Lit., i. 108.
[160] Rép. au Roi de Pologne, p. 111 and p. 113.
[161] Rép. à M. Bordes, 138.
[162] Ib. 137.
[163] "The first source of the evil is inequality; from inequality come riches
... from riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury come the fine arts,
and from idleness the sciences." Rép. au Roi de Pologne, 120, 121.
[164] Rép. à M. Bordes, 147. In the same spirit he once wrote the more
wholesome maxim, "We should argue with the wise, and never with the
public." Corr., i. 191.
[165] Rép. au Roi de Pologne, 128, 129.
[166] Rép. à M. Bordes, 150-161.
[167] P. 174.
[168] Egger's Hellénisme en France, 28ième leçon, p. 265.
[169] Voltaire to J.J.R. Aug. 30, 1755.
[170] Rép. au Roi de Pologne, 105.

[171] In 1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning a
counter-blast to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of their essay the
thesis that "The love of letters inspires the love of virtue," and the prize was
won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor of rhetoric. See Delandine, i. 42.
[172] Preface to Narcisse, 251.
[173] Rép. à M. Bordes, 167.
[174] P. 187.
[175] See for instance a strange discussion about morale universelle and the
like in Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay, i. 217-226.
[176] Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him from his
father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on the human
intelligence.
[177] Code de la Nature, ou le véritable esprit de ses loix, de tout tems
négligé ou méconnu.
[178] P. 169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself on the
track.
[179] At the end of the Code de la Nature Morelly places a complete set of
rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of it was the
absence of private property—a condition that was to be preserved by
vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking, that should make the
possession of private property odious or inconceivable. There are to be
sumptuary laws of a moderate kind. The government is to be in the hands of
the elders. The children are to be taken away from their parents at the age of
five; reared and educated in public establishments; and returned to their
parents at the age of sixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage is to be
dissoluble at the end of ten years, but after divorce the woman is not to
marry a man younger than herself, nor is the man to marry a woman
younger than the wife from whom he has parted. The children of a divorced
couple are to remain with the father, and if he marries again, they are to be
held the children of the second wife. Mothers are to suckle their own
children (p. 220). The whole scheme is fuller of good ideas than such
schemes usually are.

[180] P. 218.
[181] This is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the sense of
scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it as a general
state; but they know and are afraid of its concrete phenomena, and so are
most savages.
[182] This is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness of which
was afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence of Diderot. Conf.,
viii. 205, n.
[183] P. 261.
[184] As if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a law defining and
prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of the commission of the act which
it constituted a malpractice. As if giving a name and juristic classification to
any kind of conduct were adding to men's motives for indulging in it.
[185] P. 269.
[186] P. 278.
[187] Pp. 285-287.
[188] P. 273.
[189] P. 250.
[190] Politicus, 268 D-274 E.
[191] Here for instance is D'Alembert's story:—"The necessity of shielding
our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examine among
external objects those which are useful and those which are hurtful, so that
we may seek the one and flee the others. But we hardly begin our search
into such objects before we discover among them a great number of beings
which strike us as exactly like ourselves; that is, whose form is just like our
own, and who, so far as we can judge at the first glance, appear to have the
same perceptions. Everything therefore leads us to suppose that they have
also the same wants, and consequently the same interest in satisfying them,
whence it results that we must find great advantage in joining with them for
the purpose of distinguishing in nature what has the power of preserving us

from what has the power of hurting us. The communication of ideas is the
principle and the stay of this union, and necessarily demands the invention
of signs; such is the origin of the formation of societies." Discours
Préliminaire de l'Encyclopédie. Contrast this with Aristotle's sensible
statement (Polit. I. ii. 15) that "there is in men by nature a strong impulse to
enter into such union."
[192] Code de la Nature.
[193] See, for example, his criticism on the Abbé de St. Pierre. Conf., viii.
264. And also in the analysis of this very Discourse, above, vol. i. p. 163.
[194] "I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in
the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the
visage freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his
fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such
a community all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide distinctions
of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which
are the products of our civilisation; there is none of that widespread division
of labour which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting
interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or
for wealth, which the dense population of civilised countries inevitably
creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are
repressed, partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that
natural sense of justice and of his neighbour's right, which seems to be in
some degree inherent in every race of man. Now, although we have
progressed vastly beyond the savage state in intellectual achievements, we
have not advanced equally in morals. It is true that among those classes
who have no wants that cannot be easily supplied, and among whom public
opinion has great influence, the rights of others are fully respected. It is
true, also, that we have vastly extended the sphere of those rights, and
include within them all the brotherhood of man. But it is not too much to
say, that the mass of our populations have not at all advanced beyond the
savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it." Wallace's
Malay Archipelago, vol. ii. pp. 460-461.
[195] So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760, "For an
attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost diversity of

appearance but the natural effects of a certain number of causes differently
combined, Greece is the universe in small, and the history of Greece an
excellent epitome of universal history." (Quoted in Egger's Hellénisme en
France, ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the next generation, who used to
appeal so unseasonably to the ancients, were only following a literary
fashion set by their fathers.
[196] Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel; Oeuv., xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795.)
[197] La Législation, I. i.
[198] Ibid.
[199] It is not within our province to examine the vexed question whether
the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely political. That
socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some members, one can hardly
doubt. See Von Sybel's Hist. of the French Revolution, Bk. II. ch. iv., on one
side, and Quinet's La Révolution, ii. 90-107, on the other.
[200] Economie Politique, pp. 41, 53, etc.

CHAPTER VI.
PARIS.

I.

By what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a summer life
among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled orchards, turn into
panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato and grim Brutus's civic
devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century France—and France was
amiable in spite of the atrocities of White Penitents at Toulouse, and black
Jansenists at Paris, and the men and women who dealt in lettres-de-cachet
at Versailles—was revolted by the name of the cruel patriot who slew his
son for the honour of discipline.[201] How came Rousseau of all men, the
great humanitarian of his time, to rise to the height of these unlovely
rigours?
The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had been
bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of law
and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had been
accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment with ideas
that were the direct abnegation of all these. In Paris the idea of a God was
either repudiated along with many other ancestral conceptions, or else it
was fatally entangled with the worst superstition and not seldom with the
vilest cruelties. The idea of freedom was unknown, and the idea of law was
benumbed by abuses and exceptions. The idea of country was enfeebled in
some and displaced in others by a growing passion for the captivating
something styled citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could have ended his
days among the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly
never have come back to him. For it depends on circumstance, which of the
chances that slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused
with us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest
of the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact that
his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their most

violent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not a
Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his native city.
He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live in France:
he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote his first
famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of the Social
Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all.
There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva has
a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that against the
paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this Calvin was a prime
leader; the second was that against the materialism of the eighteenth
century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The diplomatist was right
who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At the congress of Vienna,
some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by the hardly visible
Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving momentous issues for the
whole habitable globe, called out that it was after all no more than a grain
of sand. But he was not wrong who made bold to reply, "Geneva is no grain
of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that perfumes all Europe."[202] We have to
remember that it was at all events as a grain of musk ever pervading the
character of Rousseau. It happened in later years that he repudiated his
allegiance to her, but however bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he
cannot change blood, and Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of
Calvin. We may perhaps conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the
constant spectacle and memory of a community, free, energetic, and
prosperous, whose institutions had been shaped and whose political temper
had been inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully
than what he had picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedæmon, to give him a
turn for Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy
modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain than
that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
circumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to
freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of him
on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever he
exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative energy,
"Never," he says, "did I see the walls of that happy city, I never went into it,
without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due to excess of tender
emotion. At the same time that the noble image of freedom elevated my

soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle manners, touched me even to
tears."[203] His spirit never ceased to haunt city and lake to the end, and he
only paid the debt of an owed acknowledgment in the dedication of his
Discourse on Inequality to the republic of Geneva.[204] It was there it had
its root. The honour in which industry was held in Geneva, the democratic
phrases that constituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of
the long battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of its
manners, the simplicity of its pleasures,—all these things awoke in his
memory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More than
that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his earliest
days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital idea that there are sacred
things and objects of reverence among men. And hence there came to him,
though with many stains and much misdirection, the most priceless
excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.
There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of reverence and
the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament, though a man may
well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the second in rule over him,
to be the contradiction to his other self. The objects of veneration and the
objects of sensuous delight are externally so unlike and so incongruous, that
he who follows both in their turns is as one playing the part of an ironical
chorus in the tragi-comic drama of his own life. You may perceive these
two to be mere imperfect or illusory opposites, when you confront a man
like Rousseau with the true opposite of his own type; with those who are
from their birth analysts and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably
questioning. That energetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side
of sense, yet is incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye
and ear, of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive
absorption that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance
of this profound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of the
kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in the
presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compass of
words.
The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration and
austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had nothing
sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in contempt, and ever
like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that counted simplicity of life

an antique barbarism, and literary curiousness the master virtue. There were
giants in this world, like the panurgic Diderot. There were industrious,
worthy, disinterested men, who used their minds honestly and actively with
sincere care for truth, like D'Holbach. There was poured around the whole,
like a high stimulating atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil
mental aphrodisiac to the weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great
indomitable chieftain of them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of
perfect direction by its generous power and fulness. It was not the strong
men, atheists and philosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau
into revolt against their whole system of thought in all its principles. The
dissent between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time
it flamed out into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home
to him first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the
minor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished from
his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should uphold men in
living their lives, substantial helps on which they might lean without
examination and without mistrust: his life in Paris was thrown among
people who lived in the midst of open questions, and revelled in a reflective
and didactic morality, which had no root in the heart and so made things
easy for the practical conscience. He sought tranquillity and valued life for
its own sake, not as an arena and a theme for endless argument and debate:
he found friends who knew no higher pleasure than the futile polemics of
mimic philosophy over dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-
headed interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God
and state of nature, about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as
Boswell may have done when Johnson complained of him for asking
questions that would make a man hang himself. The highest things were
thus brought down to the level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects
which the wise take care only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday
topics for all comers.
The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact,
gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of men
and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to Rousseau
as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest courage or
the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the serious side of
him to find persons of quality introducing materialism as a new fashion, and

atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The perfume of good manners only
made what he took for bad principles the worse, and heightened his
impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to overthrow the beliefs of a
world between two wines.
Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world
around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the
sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The play of
social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant demands, are fatal to
free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of soft internal emotions.
Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly enwrapped
in the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with men and
women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to produce
flashing effects on other people. We may be sure that as the two sides of his
character—his notions of serious principle, and his notions of personal
comfort—both went in the same direction, the irritation and impatience
with which they inspired him towards society did not lessen with increased
communication, but naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled
antipathy.
Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in
1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which the
good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen one
very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the relations he
formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated with his
children. We have heard too the new words with which during these years
he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax hot within
them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance on which his
life was embarked, and the shores to which it was bearing him.
His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of finance.
Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even the
introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the greatest of
the farmers general.[205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay, his two
chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates of the
farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by all the
glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it had also one or
two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is always the case when

a new rich class rises in the midst of a community possessing an old caste,
the circle of Parisian financiers made it their highest social aim to thrust and
strain into the circle of the Versailles people of quality. They had no normal
life of their own, with independent traditions and self-respect; and for the
same reason that an essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a
considerable degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain
circumstances by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new
plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want
of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving
the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate it.
Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material
opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering ostentation, there
is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both serious conduct and social
diversion. The result is seen in imitative manners, affected culture, and a
mixture of timorous self-consciousness within and noisy self-assertion
without, which completes the most distasteful scene that any collected spirit
can witness.
Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her
stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in
Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers, and
here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know, were
too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred francs;
then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the first of the
Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the second he had to
extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting. His comic opera, the
Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it brought him the round sum of
two hundred louis from the court, and some five and twenty more from the
bookseller, and so, he says, "the interlude, which cost me five or six weeks
of work, produced nearly as much money as Emilius afterwards did, which
had cost me twenty years of meditation and three years of composition."
[206] Before the arrival of this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-
general, offered him the post of cashier in that important department, and
Rousseau attended for some weeks to receive the necessary instructions.
His progress was tardy as usual, and the complexities of accounts were as
little congenial to him as notarial complexities had been three and twenty
years previously. It is, however, one of the characteristics of times of

national break-up not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and
Rousseau gravely sat at the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as
little skill as liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief
going on a short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at
the moment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which
the watchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted
Rousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him to be
the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of very painful
illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six months he would be
in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of his temper, and
the train of reflections which it would be sure to set aflame, are to be
foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing with the irksome.
Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the little fragment of days left to him,
to the bondage of an office for which he felt nothing but disgust? How
reconcile the austere principles which he had just adopted in his
denunciation of sciences and arts, and his panegyric on the simplicity of the
natural life, with such duties as he had to perform? And how preach
disinterestedness and frugality from amid the cashboxes of a receiver-
general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in independence and poverty the
little time that was yet left to him, to bring all the forces of his soul to bear
in breaking the fetters of opinion, and to carry out courageously whatever
seemed best to himself, without suffering the judgment of others to
interpose the slightest embarrassment or hindrance.[207]
With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his life
was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because such projects
harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His design mastered and
took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his living by copying
music, as that was conformable to his taste, within his capacity, and
compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron did as the world is so
naturally ready to do with those who choose the stoic's way; he declared
that Rousseau was gone mad.[208] Talk like this had no effect on a man
whom self-indulgence led into a path that others would only have been
forced into by self-denial. Let it be said, however, that this is a form of self-
indulgence of which society is never likely to see an excess, and meanwhile
we may continue to pay it some respect as assuredly leaning to virtue's side.
Rousseau's many lapses from grace perhaps deserve a certain gentleness of

treatment, after the time when with deliberation and collected effort he set
himself to the hard task of fitting his private life to his public principles.
Anything that heightens the self-respect of the race is good for us to behold,
and it is a permanent source of comfort to all who thirst after reality in
teachers, whether their teaching happens to be our own or not, to find that
the prophet of social equality was not a fine gentleman, nor the teacher of
democracy a hanger-on to the silly skirts of fashion.
Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made
him rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult as the
application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this greater sacrifice, he
gave up the pleasant things for which most men value the money that
procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary reform in truly
Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing peruke was
substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and white stockings,
and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular thought that he would
never again need to know the time. One sacrifice remained to be made. Part
of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had been a large stock of fine
linen, and for this he retained a particular affection, for both now and
always Rousseau had a passion for personal cleanliness, as he had for
corporeal wholesomeness. He was seasonably delivered from bondage to
his fine linen by aid from without. One Christmas Eve it lay drying in a
garret in the rather considerable quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief,
always suspected to be the brother of Theresa, broke open the door and
carried off the treasure, leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented
wearer of coarser stuffs.[209]
We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the
beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion
which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary power
which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. "It takes,"
wrote Diderot, "right above the clouds; never was such a success."[210] We
can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental sincerity than that his
first triumph, the first revelation to him of his power, instead of seducing
him to frequent the mischievous and disturbing circle of his applauders,
should throw him inwards upon himself and his own principles with new
earnestness and refreshed independence. Rousseau very soon made up his
mind what the world was worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary

sentimentalist or satirist does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of
personal foibles, but from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds
set to our capacity of life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy
us. "When my destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society," he wrote in
his last meditation on the course of his own life, "I found nothing there to
give a moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed
me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might have been
within my reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the disquiet
of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt even amid gleams
of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed myself to be seeking, I
should still not have found the happiness for which my heart was greedily
athirst, though without distinctly knowing its object. Thus everything
served to detach my affections from society, even before the misfortunes
which were to make me wholly a stranger to it. I reached the age of forty,
floating between indigence and fortune, between wisdom and disorder, full
of vices of habit without any evil tendency at heart, living by hazard,
distracted as to my duties without despising them, but often without much
clear knowledge what they were."[211]
A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is in
strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active type. The
attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness of the
commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadily composed to
oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an art of moral
counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim and emotion like
distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the philosophers with
whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was something foreign to
them and outside of their own lives. They studied human nature for the sake
of talking learnedly about it, not for the sake of self-knowledge; they
laboured to instruct others, not to enlighten themselves within. When they
published a book, its contents only interested them to the extent of making
the world accept it, without seriously troubling themselves whether it were
true or false, provided only that it was not refuted. "For my own part, when
I desired to learn, it was to know things myself, and not at all to teach
others. I always believed that before instructing others it was proper to
begin by knowing enough for one's self; and of all the studies that I have
tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there is hardly one that I

should not have followed equally if I had been alone, and shut up in a desert
island for the rest of my days."[212]
When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the
society which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little outrageous.
But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the first eminence
in the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exile from the society of
Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau did, and he spoke more
bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke bitterly of it in prose.[213] It
was, as has been so often said, a society dominated by women, from the
king's mistress who helped to ruin France, down to the financier's wife who
gave suppers to flashy men of letters. The eighteenth century salon has been
described as having three stages; the salon of 1730, still retaining some of
the stately domesticity, elegance, dignity of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of
1780, grave, cold, dry, given to dissertation; and between the two, the salon
of 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality, glittering
wastefulness.[214] Though this division of time must not be pressed too
closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in literature with his
Discourses fell in with the climax of social unreality in the surface
intercourse of France, and that the same date marks the highest point of
feminine activity and power.
The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much
light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into manners.
We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the word
Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters, conversation, and
books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and warmest adoration. A
whole company of transgressors of the marriage law would melt into floods
of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must surely have held of too
sacred an essence to mix itself with any one virtue in particular, except that
very considerable one of charitably letting all do as they please. It is much,
however, that these tears, if not very burning, were really honest. Society,
though not believing very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with
an arid, parching, and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good
emotions in a man, and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of
their hearts, their lives remain worth having.

It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time occasionally
sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, "It is your lover to whom you
should never say that you don't believe in God; to one's husband that does
not matter, because in the case of a lover one must reserve for one's self
some door of escape, and devotional scruples cut everything short."[215] Or
here: "I do not distrust anybody, for that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust
anybody, and there is no trouble in this."[216] Or again in the word thrown
to a man vaunting the probity of some one: "What! can a man of
intelligence like you accept the prejudice of meum and tuum?"[217] Such
speech, however, was probably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a
mode and fashion, as who should go to a masked ball in guise of
Mephistopheles, without anything more Mephistophelian about him than
red apparel and peaked toes. "She was absolutely charming," said one of a
new-comer; "she did not utter one single word that was not a paradox."
[218] This was the passing taste. Human nature is able to keep itself
wholesome in fundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as
wise as it is charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make large
allowances for mere costume and assumed character.
In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is
exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is most
jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an observant
person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native folly of men
and women—and if his observation be conducted in a catholic spirit, he will
probably see something of this not merely in others—when the tolerable
average sanity of human arrangements strikes him as the most marvellous
of all the fortunate accidents in the universe. Rousseau could not even
accept the fact of this miraculous result, the provisional and temporary
sanity of things, and he confronted society with eyes of angry chagrin. A
great lady asked him how it was that she had not seen him for an age.
"Because when I wish to see you, I wish to see no one but you. What do
you want me to do in the midst of your society? I should cut a sorry figure
in a circle of mincing tripping coxcombs; they do not suit me." We cannot
wonder that on some occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested
before a company of friends, Madame d'Epinay prayed Rousseau to be of
them, on the ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously
absurd questions, which would give gaiety to the affair.[219] As it

happened, the father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he
had devoured two million francs, without either saying or doing a single
good thing. He rewarded the child's performance with the gift of a superb
suit of cherry-coloured velvet, extravagantly trimmed with costly lace; the
peasant from whose sweat and travail the money had been wrung, went in
heavy rags, and his children lived as the beasts of the field. The poor youth
was ill dealt with. "That is very fine," said rude Duclos, "but remember that
a fool in lace is still a fool." Rousseau, in reply to the child's importunity,
was still blunter: "Sir, I am no judge of finery, I am only a judge of man; I
wished to talk with you a little while ago, but I wish so no longer."[220]
Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection in
later years, says that before the success of the first Discourse, Rousseau
concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness that was timid
even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance you perceived mistrust and
observant jealousy; there was no freedom in his manner, and no one ever
observed more cautiously the hateful precept to live with your friends as
though they were one day to be your enemies.[221] Grimm's description is
different and more trustworthy. Until he began to affect singularity, he says,
Rousseau had been gallant and overflowing with artificial compliment, with
manners that were honeyed and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness.
All at once he put on the cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still
in spite of an abrupt and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of
elaborate fine speeches, and particularly in his relations with women.[222]
Of his abruptness, he tells a most displeasing tale. "One day Rousseau told
us with an air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the opera where he
had been seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, the Duke
of Zweibrücken had approached him with much politeness, saying, 'Will
you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes, if it be
very short.' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him laughingly,
'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there resides in you a
part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me represent to you that, for all
the severity of your principles, you should hardly refuse to a sovereign
prince the respect due to a water-carrier, and that if you had met a word of
good-will from a water-carrier with an answer as rough and brutal as that,
you would have had to reproach yourself with a most unseasonable piece of
impertinence.'"[223]

There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at the
flippant tone about him carried him beyond the ordinary bounds of that
polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a
nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. "They mock the
other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of all."
ROUSSEAU: "I forgive them for their credulity, but not for condemning
those who are credulous in some other way." Some one said that in matters
of religion everybody was right, but that everybody should remain in that in
which he had been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: "Not so, by God, if it
is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm." Then some one
contended that religion always did some good, as a kind of rein to the
common people who had no other morality. All the rest cried out at this in
indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that the common
people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being damned. The
conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess calling out, "After
all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call our body, so ring and let
them bring us the joint." This done, the servants dismissed, and the door
shut, the discussion was resumed with such vehemence by Duclos and Saint
Lambert, that, says the lady who tells us the story, "I feared they were bent
on destroying all religion, and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any
rate to natural religion." There was not a whit more sympathy for that than
for the rest. Rousseau declared himself paullo infirmior, and clung to the
morality of the gospel as the natural morality which in old times constituted
the whole and only creed. "But what is a God," cried one impetuous
disputant, "who gets angry and is appeased again?" Rousseau began to
murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set in at his
expense, to which came this: "If it is a piece of cowardice to suffer ill to be
spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to suffer ill to be spoken
of one's God, who is present; and for my part, sirs, I believe in God." "I
admit," said the atheistic champion, "that it is a fine thing to see this God
bending his brow to earth and watching with admiration the conduct of a
Cato. But this notion is, like many others, very useful in some great heads,
such as Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce
heroism, but it is the germ of all madnesses." ROUSSEAU: "Sirs, I leave
the room if you say another word more," and he was rising to fulfil his
threat, when the entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.[224]

His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up
a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned
daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys, and
refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So terrible a
thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame d'Epinay was
suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of having destroyed some
valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was much idle and cruel
gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her friend, kept steadfast silence:
she challenged his opinion. "What am I to say?" he answered; "I go and
come, and all that I hear outrages and revolts me. I see the one so evidently
malicious and so adroit in their injustice; the other so awkward and so
stupid in their good intentions, that I am tempted (and it is not the first time)
to look on Paris as a cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn
is the victim. What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager
each person is to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people
who are like him."[225]
Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little pains he
took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand, whether male or
female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that "it is not always so
easy as people suppose to be poor and independent." Merciless invasion of
his time in every shape made his life weariness. Sometimes he had the
courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the letter to a painter who sent
him the same copy of verses three times, requiring immediate
acknowledgment. "It is not just," at length wrote the exasperated Rousseau,
"that I should be tyrannised over for your pleasure; not that my time is
precious, as you say; it is either passed in suffering or it is lost in idleness;
but when I cannot employ it usefully for some one, I do not wish to be
hindered from wasting it in my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped
is what all the kings of the universe could not give me back, and it is to be
my own master that I flee from the idle folk of towns,—people as
thoroughly wearied as they are thoroughly wearisome,—who, because they
do not know what to do with their own time, think they have a right to
waste that of others."[226] The more abruptly he treated visitors,
persecuting dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more
obstinate they were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the
hours they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant

irritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for a morning's
work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly that he could
not well subsist on less.[227] He had one chance of a pension, which he
threw from him in a truly characteristic manner.
When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the Muses
Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under
the patronage of M. de la Popelinière. Rameau apostrophised the unlucky
composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was the
work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely ignorant of
the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore was Rousseau's own, and the
good was a plagiarism.[228] This repulse did not daunt the hero. Five or six
years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he was lying awake in bed, he
conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude after the manner of the Italian
comic operas. In six days the Village Soothsayer was sketched, and in three
weeks virtually completed. Duclos procured its rehearsal at the Opera, and
after some debate it was performed before the court at Fontainebleau. The
Plutarchian stoic, its author, went from Paris in a court coach, but his
Roman tone deserted him, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the
great world, such divinity doth hedge even a Lewis XV., and even in a soul
of Genevan temper. The piece was played with great success, and the
composer was informed that he would the next day have the honour of
being presented to the king, who would most probably mark his favour by
the bestowal of a pension.[229] Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He
would fain have greeted the king with some word that should show
sensibility to the royal graciousness, without compromising republican
severity, "clothing some great and useful truth in a fine and deserved
compliment." This moral difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he
was liable to an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of
king and courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death.
What would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should
be driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him, instead of
the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy,
shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of
pension and patronage. We perceive the born dreamer with a
phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just proportion and true
relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with the

most fatal form of moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a little dangerous to
try to analyse into finer names.
When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke
to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could never
have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the opinion of
more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large. "He said that if I
was disinterested on my own account, I had no right to be so on that of
Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed it to them not to let
pass any possible and honest means of giving them bread.... This was the
first real dispute I had with him, and all our quarrels that followed were of
the same kind; he laying down for me what he insisted that I should do, and
I refusing because I thought that I ought not to do it."[230]
Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that we easily
see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to fling up the
book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry, some trait is at
hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him unlike common men,
reverent of truth and human dignity. There is a slight anecdote of this kind
connected with his visit to Fontainebleau. The day after the representation
of his piece, he happened to be taking his breakfast in some public place.
An officer entered, and, proceeding to describe the performance of the
previous day, told at great length all that had happened, depicted the
composer with much minuteness, and gave a circumstantial account of his
conversation. In this story, which was told with equal assurance and
simplicity, there was not a word of truth, as was clear from the fact that the
author of whom he spoke with such intimacy sat unknown and
unrecognised before his eyes. The effect on Rousseau was singular enough.
"The man was of a certain age; he had no coxcombical or swaggering air;
his expression bespoke a man of merit, and his cross of St. Lewis showed
that he was an old officer. While he was retailing his untruths, I grew red in
the face, I lowered my eyes, I sat on thorns; I tried to think of some means
of believing him to have made a mistake in good faith. At length trembling
lest some one should recognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish
my chocolate without saying a word; and stooping down as I passed in front
of him, I went out as fast as possible, while the people present discussed his
tale. I perceived in the street that I was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that if
any one had recognised me and called me by name before I got out, they

would have seen in me the shame and embarrassment of a culprit, simply
from a feeling of the pain the poor man would have had to suffer if his lie
had been discovered."[231] One who can feel thus vividly humiliated by the
meanness of another, assuredly has in himself the wholesome salt of respect
for the erectness of his fellows; he has the rare sentiment that the
compromise of integrity in one of them is as a stain on his own self-esteem,
and a lowering of his own moral stature. There is more deep love of
humanity in this than in giving many alms, and it was not the less deep for
being the product of impulse and sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical
sorites.
Another scene in a café is worth referring to, because it shows in the same
way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the fatuousness to
which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In 1752 he procured
the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he had written at the
age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading or playing as most
comedies by youths of that amount of experience of the ways of the world
and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and touched by the indulgence
of the public, in suffering without any sign of impatience even a second
representation of his piece. For himself, he could not so much as sit out the
first; quitting the theatre before it was over, he entered the famous café de
Procope at the other side of the street, where he found critics as wearied as
himself. Here he called out, "The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved
to fall flat; it wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am
that very Rousseau."[232] The relentless student of mental pathology is
very likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and not
on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be
noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of vanity
is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth to hand
Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.

II.

In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to
revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally favourable
occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he was growing
increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he moved. On his

road he turned aside to visit her who had been more than even his birth-
place to him. He felt the shock known to all who cherish a vision for a
dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality. He had not
prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only remember
for others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face that recollection
at each new energy makes lovelier with an added sweetness. "I saw her," he
says, "but in what a state, O God, in what debasement! Was this the same
Madame de Warens, in those days so brilliant, to whom the priest of
Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was torn by the sight!" Alas, as has
been said with a truth that daily experience proves to those whom pity and
self-knowledge have made most indulgent, as to those whom pinched
maxims have made most rigorous,—morality is the nature of things.[233]
We may have a humane tenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a
deep presentiment all the time that the poor soul must die in a penal
settlement. It is partly a question of time; whether death comes fast enough
to sweep you out of reach of the penalties which the nature of things may
appoint, but which in their fiercest shape are mostly of the loitering kind.
Death was unkind to Madame de Warens, and the unhappy creature lived
long enough to find that morality does mean something after all; that the old
hoary world has not fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good
thing, out of avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence
and order in the relations of men and women as a good thing, out of
cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues is ever
in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, to
collectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal.
Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress to
leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while he
and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had not
forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money when
he had it.[234] She was sunk in indigence, for her pension had long been
forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. While Rousseau was at
Geneva she came to see him. "She lacked money to complete her journey; I
had not enough about me; I sent it to her an hour afterwards by Theresa.
Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her heart. The only trinket she had
left was a small ring; she took it from her finger to place it on Theresa's,
who instantly put it back, as she kissed the noble hand and bathed it with

her tears." In after years he poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not
quitting all to attach his lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes
always to have been haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.
[235] Here is the worst of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle;
if the sensations happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the
chance goes by, never to return, and then, as memory in the best of such
temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old sentiment
revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appears not to have
seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to the end, like a
soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet mysterious perfume of
many-scented night in the silent garden at Charmettes. She died in a hovel
eight years after this, sunk in disease, misery, and neglect, and was put
away in the cemetery on the heights above Chambéri.[236] Rousseau
consoled himself with thoughts of another world that should reunite him to
her and be the dawn of new happiness; like a man who should illusorily
confound the last glistening of a wintry sunset seen through dark yew-
branches, with the broad-beaming strength of the summer morning. "If I
thought," he said, "that I should not see her in the other life, my poor
imagination would shrink from the idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain
promise myself in it."[237] To pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the
edge of the sombre unechoing gulf of nothingness into which our friend has
slid silently down, is a natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing
remorse and giving a moment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a
tenderness that has been robbed of its object. Yet would not men be more
likely to have a deeper love for those about them, and a keener dread of
filling a house with aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the
beginning of their days that we have none of this perfect companionable
bliss to promise ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave
is indeed the end of our communion, and that we know one another no
more?
The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was
followed by his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was
contemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been
reared. The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm; he
surrendered himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought of the
Parisian world that he had left behind, its frivolity, its petulance, its

disputation over all things in heaven and on the earth, its profound deadness
to all civic activity, quickened his admiration for the simple, industrious,
and independent community from which he never forgot that he was
sprung. But no Catholic could enjoy the rights of citizenship. So Rousseau
proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is the same for all Christians, and the
substance of dogma only differs, because people interposed with
explanations of what they could not understand; that therefore it is in each
country the business of the sovereign to fix both the worship and the
amount and quality of unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the
citizen's duty to admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law appointed.
"The society of the Encyclopædists, far from shaking my faith, had
confirmed it by my natural aversion for partisanship and controversy. The
reading of the Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself
for several years, had made me despise the low and childish interpretation
put upon the words of Christ by the people who were least worthy to
understand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards the essential
in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass of trivial formulas
with which men had overlaid and darkened it."[238] We may be sure that if
Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given course of action, he
would have no difficulty in putting his case in a blaze of the brightest light,
and surrounding it with endless emblems and devices of superlative
conviction. In short, he submitted himself faithfully to the instruction of the
pastor of his parish; was closely catechised by a commission of members of
the consistory; received from them a certificate that he had satisfied the
requirements of doctrine in all points; was received to partake of the
Communion, and finally restored to all his rights as a citizen.[239]
This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense of
an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau himself
had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those honest
Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had marked
their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found again. He was
never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist, and if it might be
said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant than he was either of
these two, yet he was emphatically the child of Protestantism. It is hardly
too much to say that one bred in Catholic tradition and observance,
accustomed to think of the whole life of men as only a manifestation of the

unbroken life of the Church, and of all the several communities of men as
members of that great organisation which binds one order to another, and
each generation to those that have gone before and those that come after,
would never have dreamed that monstrous dream of a state of nature as a
state of perfection. He would never have held up to ridicule and hate the
idea of society as an organism with normal parts and conditions of growth,
and never have left the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history,
from his fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the
great vague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and
reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately disciplined
hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political freedom, that zeal
for the rights of peoples against rulers, that energetic enthusiasm for a free
life, which constituted the fire and essence of Rousseau's writing. As
illustration of this, let us remark how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell
upon a Catholic country like France: so many of its principles were
assimilated by the revolutionary schools as were wanted for violent
dissolvents, while the rest dropped away, and in this rejected portion was
precisely the most vital part of his system. In other words, in no country has
the power of collective organisation been so pressed and exalted as in
revolutionised France, and in no country has the free life of the individual
been made to count for so little. With such force does the ancient system of
temporal and spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think
most confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of
reason may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.
In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not
leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was only
undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled him with
his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual connection with it
which had never been more than superficially parted. There can be little
doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva in 1754 marked a very
critical time in the formation of some of the most memorable of his
opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and smouldering
resentment against the irreverence and denial of the materialistic circle
which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What sort of opinions he
found prevailing among the most enlightened of the Genevese pastors we
know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had three or four years

later than this to suffer a bitter attack from them, but the account of the
creed of some of the ministers which he gave in his article on Geneva in the
Encyclopedia, was substantially correct. "Many of them," he wrote, "have
ceased to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal
points in our belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors,
who contend that it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full of
goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an eternity
of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pure Socinianism,
rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and supposing the first
principle of a true religion to be that it shall propose nothing for belief
which clashes with reason. Religion here is almost reduced to the adoration
of one single God, at least among nearly all who do not belong to the
common people; and a certain respect for Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is
nearly the only thing that distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from
pure Deism."[240] And it would be easy to trace the growth of these
rationalising tendencies. Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up
who anticipated some of the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in
denying the Trinity, and so forth,[241] but the time was not then ripe. The
general conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in
1685-6, says that though there were not many among the Genevese of the
first form of learning, "yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a
learned education."[242] The pacification of civic troubles in 1738 was
followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and contentment,
and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously trained are wont
to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was at all times a constant
communication, both public and private, going on between Geneva and
Holland, as was only natural between the two chief Protestant centres of the
Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth century between the two
churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at Leyden, and there is more
than one Genevese writer who deserves a place in the history of the
transition in the beginning of the eighteenth century from theology proper
to that metaphysical theology, which was the first marked dissolvent of
dogma within the Protestant bodies. To this general movement of the epoch,
of course, Descartes supplied the first impulse. The leader of the movement
in Geneva, that is of an attempt to pacify the Christian churches on the basis
of some such Deism as was shortly to find its passionate expression in the
Savoyard Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-

1737). He belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his
grandfather had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence of
Geneva against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he visited
Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and
France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of
Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent
exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from the
people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was much stir
for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in finding many
considerable followers.[243] For example, some three years or so after his
death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of La Religion Essentielle
a l'Homme, showing that faith in the existence of a God suffices, and
treating with contempt the belief in the inspiration of the Gospels.[244]
Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and more
active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it be
true or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pure
Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, and that
those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, and in refuting,
to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to his own account
almost entirely among the ministers of religion and the professors of the
academy, precisely the sort of persons who would be most sure to
familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations, with the current
religious ideas and the arguments by which they were opposed or upheld.
We may picture the effect on his mind of the difference in tone and temper
in these grave, candid, and careful men, and the tone of his Parisian friends
in discussing the same high themes; how this difference would strengthen
his repugnance, and corroborate his own inborn spirit of veneration; how he
would here feel himself in his own world. For as wise men have noticed, it
is not so much difference of opinion that stirs resentment in us, at least in
great subjects where the difference is not trivial but profound, as difference
in gravity of humour and manner of moral approach. He returned to Paris
(Oct. 1754) warm with the resolution to give up his concerns there, and in
the spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty and virtue, where
men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolities of
literary dialectic.[245]

The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse on
Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some and
indignation by others.[246] Nobody thought it a compliment, and some
thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purpose
aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now also signed
himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powder flew over
the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain that Voltaire would
make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find in his native country
the tone, the air, the manners which were driving him from Paris. From that
moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to make head against the
disturber, but what could he do alone, timid and bad talker as he was,
against a man arrogant, rich, supported by the credit of the great, of brilliant
eloquence, and already the very idol of women and young men?[247]
Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to suspect that this was a reason after
the event, for no man was ever so fond as Rousseau, or so clever a master in
the art, of covering an accident in a fine envelope of principle, and, as we
shall see, he was at this time writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive
panegyric. In this case he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did
not return to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand.
Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts whether
his fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as hostile to his love of
living solitarily and after his own fashion as the good people of Paris.
Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay
wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by
fruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he exclaimed
in delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place of refuge made
for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good friend had in the
interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced by a pretty cottage
exactly arranged for his own household. "My poor bear," she said, "here is
your place of refuge; it was you who chose it, 'tis friendship offers it; I hope
it will drive away your cruel notion of going from me."[248] Though
moved to tears by such kindness, Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but
continued to waver for some time longer between this retreat and return to
Geneva.
In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was
dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage in

the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring the
moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to mark
the limit of his wants.[249] He wrote to her bitterly in reply, that her
proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have but sorry
appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a friend into a valet.
He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed, if only she would
remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for sale.[250] Madame
d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and then Rousseau
hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special appreciation, and
that he meant by the word valet "the degradation into which the repudiation
of his principles would throw his soul. The independence I seek is not
immunity from work; I am firm for winning my own bread, I take pleasure
in it; but I mean not to subject myself to any other duty, if I can help it. I
will never pledge any portion of my liberty, either for my own subsistence
or that of any one else. I intend to work, but at my own will and pleasure,
and even to do nothing, if it happens to suit me, without any one finding
fault except my stomach."[251] We may call this unamiable, if we please,
but in a frivolous world amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live
an independent life after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of
Rousseau's character ought not to hinder us from admiring his steadfastness
in refusing to sacrifice his existence to the first person who spoke him
civilly. We may wish there had been more of rugged simplicity in his way
of dealing with temptations to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage; less
of mere irritability. But then this irritability is one side of soft temperament.
The soft temperament is easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance
does not stir up true anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick
currents of eager irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau, quivering
from head to foot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently unlike our plain
Johnson, the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding of the patron is as
worthy of our honour in one instance as in the other. Indeed, resistance to
humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as Rousseau's, in which
deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the naturally stoical spirit
which asserts itself spontaneously and rises without effort.
When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the too friendly
importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madame d'Epinay's
offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him an entire sentiment of

independence of movement and freedom from all sense of pecuniary
obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copious torrent of
pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle who met round
D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummer madness, or
even a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerful world for the dismal
solitude of woods and fields. "Only the bad man is alone," wrote Diderot in
words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his memory as long as he lived.
The men and women of the eighteenth century had no comprehension of
solitude, the strength which it may impart to the vigorous, the poetic graces
which it may shed about the life of those who are less than vigorous; and
what they did not comprehend, they dreaded and abhorred, and thought
monstrous in the one man who did comprehend it. They were all of the
mind of Socrates when he said to Phædrus, "Knowledge is what I love, and
the men who dwell in the town are my teachers, not trees and landscape."
[252] Sarcasms fell on him like hail, and the prophecies usual in cases
where a stray soul does not share the common tastes of the herd. He would
never be able to live without the incense and the amusements of the town;
he would be back in a fortnight; he would throw up the whole enterprise
within three months.[253] Amid a shower of such words, springing from
men's perverse blindness to the binding propriety of keeping all
propositions as to what is the best way of living in respect of place, hours,
companionship, strictly relative to each individual case, Rousseau
stubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his feet, and sought new life
away from the stridulous hum of men. Perhaps we are better pleased to
think of the unwearied Diderot spending laborious days in factories and
quarries and workshops and forges, while friendly toilers patiently
explained to him the structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, the
processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and all the
other countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which he afterwards
reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificent repertory of
human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement. And it is yet more
elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the great high-souled Turgot,
setting forth a little later to discharge beneficent duty in the hard field of his
distant Limousin commissionership, enduring many things and toiling late
and early for long years, that the burden of others might be lighter, and the
welfare of the land more assured. But there are many paths for many men,
and if only magnanimous self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can

move us with the deep thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of
excessive personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the social
groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhaps for some
men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.

FOOTNOTES:
[201] Rép. à M. Bordes, 163.
[202] Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.
[203] Conf., iv. 248.
[204] Ib. ix. 279. Also Economie Politique.
[205] Madame de la Popelinière, whose adventures and the misadventures
of her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's
Memoirs.
[206] The passages relating to income during his first residence in Paris
(1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books vii.-ix. of the
Confessions. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (Oeuv., xii. 74) that
Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the Confessions (xi. 126), he says 6000
livres, and one or two hundred copies. It may be worth while to add that
Diderot and D'Alembert received 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the
Encyclopædia. Sterne received £650 for two volumes of Tristram Shandy in
1780. Walpole's Letters, in. 298.
[207] Conf., viii. 154-157.
[208] Ib. viii. 160.
[209] Conf., viii. 160, 161.
[210] Ib. viii. 159.
[211] Réveries, iii 168.
[212] Rêveries, iii. 166.

[213] See the Epître à Mdme. la Marquise du Châtelet, sur la Calomnie.
[214] La Femme au 18ième siècle, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40.
[215] Madame d'Epinay's Mém., i. 295.
[216] Quoted in Goncourt's Femme au 18ième siècle, p. 378.
[217] Ib., p. 337.
[218] Mdlle. L'Espinasse's Letters, ii. 89.
[219] Madame d'Epinay's Mém., ii. 47, 48.
[220] Ib., ii. 55.
[221] Mém., Bk. iv. 327.
[222] Corr. Lit., iii. 58.
[223] Ib., 54.
[224] Madame d'Epinay's Mém., i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated his
atheism afterwards in the Catéchisme Universel.
[225] Madame d'Epinay's Mém., i. 443.
[226] Corr., i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.
[227] Letter to Madame de Créqui, 1752. Corr., i. 171.
[228] Conf,., vii. 104.
[229] The Devin du Village was played at Fontainebleau on October 18,
1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour
took a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to her, Corr.,
i. 178.
[230] Conf., viii. 190.
[231] Conf., viii. 183.
[232] Conf., viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in Strasburg, in
1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its representation. Oeuv. et

Corr. Inéd., p. 434.
[233] Madame de Staël insisted that her father said this, and Necker insisted
that it was his daughter's.
[234] Corr., i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.
[235] Conf., viii. 208-210.
[236] She died on July 30, 1762, aged "about sixty-three years." Arthur
Young, visiting Chambéri in 1789, with some trouble procured the
certificate of her death, which may be found in his Travels, i. 272. See a
letter of M. de Conzié to Rousseau, in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection,
ii. 445.
[237] Conf., xii. 233.
[238] Conf., viii. 210.
[239] Gaberel's Rousseau et les Genevois, p. 62. Conf., viii. 212.
[240] The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church and
Academy of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to examine
these allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound, reported (Feb.
10, 1758) with mild indignation, that they were unfounded, and that the
flock was untainted by unseasonable use of its mind. See on this Rousseau's
Lettres écrites de la Montagne, ii. 231.
[241] See Picot's Hist. de Genève, ii. 415.
[242] Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc., in 1685-86.
By G. Burnet, p. 9.
[243] J.A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776,
including among much besides that no longer interests men, an Oratio de
Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia (vol. iii. 437), not at all in the vein of
Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, De Legibus Naturalibus,
in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbes and assails the doctrine
of Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its definition to το προς εαυτον in its
narrowest sense. He appears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326).
Francis Turretini, his father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of

the treaty or contract between God and man, in a piece entitled Foedus
Naturæ a primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris
imputatam (1675).
[244] Gaberel's Eglise de Genève, iii. 188.
[245] Corr., i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).
[246] Conf., viii. 215, 216. Corr., i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28, 1754).
[247] Conf., viii. 218.
[248] Conf., viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the accuracy of the
Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (Mém., ii. 115) says that when
she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he had never been there,
and that she was careful to lead him to believe that the expense had not
been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to him describing it could only
have been written to one who had not seen it, and though her Memoirs are
full of sheer imagination and romance, the documents in them are
substantially authentic, and this letter is shown to be so by Rousseau's reply
to it.
[249] Mém., ii. 116.
[250] Corr. (1755), i. 242.
[251] Corr., i. 245.
[252] Phædrus, 230.
[253] Conf., viii. 221, etc.

CHAPTER VII.
THE HERMITAGE.

It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the
Encyclopædia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of those scenes
which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp of
humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and with
adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortification of
flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of firm hope and
beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth century were centred in
action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of that epoch, as well as
of another nearer to our own, fled away from the impotence of their own
will, rather than into the haven of satisfied conviction and clear-eyed
acceptance. Only one of them—Wordsworth, the poetic hermit of our lakes
—impresses us in any degree like one of the great individualities of the ages
when men not only craved for the unseen, but felt the closeness of its
presence over their heads and about their feet. The modern anchorite goes
forth in the spirit of the preacher who declared all the things that are under
the sun to be vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things
that are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the light
of a celestial brightness to come.
Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society and
circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his native
exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not leave him
vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted. The
sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life
extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure of a
scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the
general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded with
the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but an essential
condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he says, when making
excursions into the country with great people, "I was so tired of fine rooms,
fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the still more tiresome

people who displayed all these; I was so worn out with pamphlets, card-
playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs, great suppers, that as I spied a poor
hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a
hamlet I snuffed the odour of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a
distance the rude refrain of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil
the whole tale of rouge and furbelows."[254] He was no anchorite proper,
one weary of the world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong
dislike for one kind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he
was now about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his
inveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace a past. He
forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tender benefactress who was
now waiting for slow death in her hovel, his house-mates would be a poor
dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot, too, that since those days the
various processes of intellectual life had expanded within him, and
produced a busy fermentation which makes a man's surroundings very
critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportion as a man suffers the smooth
course of his thought to depend on anything external, whether on the
greenness of the field or the gaiety of the street or the constancy of friends,
so comes he nearer to chance of making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy,
though the very root of the tragedy lay deeper,—in temperament.

I.

Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls
of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). "Although it was cold, and
snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life; violets
and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were beginning to
shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the first song of the
nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood that touched the
house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I was transplanted; I
thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in an instant the warbling
of the birds made me thrill with delight. My very first care was to surrender
myself to the impression of the rustic objects about me. Instead of
beginning by arranging things inside my quarters, I first set about planning
my walks, and there was not a path nor a copse nor a grove round my
cottage which I had not found out before the end of the next day. The place,
which was lonely rather than wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the

world, and no one could ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues
from Paris."[255]
This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the end of
which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was too soon
broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the stimulus
given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he found
himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that which had
seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded the usage and
costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive an angry contempt
for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time. Restoration to a more
purely sensuous atmosphere softened this austerity. No longer having the
vices of a great city before his eyes, he no longer cherished the wrath which
they had inspired in him. "When I did not see men, I ceased to despise
them; and when I had not the bad before my eyes, I ceased to hate them.
My heart, little made as it is for hate, now did no more than deplore their
wretchedness, and made no distinction between their wretchedness and
their badness. This state, so much more mild, if much less sublime, soon
dulled the glowing enthusiasm that had long transported me."[256] That is
to say, his nature remained for a moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It
was only for a moment. And in studying the movements of impulse and
reflection in him at this critical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from
phase to phase. Once more we are watching a man who lived without either
intellectual or spiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing
mood, a personality accidentally encountered, by anything except
permanent aim and fixed objects, and who would at any time have
surrendered the most deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to
the fascination of a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence
there could be no normally composed state for him; the first soothing effect
of the rich life of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of the
town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept
the stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled
triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and bitterness.
At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him
gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him
from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by
recollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency,

with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. "As I got up with the
sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was going to be
fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might come to disturb
its charm. After having given the morning to divers tasks which I fulfilled
with all the more pleasure that I could put them off to another time if I
chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape from the importunate and
make myself a longer afternoon. Before one o'clock, even on days of
fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of the sun, along with my faithful
Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one should lay hold of me before I
could get away. But when I had once passed a certain corner, with what
beating of the heart, with what radiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I
felt myself safe and my own master for the rest of the day! Then with easier
pace I went in search of some wild and desert spot in the forest, where there
was nothing to show the hand of man, or to speak of servitude and
domination; some refuge where I could fancy myself its discoverer, and
where no inopportune third person came to interfere between nature and
me. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a magnificence that was
always new. The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struck my
eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very heart; the majesty of
the trees that covered me with their shadow, the delicacy of the shrubs that
surrounded me, the astonishing variety of grasses and flowers that I trod
under foot, kept my mind in a continual alternation of attention and
delight.... My imagination did not leave the earth thus superbly arrayed
without inhabitants. I formed a charming society, of which I did not feel
myself unworthy; I made a golden age to please my own fancy, and filling
up these fair days with all those scenes of my life that had left sweet
memories behind, and all that my heart could yet desire or hope in scenes to
come, I waxed tender even to shedding tears over the true pleasures of
humanity, pleasures so delicious, so pure, and henceforth so far from the
reach of men. Ah, if in such moments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my
little aureole as author, came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I
drive them out, to deliver myself without distraction to the exquisite
sentiments of which I was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness
of my chimeras sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream
had suddenly been transformed into reality, it would not have been enough;
I should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still." Alas, this deep
insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulness of

animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination, was
never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his
conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short space by that
sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old theology into the
living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the earth I raised my ideas
to all the existences in nature, to the universal system of things, to the
incomprehensible Being who embraces all. Then with mind lost in that
immensity, I did not think, I did not reason, I did not philosophise; with a
sort of pleasure I felt overwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I
surrendered myself to the ravishing confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to
lose myself in imagination in immeasurable space; within the limits of real
existences my heart was too tightly compressed; in the universe I was
stifled; I would fain have launched myself into the infinite. I believe that if I
had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I should have found myself in a
less delicious situation than that bewildering ecstasy to which my mind so
unreservedly delivered itself, and which sometimes transported me until I
cried out, 'O mighty Being! O mighty Being!' without power of any other
word or thought."[257]
It is not wholly insignificant that though he could thus expand his soul with
ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endure the sight of
one of his fellow-creatures. "If my gaiety lasted the whole night, that
showed that I had passed the day alone; I was very different after I had seen
people, for I was rarely content with others and never with myself. Then in
the evening I was sure to be in taciturn or scolding humour." It is not in
every condition that effervescent passion for ideal forms of the religious
imagination assists sympathy with the real beings who surround us. And to
this let us add that there are natures in which all deep emotion is so entirely
associated with the ideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are
repugnant to them as something alien; and this without the least insincerity,
though with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged
to this class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was, it
does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it was one
side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of his spirit with a force
as genuine as that which is kindled in natures of another type by sympathy
with the real and concrete, with the daily walk and conversation and actual
doings and sufferings of the men and women whom we know. The

fermentation which followed his arrival at the Hermitage, in its first form
produced a number of literary schemes. The idea of the Political
Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed upon his meditations. He had
been earnestly requested to compose a treatise on education. Besides this,
his thoughts wandered confusedly round the notion of a treatise to be called
Sensitive Morality, or the Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was
to examine the influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness,
sound, seasons, food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine,
and thus indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the
art of modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become
surer of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external
system of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep
the soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.[258] Though the treatise
was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we perceive at
least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to character wide
enough, and the material influences that impress it and produce its caprices,
multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them with the medical specialist
to one or two organs, and one or two of the conditions that affect them. Nor,
on the other hand, do the words in which he sketches his project in the least
justify the attribution to him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the
physical constitution over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be
a credit or a discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No
one denies the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and
Rousseau says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the
modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for a
spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation.
A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit the
papers and printed works of the Abbé de Saint Pierre (1658-1743), confided
to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of Madame
Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.[259] This task
involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from twenty-three
diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and repetition. Rousseau,
dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of perception enough to discern
the weakness of a dreamer of another sort; and he soon found out that the
Abbé de Saint Pierre's views were impracticable, in consequence of the
author's fixed idea that men are guided rather by their lights than by their

passions. In fact, Saint Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century
faith to a peculiar degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his
admiration for the extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that
perfected reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and
would speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went
wrong," says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other passion but that of
reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of taking
them as they are and as they will continue to be." The critic's own error in
later days was not very different from this, save that it applied to the
medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by refusing to take
complex societies as they are, even as starting-points for higher attempts at
organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the old man, and he preserved
the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him as the honour of his
age and race, with a fulness of enthusiasm very unusual towards men,
though common enough towards inanimate nature. The sincerity of this
respect, however, could not make the twenty-three volumes which the good
man had written, either fewer in number or lighter in contents, and after
dealing as well as he could with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works,
he threw up the task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would
allow that fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really
needed no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill
in finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint
Pierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France,
some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been
punished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as a kind
of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to say what
he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to what he said.
Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and hence the latter,
in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on French affairs, was exposing
himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a country that did not
concern him. "It surprised me," says Rousseau, "that the reflection had not
occurred to me earlier," but this coincidence of the discovery that the work
was imprudent, with the discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise
nobody versed in study of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has
vanity enough to dislike to admit it.

The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint
Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality of
Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show us,
if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to make to the
more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's fault is said, with
entire truth, to be a failure to make his views relative to men, to times, to
circumstances; and there is something that startles us when we think whose
words we are reading, in the declaration that, "whether an existing
government be still that of old times, or whether it have insensibly
undergone a change of nature, it is equally imprudent to touch it: if it is the
same, it must be respected, and if it has degenerated, that is due to the force
of time and circumstance, and human sagacity is powerless." Rousseau
points to France, asking his readers to judge the peril of once moving by an
election the enormous masses comprising the French monarchy; and in
another place, after a wise general remark on the futility of political
machinery without men of a certain character, he illustrates it by this
scornful question: When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a
dancer or a wit, and the affairs of the academy or the opera making
everybody forget the interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what
can you hope from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and
removing them from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps
not one of these pages which Burke might not well have owned.[262]
A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful effort
after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find that if
society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there is evil in frivolous
complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is only a little serious, so
there is evil in a passionate tenderness for phantoms of an imaginary world
that is not serious at all. To the pure or stoical soul the solitude of the forest
is strength, but then the imagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's
imagination, in no way of the strongest either as receptive or inventive, was
the free accomplice of his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal
sensibility gradually rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The
spectacle does not either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there
are such states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature
should have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may be
presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we

meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger in
allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness
being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the third person, as
to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the man's." In Rousseau's
case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor magic potion that "confused
the chemic labour of the blood," but the too potent wine of the joyful beauty
of nature herself, working misery in a mental structure that no educating
care nor envelope of circumstance had ever hardened against her
intoxication. Most of us are protected against this subtle debauch of
sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while even those who are born
with senses and appetites of great strength and keenness, are guarded by
accumulated discipline of all kinds from without, especially by the
necessity for active industry which brings the most exaggerated native
sensibility into balance. It is the constant and rigorous social parade which
keeps the eager regiment of the senses from making furious rout. Rousseau
had just repudiated all social obligation, and he had never gone through
external discipline. He was at an age when passion that has never been
broken in has the beak of the bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but
its first approach is in fair shapes.
Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in the month
of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale and the soft
murmuring of the brooks in his ear," he began to wonder restlessly why he
had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid sentiments which he was
conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of that intoxicating delight which
he felt potentially existent in his soul. Why had he been created with
faculties so exquisite, to be left thus unused and unfruitful? The feeling of
his own quality, with this of a certain injustice and waste superadded,
brought warm tears which he loved to let flow. Visions of the past, from girl
playmates of his youth down to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in
fluttering tumult into his brain. He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of
houris whom he had known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a
whirl. His imagination was kindled into deadly activity. "The impossibility
of reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and
seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I nourished it in
an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soon peopled with
beings after my heart's desire. In my continual ecstasies, I made myself

drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the
heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human race, I invented for
myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly for their virtues as their
beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends, such as I never found in our nether
world. I had such a passion for haunting this empyrean with all its charming
objects, that I passed hours and days in it without counting them as they
went by; and losing recollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed
a morsel in hot haste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my
beloved groves. If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw
unhappy mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither
moderate nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to
give them greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal."[263]
This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the
tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young, and
life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of nature
made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been attended
with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in devout
acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the goodness and
bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more pitiable time the
beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only not a blank because it
was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh. Nature without the
association of some living human object, like Madame de Warens, was a
poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which slowly brought decay
of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our present point we see one
stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost mercy when he was laid up
with a sharp attack of the more painful, but far less absorbing and frightful
disorder, to which Rousseau was subject all his life long. It gave pause to
what he misnames his angelic loves. "Besides that one can hardly think of
love when suffering anguish, my imagination, which is animated by the
country and under the trees, languishes and dies in a room and under roof-
beams." This interval he employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating
the ways and economy of Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we
shall presently examine. The moment he could get out of doors again into
the forest, the transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active
effort in the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these
over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions

by associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by
introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which
prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The
egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than the
egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural objects, and
took off something from the violent excess of sensuous force. His thought
became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and the other fair, one
sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the other quick, analogous in
character but different, not handsome but animated by cheerfulness and
feeling. To one of these he gave a lover, to whom the other was a tender
friend. He planted them all, after much deliberation and some changes, on
the shores of his beloved lake at Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was
born, and which he always thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.
This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain
amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral
convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets,
assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the three
companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was confined
to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his ordinary indoor
labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his Musical Dictionary.
To his amazement he found that this was no longer possible. The fever of
that literary composition of which he had always such dread had strong
possession of him. He could see nothing on any side but the three figures
and the objects about them made beautiful by his imagination. Though he
tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance was vain, and he set himself to
bringing some order into his thoughts "so as to produce a kind of romance."
We have a glimpse of his mental state in the odd detail, that he could not
bear to write his romance on anything but the very finest paper with gilt
edges; that the powder with which he dried the ink was of azure and
sparkling silver; and that he tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.
[264] The distance from all this to the state of nature is obviously very great
indeed. It must not be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus,
and the other Plutarchians. "My great embarrassment," he says honestly,
"was that I should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe
principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the austere
maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting invectives

against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft delights, could
anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for, than to see me
inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors on whose books
I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this inconsequence in all its force, I
taxed myself with it, I blushed over it, and was overcome with
mortification; but nothing could restore me to reason."[265] He adds that
perhaps on the whole the composition of the New Heloïsa was turning his
madness to the best account. That may be true, but does not all this make
the bitter denunciation, in the Letter to D'Alembert, of love and of all who
make its representation a considerable element in literature or the drama, at
the very time when he was composing one of the most dangerously
attractive romances of his century, a rather indecent piece of invective? We
may forgive inconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories,
or two self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the
form of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.
We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused
connivance with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M.
d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two
ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom
among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They were
curious to see the eccentric man," as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his
scandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to
parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections. "He was
walking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand; he
saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and stalked off
as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the miserable and
intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and quarrel, which make up
this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of even one trait of masculine
robustness. We should perhaps be still more glad if the unwedded Theresa
were not visible in the background of this scene of high morals.

II.

The New Heloïsa was not to be completed without a further extension of
morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of
compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air

swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again
began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire of a
consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream. In the
spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the sister-in-
law of Madame d'Epinay.[267] Her husband had gone to the war (we are in
the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert, whose passion
had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Châtelet eight years before. She
rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house not very far off,
where she was to pass her retreat during the absence of her two natural
protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various occasions; she had
been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had partaken of its host's
homely fare.[268] But the time was not ripe; the force of a temptation is not
from without but within. Much, too, depended with our hermit on the
temperature; one who would have been a very ordinary mortal to him in
cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite herself in days when the sun shone
hot and the air was aromatic. His fancy was suddenly struck with the
romantic guise of the female cavalier, and this was the first onset of a
veritable intoxication, which many men have felt, but which no man before
or since ever invited the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that
after the first interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who
had thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay
weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the sorceress
he wept in the woods.[269] He talked to himself for hours, and was of a
black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object of this
deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved. He
walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture, commixed
with sicklier delight.
People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will,
emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its convenient
lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all blurred, body all
shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in slow clouds of
mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the blood, and turning
the reality of conduct and duty into distant unmeaning shadows. If such a
disease were the furious mood of the brute in spring-time, it would be less
dreadful, but shame and remorse in the ever-struggling reason of man or
woman in the grip of the foul thing, produces an aggravation of frenzy that

makes the mental healer tremble. Add to all this lurking elements of hollow
rage that his passion was not returned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger
man whose place he could not take, and who was his friend besides; of
suspicion that he was a little despised for his weakness by the very object of
it, who saw that his hairs were sprinkled with gray,—and the whole offers a
scene of moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away
with dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scaly
shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.
Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious
hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in physical or
mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox, the terrible
plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a yellowish tinge to her
complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow low; she was short-
sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by an excessive squint. This
homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and caressing expression, and by a
sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free sprightliness of manner, that no trouble
could restrain. Her figure was very slight, and there was in all her
movements at once awkwardness and grace. She was natural and simple,
and had a fairly good judgment of a modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies
in which her spirits sometimes found vent. Capable of chagrin, she was
never prevented by it from yielding to any impulse of mirth. "She weeps
with the best faith in the world, and breaks out laughing at the same
moment; never was anybody so happily born," says her much less amiable
sister-in-law.[270] Her husband was indifferent to her. He preserved an
attachment to a lady whom he knew before his marriage, whose society he
never ceased to frequent, and who finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame
d'Houdetot found consolation in the friendship of Saint Lambert. "We both
of us," said her husband, "both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation
for fidelity, only there was a mis-arrangement." She occasionally composed
verses of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to
write them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and wit.
[271] Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of Leipsic,
preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day, for instance,
in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going on as to the various
merits and defects of women; she heard much, and then with her
accustomed suavity of voice contributed this light summary:—"Without

women, the life of man would be without aid at the beginning, without
pleasure in the middle, and without solace at the end."[272]
We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sort that
kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness, frankness,
and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion united every virtue
except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau would be least likely
to miss. The bond of union between them was subtle. She found in
Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the story of her passion for
Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious force produced in him a thrill
which he never felt with any one else before or after. Thus, as he says, there
was equally love on both sides, though it was not reciprocal. "We were both
of us intoxicated with passion, she for her lover, I for her; our sighs and
sweet tears mingled. Tender confidants, each of the other, our sentiments
were of such close kin that it was impossible for them not to mix; and still
she never forgot her duty for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear,
that if sometimes drawn astray by my senses, still"—still he was a paragon
of virtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the author of
the New Heloïsa; we can appreciate the author of Emilius; but this strained
attempt to confound those two very different persons by combining tearful
erotics with high ethics, is an exhibition of self-delusion that the most
patient analyst of human nature might well find hard to suffer. "The duty of
privation exalted my soul. The glory of all the virtues adorned the idol of
my heart in my sight; to soil its divine image would have been to annihilate
it," and so forth.[273] Moon-lighted landscape gave a background for the
sentimentalist's picture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and the soft
rustle of the night air, made up a scene which became for its chief actor "an
immortal memory of innocence and delight." "It was in this grove, seated
with her on a grassy bank, under an acacia heavy with flowers, that I found
expression for the emotions of my heart in words that were worthy of them.
'Twas the first and single time of my life; but I was sublime, if you can use
the word of all the tender and seductive things that the most glowing love
can bring into the heart of a man. What intoxicating tears I shed at her
knees, what floods she shed in spite of herself! At length in an involuntary
transport, she cried out, 'Never was man so tender, never did man love as
you do! But your friend Saint Lambert hears us, and my heart cannot love
twice.'"[274] Happily, as we learn from another source, a breath of

wholesome life from without brought the transcendental to grotesque end.
In the climax of tears and protestations, an honest waggoner at the other
side of the park wall, urging on a lagging beast launched a round and far-
sounding oath out into the silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with
a lively continuous peal of young laughter, while an angry chill brought
back the discomfited lover from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.[275]
Rousseau wrote in the New Heloïsa very sagely that you should grant to the
senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits that the
saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot. Clearly the
credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather than to himself. What
her feelings were, it is not very easy to see. Honest pity seems to have been
the strongest of them. She was idle and unoccupied, and idleness leaves the
soul open for much stray generosity of emotion, even towards an
importunate lover. She thought him mad, and she wrote to Saint Lambert to
say so. "His madness must be very strong," said Saint Lambert, "since she
can perceive it."[276]
Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a
fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion
by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and garnished
for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered unseen. In short,
such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first stage marked by
ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel. When a man lets his soul
be swept away from the narrow track of conduct appointed by his relations
with others, still the reality of such relations survives. He may retreat to
rural lodges; that will not save him either from his own passion, or from
some degree of that kinship with others which instantly creates right and
wrong like a wall of brass around him. Let it be observed that the natures of
finest stuff suffer most from these forced reactions, and it was just because
Rousseau had innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was
without it, that the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was
unconscious of having fallen at all.
One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found
Madame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her
cheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter was
carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was that

Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the
viciousness of her relations with her lover.[277] "They have played us an
evil turn," cried Madame d'Houdetot; "they have been unjust to me, but that
is no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what you ought to be."
[278] This was Rousseau's first taste of the ashes of shame into which the
lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked at the expense of others, is
ever apt to be transformed. Mortification of the considerable spiritual pride
that was yet alive after this lapse, was a strong element in the sum of his
emotion, and it was pointed by the reflection which stung him so
incessantly, that his monitress was younger than himself. He could never
master his own contempt for the gallantry of grizzled locks.[279] His
austerer self might at any rate have been consoled by knowing that this
scene was the beginning of the end, though the end came without any
seeking on his part and without violence. To his amazement, one day Saint
Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot came to the Hermitage, asking him to
give them dinner, and much to the credit of human nature's elasticity, the
three passed a delightful afternoon. The wronged lover was friendly, though
a little stiff, and he passed occasional slights which Rousseau would surely
not have forgiven, if he had not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt.
He fell asleep, as we can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau
read aloud his very inadequate justification of Providence against Voltaire.
[280]
In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of his
mad passion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it involved
the perilous assistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately her loyalty and
good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found, or thought he
found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despair at not being
allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion, he did the most
singular thing that he could have done under the circumstances. He wrote to
Saint Lambert.[281] His letter is a prodigy of plausible duplicity, though
Rousseau in some of his mental states had so little sense of the difference
between the actual and the imaginary, and was moreover so swiftly borne
away on a flood of fine phrases, that it is hard to decide how far this was
voluntary, and how far he was his own dupe. Voluntary or not, it is
detestable. We pass the false whine about "being abandoned by all that was
dear to him," as if he had not deliberately quitted Paris against the

remonstrance of every friend he had; about his being "solitary and sad," as
if he was not ready at this very time to curse any one who intruded on his
solitude, and hindered him of a single half-hour in the desert spots that he
adored. Remembering the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we
read this:—"Whence comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you can
have suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in
consequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue? A passage in one of your
letters shows a glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert, the
breast of J.J. Rousseau never held the heart of a traitor, and I should despise
myself more than you suppose, if I had ever tried to rob you of her heart....
Can you suspect that her friendship for me may hurt her love for you?
Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open to all sorts of affections,
and no sentiment can spring up in them which does not turn to the
advantage of the dominant passion. Where is the lover who does not wax
the more tender as he talks to his friend of her whom he loves? And is it not
sweeter for you in your banishment that there should be some sympathetic
creature to whom your mistress loves to talk of you, and who loves to
hear?"
Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which the
sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend's mistress
talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two passages from a letter to
her; as when he cries, "Ah, how proud would even thy lover himself be of
thy constancy, if he only knew how much it has surmounted.... I appeal to
your sincerity. You, the witness and the cause of this delirium, these tears,
these ravishing ecstasies, these transports which were never made for
mortal, say, have I ever tasted your favours in such a way that I deserve to
lose them?... Never once did my ardent desires nor my tender supplications
dare to solicit supreme happiness, without my feeling stopped by the inner
cries of a sorrow-stricken soul.... O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the
idea of eternal privation is too frightful for one who groans that he cannot
identify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be
lowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What, are
my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along with my
kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, that rapid and
devouring fire, swifter than lightning?"[282].... We see a sympathetic
creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a nature endowed with

sensibility even more than enough, but with decency, loyalty, above all with
self-knowledge, far less than enough.
One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. He takes
great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of his
principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law as the
relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so attached to
the sinful pair that he half forgives them. "Do not suppose," he says, with
superlative gravity, "that you have seduced me by your reasons; I see in
them the goodness of your heart, not your justification. I cannot help
blaming your connection: you can hardly approve it yourself; and so long as
you both of you continue dear to me, I will never leave you in careless
security as to the innocence of your state. Yet love such as yours deserves
considerateness.... I feel respect for a union so tender, and cannot bring
myself to attempt to lead it to virtue along the path of despair" (p. 401).
Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from appreciating
the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to virtue along the path
of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much as he could to lead to
vice along the path of highly stimulated sense. Saint Lambert was as much
a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a certain manliness, acquired
by long contact with men, which his correspondent only felt in moods of
severe exaltation. Saint Lambert took all the blame on himself. He had
desired that his mistress and his friend should love one another; then he
thought he saw some coolness in his mistress, and he set the change down
to his friend, though not on the true grounds. "Do not suppose that I thought
you perfidious or a traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people
had spoken to me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found
hard to bear." In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than
being over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a
connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or
religion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had ceased
to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might be spared a certain
chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and conscience in so
austere an adviser.[283]
It is well known how effectively one with a germ of good principle in him
is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in his hands and

its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last interview with
Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less wise, less
generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As it was, he passed
four or five hours with her in a delicious calm, infinitely more delightful
than the accesses of burning fever which had seized him before. They
formed the project of a close companionship of three, including the absent
lover; and they counted on the project coming more true than such designs
usually do, "since all the feelings that can unite sensitive and upright hearts
formed the foundation of it, and we three united talents enough as well as
knowledge enough to suffice to ourselves, without need of aid or
supplement from others." What happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for
the next three or four months, which were among the most bitter in
Rousseau's life, for then the bitterness which became chronic was new and
therefore harder to be borne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and
most considerate letters that a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the
most petulant, suspicious, perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patience
and exquisite sweetness of friendship some of these letters are matchless,
and we can only conjecture the wearing querulousness of the letters to
which they were replies. If through no fault of her own she had been the
occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shook off the
consequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counsel and grave
tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough of suspicion and
despair into which he was plunged.[284] In the beginning of 1758 there was
a change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow became known to all the
world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was the cause of a passing
disturbance between him and his mistress. Saint Lambert throughout acted
like a man who is thoroughly master of himself. At first, we learn, he ceased
for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue which he sought in him, and
which he was persuaded that he found in him. "Since then, however," wrote
Madame d'Houdetot, "he pities you more for your weakness than he
reproaches you, and we are both of us far from joining the people who wish
to blacken your character; we have and always shall have the courage to
speak of you with esteem."[285] They saw one another a few times, and on
one occasion the Count and Countess d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and
Rousseau all sat at table together, happily without breach of the peace.[286]
One curious thing about this meeting was that it took place some three
weeks after Rousseau and Saint Lambert had interchanged letters on the

subject of the quarrel with Diderot, in which each promised the other
contemptuous oblivion.[287] Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of
love for our poor short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were
once to have lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next
mood to have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of
the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent
good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may
serve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, when it
no longer suits them to see one another.[288] It is at least certain that in
them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends that he
ever possessed.

III.

The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with
catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished itself
in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a silent
and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something of
acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous process was
the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders. This disorder,
arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from his infancy to the
day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing man to the spiritual,
blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the history of a life is the
history of a body no less than that of a soul. Many a piece of conduct that
divides the world into two factions of moral assailants and moral
vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuities of ethical or psychological
analysis, ought really to have been nothing more than an item in a page of a
pathologist's case-book. We are not to suspend our judgment on action;
right and wrong can depend on no man's malformations. In trying to know
the actor, it is otherwise; here it is folly to underestimate the physical
antecedents of mental phenomena. In firm and lofty character, pain is
mastered; in a character so little endowed with cool tenacious strength as
Rousseau's, pain such as he endured was enough to account, not for his
unsociality, which flowed from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable,
and suspicious form which this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau
was never a saintly nature, but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious
tale of his quarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot—a tale
of labyrinthine nightmares—let us remember that we may even to this point
explain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of insanity,
unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many sane
people very uncomfortable.
His own account was this: "In my quality of solitary, I am more sensitive
than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the world, he thinks
of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions make him forget it for
the rest of the day; but there is nothing to distract me as to his wrong
towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy myself with him all night long;
solitary in my walks, I busy myself with him from sunrise until sunset; my

heart has not an instant's relief, and the harshness of a friend gives me in
one day years of anguish. In my quality of invalid, I have a title to the
considerateness that humanity owes to the weakness or irritation of a man
in agony. Who is the friend, who is the good man, that ought not to dread to
add affliction to an unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and
incurable malady?"[289] We need not accept this as an adequate
extenuation of perversities, but it explains them without recourse to the
theory of uncontrollable insanity. Insanity came later, the product of
intellectual excitation, public persecution, and moral reaction after
prolonged tension. Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of
the sane; knowing his temperament, his previous history, his circumstances,
we have no difficulty in accounting for his conduct. Least of all is there any
need for laying all the blame upon his friends. There are writers whom
enthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical
denigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say, nearly
every one whom he ever knew.[290] Diderot said well, "Too many honest
people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right."
The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages
during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame
d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature
unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that
attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a friend. He
threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once struck him, as he
did into the Encyclopædia. We have already seen how warmly he rated Jean
Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he scolded and laughed at him
for turning hermit. With still more seriousness he remonstrated with him for
remaining in the country through the winter, thus endangering the life of
Theresa's aged mother. This stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two
or three bitter letters were interchanged,[291] those of Diderot being
pronounced by a person who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too
harsh.[292] Yet there is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if
only the man to whom they were written had not hated interference in his
affairs as the worst of injuries. "I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him
sincerely," says Rousseau, "and I counted with entire confidence upon the
same sentiments in him. But worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in
everlastingly thwarting my tastes, my inclinations, my ways of living,

everything that concerned myself only; revolted at seeing a younger man
than myself insist with all his might on governing me like a child; chilled
by his readiness in giving his promise and his negligence in keeping it; tired
of so many appointments which he made and broke, and of his fancy for
repairing them by new ones to be broken in their turn; provoked at waiting
for him to no purpose three or four times a month on days which he had
fixed, and of dining alone in the evening, after going on as far as St. Denis
to meet him and waiting for him all day,—I had my heart already full of a
multitude of grievances."[293] This irritation subsided in presence of the
storms that now rose up against Diderot. He was in the thick of the
dangerous and mortifying distractions stirred up by the foes of the
Encyclopædia. Rousseau in friendly sympathy went to see him; they
embraced, and old wrongs were forgotten until new arose.[294]
There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns
two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris, in
order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear Diderot's
opinion of the two first parts of the New Heloïsa. She says that he wanted to
borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts to Paris; Rousseau
says that they had already been in Diderot's possession for six months.[295]
As her letters containing this very circumstantial story were written at the
moment, it is difficult to uphold the Confessions as valid authority against
them. Thirdly, Rousseau told her that he had not taken his manuscripts to
Paris (p. 302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p. 309) mentions
that he has received a letter from Diderot, to the effect that Rousseau's visit
had no other object than the revision of these manuscripts. The scene is
characteristic. "Rousseau kept him pitilessly at work from Saturday at ten
o'clock in the morning till eleven at night on Monday, hardly giving him
time to eat and drink. The revision at an end, Diderot chats with him about a
plan he has in his head, and begs Rousseau to help him in contriving some
incident which he cannot yet arrange to his taste. 'It is too difficult,' replies
the hermit coldly, 'it is late, and I am not used to sitting up. Good night; I
am off at six in the morning, and 'tis time for bed.' He rises from his chair,
goes to bed, and leaves Diderot petrified at his behaviour. The day of his
departure, Diderot's wife saw that her husband was in bad spirits, and asked
the reason. 'It is that man's want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which afflicts me;
he makes me work like a slave, but I should never have found that out, if he

had not so drily refused to take an interest in me for a quarter of an hour.'
'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do you not know him? He is
devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when anything fine appears
that is not his own. You will see him one day commit some great crime
rather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not swear that he will
not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake their vindication.'"
Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letters
long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to make us
perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood to Madame
d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot. I see no
reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the points of
coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth probable.[296]
Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and his
sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalent
opinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems to have
existed.[297] Those who disbelieved that he had reached this distinction,
yet made sure that he had a passion for her, which may or may not have
been true.[298] Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough to be willing
that this should be generally accepted, and it is certain that she showed a
friendship for him which, considering the manners of the time, was
invitingly open to misconception. Again, she was jealous of her sister-in-
law, Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than that the latter, being
the wife of a Norman noble, had access to the court, and this was
unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. Hence Madame d'Epinay's
barely-concealed mortification when she heard of the meetings in the forest,
the private suppers, the moonlight rambles in the park. When Saint Lambert
first became uneasy as to the relations between Rousseau and his mistress,
and wrote to her to say that he was so, Rousseau instantly suspected that
Madame d'Epinay had been his informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion
by tales of baskets and drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of
Madame d'Houdetot's letters to him. Whether these tales were true or not,
we can never know; we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably
not incapable of these meannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose
that she took the pains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news
which she was writing to Grimm, knowing that he was then in
communication with Saint Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had

written to Saint Lambert,[299] but it may be doubted whether Theresa's
imagination could have risen to such feat as writing to a marquis, and a
marquis in what would have seemed to her to be remote and inaccessible
parts of the earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for us; a puzzle
that can never be found out, nor be worth finding out. Rousseau was
persuaded that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was seized by one
of his blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an affectionate letter
from her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so long, he wrote thus: "I
can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am better informed, and this I shall
be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be certain that accused innocence will find a
champion ardent enough to make calumniators repent, whoever they may
be." It is rather curious that so strange a missive as this, instead of
provoking Madame d'Epinay to anger, was answered by a warmer and more
affectionate letter than the first. To this Rousseau replied with increased
vehemence, charged with dark and mysteriously worded suspicion. Still
Madame d'Epinay remained willing to receive him. He began to repent of
his imprudent haste, because it would certainly end by compromising
Madame d'Houdetot, and because, moreover, he had no proof after all that
his suspicions had any foundation. He went instantly to the house of
Madame d'Epinay; at his approach she threw herself on his neck and melted
into tears. This unexpected reception from so old a friend moved him
extremely; he too wept abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the
precise nature of his suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an
end.[300]
Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years, there
had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their characters were in
fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we know,—sensuous, impulsive,
extravagant, with little sense of the difference between reality and dreams.
Grimm was exactly the opposite; judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly
upright. He was a German (born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader
to the Duke of Saxe Gotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way, partly
through the friendship of Rousseau, into the society of the Parisian men of
letters, rapidly acquired a perfect mastery of the French language, and with
the inspiring help of Diderot, became an excellent critic. After being
secretary to sundry high people, he became the literary correspondent of
various German sovereigns, keeping them informed of what was happening

in the world of art and letters, just as an ambassador keeps his government
informed of what happens in politics. The sobriety, impartiality, and
discrimination of his criticism make one think highly of his literary
judgment; he had the courage, or shall we say he preserved enough of the
German, to defend both Homer and Shakespeare against the unhappy
strictures of Voltaire.[301] This is not all, however; his criticism is
conceived in a tone which impresses us with the writer's integrity. And to
this internal evidence we have to add the external corroboration that in the
latter part of his life he filled various official posts, which implied a peculiar
confidence in his probity on the part of those who appointed him. At the
present moment (1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estrées,
commander of the French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven
Years' War. He was an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough
manner, powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn
the name of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are
not always beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than too
much in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which there
was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated declamation.
Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough underneath the
surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singer at the opera who
had a thrilling voice. As he did not believe in the metaphysical doctrine
about the freedom of the will, he accepted from temperament the necessity
which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by constant pressure from
without. "I am surprised," Madame d'Epinay said to him, "that men should
be so little indulgent to one another." "Nay, the want of indulgence comes
of our belief in freedom; it is because the established morality is false and
bad, inasmuch as it starts from this false principle of liberty." "Ah, but the
contrary principle, by making one too indulgent, disturbs order." "It does
nothing of the kind. Though man does not wholly change, he is susceptible
of modification; you can improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him.
The gardener does not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the
branch and keeps it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302]
He applied the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for
social crookedness.
It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would
gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a weighty

moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract attention.
Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to remove
Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his friends. The
attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret allowance to her
mother and her by Grimm and Diderot of some sixteen pounds a year.[303]
Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings and goings and comings
to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy. That the suspicions in other
respects were in a certain sense not wholly unfounded, is shown by
Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He disapproved of her installing
Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her in a very remarkable prophecy
that solitude would darken his imagination.[304] "He is a poor devil who
torments himself, and does not dare to confess the true subject of all his
sufferings, which is in his cursed head and his pride; he raises up imaginary
matters, so as to have the pleasure of complaining of the whole human
race."[305] More than once he assures her that Rousseau will end by going
mad, it being impossible that so hot and ill-organised a head should endure
solitude.[306] Rousseauite partisans usually explain all this by supposing
that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion, against a
man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and it is possible that
jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his natural shrewdness. But
this shrewdness, added to entire want of imagination and a very narrow
range of sympathy, was quite enough to account for Grimm's harsh
judgment, without the addition of any sinister sentiment. He was perfectly
right in suspecting Rousseau of want of loyalty to Madame d'Epinay, for we
find our hermit writing to her in strains of perfect intimacy, while he was
writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as "your unworthy sister."[307] On
the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay was overwhelming him with
caressing phrases, she was at the same moment describing him to Grimm as
a master of impertinence and intractableness. As usual where there is
radical incompatibility of character, an attempted reconciliation between
Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the early part of October 1757) had
only made the thinly veiled antipathy more resolute. Rousseau excused
himself for wrongs of which in his heart he never thought himself guilty.
Grimm replied by a discourse on the virtues of friendship and his own
special aptitude for practising them. He then conceded to the impetuous
penitent the kiss of peace, in a slight embrace which was like the accolade
given by a monarch to new knights.[308] The whole scene is ignoble. We

seem to be watching an unclean cauldron, with Theresa's mother, a cringing
and babbling crone, standing witch-like over it and infusing suspicion,
falsehood, and malice. When minds are thus surcharged, any accident
suffices to release the evil creatures that lurk in an irritated imagination.
One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to his
unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with some
strange disorder, which made it advisable that she should start without any
delay for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin, who
was at that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise was greatly
increased by the expectation which he found among his friends that he
would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, by offering to
bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in a town which was
strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to no purpose that he
protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse of another; and how
great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in the bad season, when
for many days he was absolutely unable to leave his chamber without
danger. Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide a friend's course, wrote
him a letter urging that his many obligations, and even his grievances in
respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him to accompany her, as he would
thus repay the one and console himself for the other. "She is going into a
country where she will be like one fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she will
need amusement and distraction. As for winter, are you worse now than you
were a month back, or than you will be at the opening of the spring? For
me, I confess that if I could not bear the coach, I would take a staff and
follow her on foot."[309] Rousseau trembled with fury, and as soon as the
transport was over, he wrote an indignant reply, in which he more or less
politely bade the panurgic one to attend to his own affairs, and hinted that
Grimm was making a tool of him. Next he wrote to Grimm himself a letter,
not unfriendly in form, asking his advice and promising to follow it, but
hardly hiding his resentment. By this time he had found out the secret of
Madame d'Epinay's supposed illness and her anxiety to pass some months
away from her family, and the share which Grimm had in it. This, however,
does not make many passages of his letter any the less ungracious or
unseemly. "If Madame d'Epinay has shown friend' ship to me, I have shown
more to her.... As for benefits, first of all I do not like them, I do not want
them, and I owe no thanks for any that people may burden me with by

force. Madame d'Epinay, being so often left alone in the country, wished me
for company; it was for that she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to
friendship, I must now make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must
be without a servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my
character, before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's
house. For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into
bondage with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty
domestics, and cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with
gloomy indigestion, and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer....
Consider how much money an hour of the life and the time of a man is
worth; compare the kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of
my native country and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the
obligation is greater on her side or mine." He then urges with a torrent of
impetuous eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and
absurd for him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame
d'Epinay, rich and surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that
the philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and
wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his five
and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.[310]
The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed, how
difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how little such
friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing this unfortunate
nature. They fretted him by not leaving him sufficiently free to follow his
own changing moods, while he in turn lost all self-control, and yielded in
hours of bodily torment to angry and resentful fancies. But let us hasten to
an end. Grimm replied to his eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the
effect that he would think the matter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau
had best keep quiet in his hermitage. Rousseau burning with excitement at
once conceived a thousand suspicions, wholly unable to understand that a
cold and reserved German might choose to deliberate at length, and finally
give an answer with brevity. "After centuries of expectation in the cruel
uncertainty in which this barbarous man had plunged me"—that is after
eight or ten days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct
application for one.[311] It was short and extremely pointed, not
complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay
but protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to

him for not accompanying her. "It has made me quiver with indignation; so
odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness and duplicity.
You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for more than two
years have been the daily witness of all the marks of the tenderest and most
generous friendship that you have received at the hands of that woman. If I
could pardon you, I should think myself unworthy of having a single friend.
I will never see you again while I live, and I shall think myself happy if I
can banish the recollection of your conduct from my mind."[312] A flash of
manly anger like this is very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious
way between morbid egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of
equivocal complaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific.
In a paroxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in
the same key. He wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in shrieks.
"Have I a single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one word, and
I can live." A day or two later: "Think of the state I am in. I can bear to be
abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so well! Great
God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313] And so on, raving. It was to no
purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing letters, praying him to
calm himself, to find something to busy himself with, to remain at peace
with Madame d'Epinay, "who had never appeared other than the most
thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him."[314] He was almost ready to
quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she paid the postage of
her letters, which he counted an affront to his poverty.[315] To Madame
d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his tormenting uncertainty as to the
answer which Grimm would make to his letter. It was an ungainly assertion
that she was playing a game of tyranny and intrigue at his cost. For the first
time she replied with spirit and warmth. "Your letter is hardly that of a man
who, on the eve of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life
repair the wrongs he had done me." She then tersely remarks that it is not
natural to pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that
he abuses her patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness that
friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the
Hermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until the spring he
would with her permission follow their counsel. Then she, with a final
thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm: "Since
you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I am
astonished that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't consult mine

as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as to yours." This
was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble petulance to
dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a misfortune to make a
mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not less cruel to awake from so
sweet an error, and two days before he wrote, he left her house. He found a
cottage at Montmorency, and thither, nerved with fury, through snow and
ice he carried his scanty household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).[316]
We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a
visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon as
he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and with his eyes all aflame:
"What have you come here for?" "I want to know whether you are mad or
malicious." "You have known me for fifteen years; you are well aware how
little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not mad: follow me."
He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded to clear himself, by
means of letters, of the charge of trying to make a breach between Saint
Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in fact letters that convicted
him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame d'Houdetot of the
criminality of her relations with her lover, and at the same time to accept
himself in the very same relation. Of all this we have heard more than
enough already. He was stubborn in the face of Diderot's remonstrance, and
the latter left him in a state which he described in a letter to Grimm the
same night. "I throw myself into your arms, like one who has had a shock
of fright: that man intrudes into my work; he fills me with trouble, and I am
as if I had a damned soul at my side. May I never see him again; he would
make me believe in devils and hell."[317] And thus the unhappy man who
had began this episode in his life with confident ecstasy in the glories and
clear music of spring, ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the
sullen crimson of the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the
haggard desperate gaze of a lost spirit.

FOOTNOTES:
[254] Conf., ix. 247.
[255] Conf., ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (Mém., ii. 132) has given an account
of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date. When Madame

d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the Hermitage—of
which nothing now stands—along with the rest of the estate became
national property, and was bought after other purchasers by Robespierre,
and afterwards by Grétry the composer, who paid 10,000 livres for it.
[256] Conf., ix. 255.
[257] Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.
[258] Conf., ix. 239.
[259] Conf., ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.
[260] The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the Polysynodia,
together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at the end of the
volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but without the judgment,
was printed separately without Rousseau's permission, in 1761, by Bastide,
to whom he had sold it for twelve louis for publication in his journal only.
Conf., xi. 107. Corr., ii. 110, 128.
[261] P. 485.
[262] For a sympathetic account of the Abbé de Saint Pierre's life and
speculations, see M. Léonce de Lavergne's Economistes français du 18ième
siècle (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's Lettres à M. Valat, p. 73.
[263] Conf., ix. 270-274.
[264] Conf., ix. 289.
[265] Ib. ix. 286.
[266] D'Epinay, ii. 153.
[267] Madame d'Houdetot, (b. 1730—d. 1813) was the daughter of M. de
Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage with
the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748. The
circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view of the
vows common among the great people of the time, are given with perhaps a
shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's Mém., i 101.
[268] Conf., ix. 281.

[269] D'Epinay, ii. 246.
[270] D'Epinay, ii. 269.
[271] Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her composition,
ii. 136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account of her, pp. 140, 141.
[272] Quoted by M. Girardin, Rev. des Deux Mondes, Sept. 1853, p. 1080.
[273] Conf., ix. 304.
[274] Ib. ix. 305. Slightly modified version in Corr., i. 377.
[275] M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.
[276] Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.
[277] This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to which
we come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot to
Rousseau in May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she
distinctly says that she concealed his mad passion for her from Saint
Lambert, who first heard of it in common conversation.
[278] Conf., ix. 311.
[279] Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions, see the
phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the Mélanges, pp. 347-360.
[280] Conf., ix. 337.
[281] Corr., i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.
[282] To Madame d'Houdetot. Corr., i. 376-387. June 1757.
[283] Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757.
Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.
[284] These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume (pp.
354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps the one best
worth turning to.
[285] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. Conf., x. 15.

[286] Ib. x. 22.
[287] Ib. x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.
[288] Conf., x. 24.
[289] To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. Corr., i. 362, 353. See also Conf., ix. 307.
[290] One of the most unflinching in this kind is an Essai sur la vie et le
caractère de J.J. Rousseau, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the laborious
production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the Confessions, Dialogues,
Letters, etc., with the reverence due to verbal inspiration, and writes of
everybody who offended his hero, quite in the vein of Marat towards
aristocrats.
[291] Corr., i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182
[292] D'Epinay, ii. 173.
[293] Conf., ix. 325.
[294] Ib., ix. 334.
[295] Mém., ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than
Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the winter of
1756-1757.
[296] The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's Mém. de
Diderot, p. 61.
[297] Conf., ix. 245, 246.
[298] Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. Conf., x. 17.
[299] Mém., ii. 318.
[300] Conf., ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (Mém., ii. 326), writing to Grimm,
gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of reconciliation, but the
nature of her relations with him would account for this. The same
circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (Rev. des Deux Mondes, Sept.
1853), would explain the discrepancy between her letters as given in the
Confessions, and the copies of them sent to Grimm, and printed in her

Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never perfectly master of himself in
dealing with the chiefs of the revolutionary schools, as might indeed have
been expected in a writer with his predilections for the seventeenth century,
rashly hints (Causeries, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The
publication from the autograph originals sets this at rest.
[301] For Shakespeare, see Corr. Lit., iv. 143, etc.
[302] D'Epinay, ii. 188.
[303] D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's Mém. de Diderot, p. 61.
[304] Mém. ii. 128.
[305] P. 258. See also p. 146.
[306] Pp. 282, 336, etc.
[307] Corr., i. 386. June 1757.
[308] Conf., ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible version,
assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see Mém., ii. 355-358.
Saint Lambert refers to the momentary reconciliation in his letter to
Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i. 418), repeating what he had said
before (p. 417), that Grimm always spoke of Mm in amicable terms, though
complaining of Rousseau's injustice.
[309] Conf., ix. 372.
[310] Corr., i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.
[311] Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's Mém. ii. 386. Nov. 3, 1757.
[312] D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.
[313] Corr., i. 425. Nov. 8. Ib. 426.
[314] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.
[315] Ib. 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre
(Oeuv., xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave the Hermitage
was the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending him letters by some

conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might equally well have been sent
for as many sous.
[316] The sources of all this are in the following places. Corr., i. 416. Oct.
29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. Conf., ix. 377. Corr., i. 427. Nov. 23. Conf.,
ix. 381. Dec. 1. Ib., ix. 383. Dec. 17.
[317] Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's Oeuv., xix. 446. See
also 449 and 210.

CHAPTER VIII.
MUSIC.

Simplification has already been used by us as the key-word to Rousseau's
aims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with which he came to
try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published vindication of it, and his
musical compositions afterwards all fall under this term. Each of them was
a plea for the extrication of the simple from the cumbrousness of elaborated
pedantry, and for a return to nature from the unmeaning devices of false art.
And all tended alike in the popular direction, towards the extension of
enjoyment among the common people, and the glorification of their simple
lives and moods, in the art designed for the great.
The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a
revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the
tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through a
middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the noble severity of
Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by birth,
found his first appreciation in a public that had been trained by the Italian
pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the earliest produced in
France. Grétri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a hearty admiration for
Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety lived for a time in his
Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence between the group of
Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck. "I have not produced
exaltation in people's heads by tragical superlative," Grétri said, "but I have
revealed the accent of truth, which I have impressed deeper in men's
hearts."[318] These words express sufficiently the kind of influence which
Rousseau also had. Crude as the music sounds to us who are accustomed to
more sumptuous schools, we can still hear in it the note which would strike
a generation weary of Rameau. It was the expression in one way of the
same mood which in another way revolted against paint, false hair, and
preposterous costume as of savages grown opulent. Such music seems
without passion or subtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly
any higher than a negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for

the acceptance of a more positive style, that should replace both the
elaborate false art of the older French composers and the too colourless
realism of the pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation
of Orfeo and Alceste.
In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a
number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. A
violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the defeat of
Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel between the
Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament had just been
exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State. The operatic quarrel
turned the excitement of the capital into another channel. Things went so far
that the censor was entreated to prohibit the printing of any work containing
the damnable doctrine and position that Italian music is good. Rousseau
took part enthusiastically with the Italians.[319] His Letter on French Music
(1753) proved to the great fury of the people concerned, that the French had
no national music, and that it would be so much the worse for them if they
ever had any. Their language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason,
was radically unfit either for poetry or music. All national music must
derive its principal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a
language in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet,
sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are
precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It is sweet
because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting of
consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of the
syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its
pronunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowels are
full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has few or no
nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far more favourable to
true melody than the didactic order of French. And so onwards, with much
close grappling of the matter. French melody does not exist; it is only a sort
of modulated plain-song which has nothing agreeable in itself, which only
pleases with the aid of a few capricious ornaments, and then only pleases
those who have agreed to find it beautiful.[320]
The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes a
vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the like.
Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained hardly

rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and "other difficult
fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason justify," they are
evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which only remain, like the
porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace of those who had patience
enough to construct them.[321] The last phrase-and both Voltaire and
Turgot used gothic architecture as the symbol for the supreme of rudeness
and barbarism—shows that even a man who seems to run counter to the
whole current of his time yet does not escape its influence.
Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the
impossibility of setting melody to French words on the part of a writer who
had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter created a
furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself taken the side of
the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which became a sort of
classic model for similar facetiousness in other controversies of the century.
The French, as he said, forgive everything in favour of what makes them
laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and demolished the pretensions of
French music with great sounding strokes as of an axe.[322] Rousseau
expected to be assassinated, and gravely assures us that there was a plot to
that effect, as well as a design to put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly
surmise to have been a fiction of his own imagination, and the only real
punishment that overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to
the Opera. After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French
music, the directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in
releasing him from them.[323] Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris
was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the Gluckists
and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the impossibility of
wedding melody to French words.[324] He went as often as he could to
hear the works both of Grétri and Gluck, and Orfeo delighted him, while the
Fausse magie of the former moved him to say to the composer, "Your
music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought my heart had long been
closed."[325] This being so, and life being as brief as art is long, we need
not further examine the controversy. It may be worth adding that Rousseau
wrote some of the articles on music for the Encyclopædia, and that in 1767
he published a not inconsiderable Musical Dictionary of his own.
His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he
defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now accepted

as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical instruction. The
aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at once practical and
popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music to the lowest possible
point, and so to bring the most delightful of the arts within the reach of the
largest possible number of people. Hence, although he maintains the fitness
of his scheme for instrumental as well as vocal performances, it is clearly
the latter which he has most at heart, evidently for the reason that this is the
kind of music most accessible to the thousands, and it was always the
thousands of whom Rousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music,
it is for the people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables
persons to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had come
practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which the pupil
was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from the open
book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to anything like facility in
performance, and without some of this facility he rightly felt that music
must remain a luxury for the few. So genuine was his interest in the matter,
that he was not very careful to fight for the originality of his own scheme.
Our present musical signs, he said, are so imperfect and so inconvenient
that it is no wonder that several persons have tried to re-cast or amend
them; nor is it any wonder that some of them should have hit upon the same
device in selecting the signs most natural and proper, such as numerical
figures. As much, however, depends on the way of dealing with these
figures, as with their adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was
as novel as it was advantageous.[326] Thus we have to bear in mind that
Rousseau's scheme was above all things a practical device, contrived for
making the teaching and the learning of musical elements an easier process.
[327]
The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a relative
series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In the common
notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is uniformly
represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second space in the
clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting on the varying
quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the key-note of the scale
to which it belongs, protested against the same name being given to the
tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus Re or D, which is the
second tone in the key of C, ought, according to him, to have a different

name when found as the fifth in the key of G, and in every case the name
should at once indicate the interval of a tone from its key-note. His mode of
effecting this change is as follows. The names ut, re, and the rest, are kept
for the fixed order of the tones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is
shown by prefixing one of these symbols, and this determines the absolute
quality of the melody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is expressed by a
number bearing a relation to the key-note. This tonic note is represented by
one, the other six tones of the scale are expressed by the numbers from two
to seven. In the popular Tonic Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds so
closely to Rousseau's in principle, the key-note is always styled Do, and the
other symbols, mi, la, and the rest, indicate at once the relative position of
these tones in their particular key or scale. Here the old names were
preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau selected numbers because he
supposed that they best expressed the generation of the sounds.[328]
Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic establishment
of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed that the order of the
harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would furnish a principle for
forming the familiar major scale,[329] but his knowledge of the order was
faulty. He was perhaps groping after the idea by which Professor Helmholtz
has accounted for the various mental effects of the several intervals in a key
—namely, the degree of natural affinity, measured by means of the upper
tones, existing between the given tone and its tonic. Apart from this,
however, the practical value of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly
shown by the circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young
children are now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a
few weeks. This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the
ease of hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in
respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit the
tone is compelled to measure the interval between it and the preceding tone,
and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to associate every tone
with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a relation with this
fundamental tone.
Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were just as
applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirements of
the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano, who has
to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or to a violinist

who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity, the most urgent
need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which the absolute pitch of
each successive tone may be at once recognised. Neither of these has any
time to think about the melodious relation of the tones; it is quite as much
as they can do to find their place on the key-board or the string. Rousseau's
scheme, or any similar one, fails to supply the clear and obvious index to
pitch supplied by the old system. Old Rameau pointed this out to Rousseau
when the scheme was laid before him, and Rousseau admitted that the
objection was decisive,[330] though his admission was not practically
deterrent.
His device for expressing change of octave by means of points would
render the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer still more
difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this to the other plan
suggested, of indicating height of octave by visible place above or below a
horizontal line. Again, his attempt to simplify the many varieties of musical
time by reducing them all to the two modes of double and triple time,
though laudable enough, yet implies an imperfect recognition of the full
meaning of time, by omitting all reference to the distribution of accent and
to the average time value of the tones in a particular movement.

FOOTNOTES:
[318] Quoted in Martin's Hist. de France, xvi. 158.
[319] Conf., viii. 197. Grimm, Corr. Lit., i. 27.
[320] Lettre sur la Musique Française, 178, etc., 187.
[321] P. 197.
[322] Corr. Lit., i. 92. His own piece was Le petit prophète de
Boehmischbroda, the style of which will be seen in a subsequent footnote.
[323] He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm, Corr.
Lit., i. 113.
[324] This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard, Oeuv.,
ii. 827):—"Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la musique est un excellent

passe-port auprès de lui. Quant à l'impossibilité de faire de la musique
française, je ne puis y croire, et votre raison ne me paraît pas bonne; car il
n'est point vrai que l'essence de la langue française est d'être sans accent.
Point de conversation animée sans beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre
et déterminé seulement par l'affection de celui qui parle, sans être fixé par
des conventions sur certaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons aussi dans
plusieurs mots des syllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent être accentuées."
[325] Musset-Pathay, i. 289.
[326] Preface to Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne, pp. 32, 33.
[327] I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M.A., for furnishing me with notes
on a technical subject with which I have too little acquaintance.
[328] Dissertation, p. 42.
[329] P. 52.
[330] Conf., vii. 18, 19. Also Dissertation, pp. 74, 75.

CHAPTER IX.
VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.

Everybody in the full tide of the eighteenth century had something to do
with Voltaire, from serious personages like Frederick the Great and Turgot,
down to the sorriest poetaster who sent his verses to be corrected or
bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the days of his unformed youth we
have already seen, as well as the courtesies with which they approached one
another, when Richelieu employed the struggling musician to make some
modifications in the great man's unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them
then dreamed that their two names were destined to form the great literary
antithesis of the century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first
interchange of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been
tolerably clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the
matter, that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their
methods were different, their training different, their points of view
different, and above all these things, their temperaments were different by a
whole heaven's breadth.
A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered by
various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The philosophy of
Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the happy, while Rousseau is
the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals away their faith from those
who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into the mind of the unbeliever.
The gaiety of the one saddens, while the sadness of the other consoles. If
we pass from the marked divergence in tendencies, which is imperfectly
hinted at in such sayings as these, to the divergence between them in all the
fundamental conditions of intellectual and moral life, then the variation
which divided the revolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly
apart through unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is
intelligible enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those
elements in contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity,
vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say,
Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly

antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling
vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion of
knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of the
felicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophic
raiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless. Still this
can never make us forget that he was in his day and generation one of the
sovereign emancipators, because he awoke one dormant set of energies, just
as Rousseau presently came to awake another set. Each was a power, not
merely by virtue of some singular preeminence of understanding or
mysterious unshared insight of his own, but for a far deeper reason. No
partial and one-sided direction can permanently satisfy the manifold
aspirations and faculties of the human mind in the great average of common
men, and it is the common average of men to whom exceptional thinkers
speak, whom they influence, and by whom they are in turn influenced,
depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter or a dramatist is affected.
Voltaire's mental constitution made him eagerly objective, a seeker of true
things, quivering for action, admirably sympathetic with all life and
movement, a spirit restlessly traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far
different from this, saw in himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world,
and was content to take that instead of the outer world, and as its truest
version. He made his own moods the premisses from which he deduced a
system of life for humanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or
some parts of them, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the
bustle of the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-
absorption which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to
interests of emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and
made eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses.
He was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example of
clear-eyed penetration.
This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division, for
the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are. Especially
when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its opposite. Just as
Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of intelligence made him one of
the humanest of men, so Rousseau's emotional susceptibility endowed him
with the gift of a vision that carried far into the social depths. It was a very
early criticism on the pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that

Rousseau was the more profound. In truth one was hardly much more
profound than the other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which
popular confusion of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had
seriousness. If profundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of
subjects, Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-
witted crusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is
that Rousseau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects of
human life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought about
at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry, history, literature,
and the more ridiculous parts of the religious superstition of his time,
Rousseau thought about social justice and duty and God and the spiritual
consciousness of men, with a certain attempt at thoroughness and system.
As for the substance of his thinking, as we have already seen in the
Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunity of seeing still more clearly,
it was often as thin and hollow as if he had belonged to the company of the
epigrammatical, who, after all, have far less of a monopoly of shallow
thinking than is often supposed. The prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing
him with the brilliant chief of the rationalistic school of the time, is his
reverence; reverence for moral worth in however obscure intellectual
company, for the dignity of human character and the loftiness of duty, for
some of those cravings of the human mind after the divine and
incommensurable, which may indeed often be content with solutions
proved by long time and slow experience to be inadequate, but which are
closely bound up with the highest elements of nobleness of soul.
It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great power in
the century, between the Encyclopædic party and the Church. He recognised
a something in men, which the Encyclopædists treated as a chimera
imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their own
purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the rational
feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a word he was
religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire and his school,
who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a puritan. In being
this, he was cut off from the intellectually and morally unreformed church,
which was then the organ of religion in France. Nor is this all. It was
Rousseau, and not the feeble controversialists put up from time to time by
the Jesuits and other ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective

champion of religion, and the only power who could make head against the
triumphant onslaught of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian dogmas and
mysteries, and, throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions
in which all religions have their root and their power, he breathed new life
into them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and
he beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly
repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but to root
out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This immense
achievement accomplished,—the great framework of a faith in God and
immortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, it
was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once
more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited
paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad for
the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better
opportunity of considering presently.
We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious
reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the school who
believed that men are better employed in thinking as accurately, and
knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those difficult processes
are possible, than in wearying themselves in futile search after gods who
dwell on inaccessible heights.

Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with his
usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against the human
race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of
making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk on all fours.
But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the
impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of
Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European
surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and
because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as
ourselves. So I content myself with being a very peaceable savage in the
solitude which I have chosen near your native place, where you ought to be
too." After an extremely inadequate discussion of one or two points in the

essay,[331] he concludes:—"I am informed that your health is bad; you
ought to come to set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to
drink with me the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau
replied to all this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and
actually at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of
the arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of
returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms as these:
—"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude of my
fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have profited by
the lessons that you of all men are able to give them. Embellish the asylum
you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your instruction; and do you
who know so well how to paint virtue and freedom, teach us to cherish
them in our walls."[333]
Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate pieces
to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century, his poem on
the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word had been
heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had figured the
doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life by refuting
Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the optimism of Pope and
Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man (1732-34) into French verse
as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination, already sombred by the
triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged around him, was suddenly
struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a world where whatever is is
best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures in the smoking ashes and
engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried, can you persist in talking of the
deliberate will of a free and benevolent God, whose eternal laws
necessitated such an appalling climax of misery and injustice as this? Was
the disaster retributive? If so, why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances?
The enigma is desperate and inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the
paradise of the fool. We ask in vain what we are, where we are, whither we
go, whence we came. We are tormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom
death at last swallows up, and with whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel
sport. The past is only a disheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the
thinking creature, how frightful is the present!

Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the first sign of
the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the polished
common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more than a
quarter of a century such influence in Europe.[335] It is a little odd that
Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of this stock, should have
broken so energetically away from it, and that he should have done so,
shows how open and how strong was the feeling in him for reality and
actual circumstance.
Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with
prosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life and
pronounce that all is evil and vanity. "Voltaire in seeming always to believe
in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since his pretended
God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all his pleasure in
working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is especially revolting in a
man crowned with good things of every sort, and who from the midst of his
own happiness tries to fill his fellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and
terrible image of the serious calamities from which he is himself free."[336]
As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so
quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from
calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe, and
the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch the
fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method of the
supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a more execrable
emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous. Voltaire is more
admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and far-spreading lively
sympathy with which he interested himself in all the world's fortunes, and
felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly as if the Geneva at his gates
had been destroyed. He relished his own prosperity keenly enough, but his
prosperity became ashes in his mouth when he heard of distress or wrong,
and he did not rest until he had moved heaven and earth to soothe the
distress and repair the wrong. It was his impatience in the face of the evils
of the time which wrung from him this desperate cry, and it is precisely
because these evils did not touch him in his own person, that he merits the
greater honour for the surpassing energy and sincerity of his feeling for
them.

Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those of
Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden wrongfully
accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement of a strange
town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her fate, still was
moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest of Montmorency to
speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine government of our world.
For him at any rate life was then warm and the day bright and the earth very
fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly. It was his very sensuousness, as
we are so often saying, that made him religious. The optimism which
Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a sovereign element of comfort.
"Pope's poem," he says, "softens my misfortunes and inclines me to
patience, while yours sharpens all my pains, excites me to murmuring, and
reduces me to despair. Pope and Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by
declaring calamities to be a necessary effect of the nature and constitution
of the universe. You cry, Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God
who created thee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no
end to them, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy existence, except
to suffer and to perish."[337] Rousseau then proceeds to argue the matter,
but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said before, and
said far more effectively. He begins, however, originally enough by a
triumphant reference to his own great theme of the superiority of the natural
over the civil state. Moral evil is our own work, the result of our liberty; so
are most of our physical evils, except death, and that is mostly an evil only
from the preparations that we make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was it
nature who collected the twenty thousand houses, all seven stories high? If
the people of Lisbon had been dispersed over the face of the country, as
wild tribes are, they would have fled at the first shock, and they would have
been seen the next day twenty leagues away, as gay as if nothing had
happened. And how many of them perished in the attempt to rescue clothes
or papers or money? Is it not true that the person of a man is now, thanks to
civilisation, the least part of himself, and is hardly worth saving after loss of
the rest? Again, there are some events which lose much of their horror when
we look at them closely. A premature death is not always a real evil and
may be a relative good; of the people crushed to death under the ruins of
Lisbon, many no doubt thus escaped still worse calamities. And is it worse
to be killed swiftly than to await death in prolonged anguish?[338]

The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part. Although
the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to its Creator than a
single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of the universe which
produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking and feeling beings, ought
to be dearer to him than any one of them, and he may, notwithstanding his
goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness, sacrifice something of the
happiness of individuals to the preservation of the whole. "That the dead
body of a man should feed worms or wolves or plants is not, I admit, a
compensation for the death of such a man; but if in the system of this
universe, it is necessary for the preservation of the human race that there
should be a circulation of substance between men, animals, vegetables, then
the particular mishap of an individual contributes to the general good. I die,
I am eaten by worms; but my children, my brothers, will live as I have
lived; my body enriches the earth of which they will consume the fruits; and
so I do, by the order of nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the
Decii, and a thousand others, did of their own free will for a small part of
men." (p. 305.)
All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept it as true
doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation easier by explaining
the nature of evil, it does not touch the point of Voltaire's outburst, which is
that evil exists, and exists in shapes which it is a mere mockery to associate
with the omnipotence of a benevolent controller of the world's forces.
According to Rousseau, if we go to the root of what he means, there is no
such thing as evil, though much that to our narrow and impatient sight has
the look of it. This may be true if we use that fatal word in an arbitrary and
unreal sense, for the avoidable, the consequent without antecedent, or
antecedent without consequent. If we consent to talk in this way, and only
are careful to define terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning, it is
hardly deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and whatever is is
indeed right and best, because no better is within our reach. Voltaire,
however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed that at any rate
relatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain, suffering, waste,
whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with stern immutable
law or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable reality: from our point of
view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at every calamity and every iniquity
that all is well in the best of possible worlds, and to sing hymns of praise

and glory to the goodness and mercy of a being of supreme might, who
planted us in this evil state and keeps us in it. Voltaire's is no perfect
philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy at all, but a passionate ejaculation;
but it is perfect in comparison with a cut and dried system like this of
Rousseau's, which rests on a mocking juggle with phrases, and the
substitution by dexterous sleight of hand of one definition for another.
Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that the matter is
beyond the light of reason, and that, "if the theist only founds his sentiment
on probabilities, the atheist with still less precision only founds his on the
alternative possibilities." The objections on both sides are insoluble,
because they turn on things of which men can have no veritable idea; "yet I
believe in God as strongly as I believe any other truth, because believing
and not believing are the last things in the world that depend on me." So be
it. But why take the trouble to argue in favour of one side of an avowedly
insoluble question? It was precisely because he felt that the objections on
both sides cannot be answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that he
faced the horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake without a
glimpse of consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstrance only
amounted to this, that he could not furnish one with any consolation out of
the armoury of reason, that he himself found this consolation, but in a way
that did not at all depend upon his own effort or will, and was therefore as
incommunicable as the advantage of having a large appetite or being six
feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes accustomed to this way of
dealing with subjects of discussion. We see him using his reason as adroitly
as he knows how for three-fourths of the debate, and then he suddenly
flings himself back with a triumphant kind of weariness into the buoyant
waters of emotion and sentiment. "You sir, who are a poet," once said
Madame d'Epinay to Saint Lambert, "will agree with me that the existence
of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and of sovereign intelligence, is at any rate
the germ of the finest enthusiasm."[339] To take this position and cleave to
it may be very well, but why spoil its dignity and repose by an unmeaning
and superfluous flourish of the weapons of the reasoner?
With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true question is
not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good that the
universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable in its
constitution. Then within a dozen lines he admits that there can be no direct

proof either way; we must content ourselves with settling it by means of
inference from the perfections of God. Of course, it is clear that in the first
place what Rousseau calls the true question consists of two quite distinct
questions. Is the universe in its present ordering on the whole good
relatively either to men, or to all sentient creatures? Next was evil an
inevitable element in that ordering? Second, this way of putting it does not
in the least advance the case against Voltaire, who insisted that no fine
phrases ought to hide from us the dreadful power and crushing reality of
evil and the desolate plight in which we are left. This is no exhaustive
thought, but a deep cry of anguish at the dark lot of men, and of just
indignation against the philosophy which to creatures asking for bread gave
the brightly polished stone of sentimental theism. Rousseau urged that
Voltaire robbed men of their only solace. What Voltaire really did urge was
that the solace derived from the attribution of humanity and justice to the
Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical account of evil, rests on too
narrow a base either to cover the facts, or to be a true solace to any man
who thinks and observes. He ought to have gone on, if it had only been
possible in those times, to persuade his readers that there is no solace
attainable, except that of an energetic fortitude, and that we do best to go
into life not in a softly lined silken robe, but with a sharp sword and armour
thrice tempered. As between himself and Rousseau, he saw much the more
keenly of the two, and this was because he approached the matter from the
side of the facts, while the latter approached it from the side of his own
mental comfort and the preconceptions involved in it.
The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, where
Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from the
philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of
civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that everybody
should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims that
everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion in accord
with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of accord with it
proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other religion but the code
itself.
Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of nonsense
like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there any reason to
suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau chose to think

that Candide (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340] He is careful to tell
us that he never read that incomparable satire, for which one would be
disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose appreciation of wit, if not
of humour also, was probably more deficient than in any man who ever
lived, either in Geneva or any other country fashioned after Genevan guise.
Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was four years later, and by that time the
alienation which had no definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no
special date, had become complete. "I hate you, in fact," he concluded,
"since you have so willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have
loved you, if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart
was full towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot
refuse to your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in
you which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine."[341] We
know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved with
bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence would have
been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau occasionally,
though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.[342] On the whole his
judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant to be unkind.
"Voltaire's first impulse," he said, "is to be good; it is reflection that makes
him bad."[343] Tronchin had said in the same way that Voltaire's heart was
the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is always trying to like him, he
always recognises him as the first man of the time, and he subscribed his
mite for the erection of a statue to him. It was the satire and mockery in
Voltaire which irritated Rousseau more than the doctrines or denial of
doctrine which they cloaked; in his eyes sarcasm was always the veritable
dialect of the evil power. It says something for the sincerity of his efforts
after equitable judgment, that he should have had the patience to discern
some of the fundamental merit of the most remorseless and effective
mocker that ever made superstition look mean, and its doctors ridiculous.

II.

Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack upon
another great Encyclopædist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert on
Stage Plays. "There," Rousseau said afterwards, "is my favourite book, my
Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the first inspiration, and
in the most lucid moments of my life."[344] Voltaire, who to us figures so

little as a poet and dramatist, was to himself and to his contemporaries of
this date a poet and dramatist before all else, the author of Zaïre and
Mahomet, rather than of Candide and the Philosophical Dictionary.
D'Alembert was Voltaire's staunchest henchman. He only wrote his article
on Geneva for the Encyclopædia to gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to
him when he composed it, he took occasion to regret that the austerity of
the tradition of the city deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre.
This suggestion had its origin partly in a desire to promote something that
would please the eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for
so close a neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a
theatre of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an
opportunity of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church
nearer home treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set
an example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see
actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an
object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt
by citizens.[345]
The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by the
French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as ever. The
circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the time would not
tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the persecution of players by
priests was in some sense an episode of the war between the priest and the
philosophers. The latter took up the cause of the stage partly because they
hoped to make the drama an effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and
confessional, partly from their natural sympathy with an elevated form of
intellectual manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical
inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage performers.
While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those who furnished
them as much diversion in private as in public, the church refused to all
players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress wished to marry,
they were obliged to renounce the stage, and the Archbishop of Paris
diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge.[346] The atrocities connected with
the refusal of burial, as well in the case of players as of philosophers, are
known to all readers in a dozen illustrious instances, from Molière and
Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.

Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old
prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against its
adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical. Jeremy
Collier in his Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English
Stage (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once famous piece
was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack on certain specific
qualities of the plays of his time—their indecency of phrase, their oaths,
their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism of the characters. One can
hardly deny that this was richly deserved by the English drama of the
Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not applicable, nor meant to apply,
either to the ancients, for he has a good word even for Aristophanes, or to
the French drama. Bossuet's loftier denunciation, like Rousseau's, was
puritanical, and it extended to the whole body of stage plays. He objected to
the drama as a school of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of
the gravity and purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the
senses, and therefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers. He
appeals to the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried,
Woe unto you that laugh.[347] There is a fine austerity about Bossuet's
energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness, and so severe
without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation or two later had
fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.
Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be an
appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not conceived
in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant menace. It is
no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought and idiom, but a
piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position is this: that the moral
effect of the stage can never be salutary in itself, while it may easily be
extremely pernicious, and that the habit of frequenting the theatre, the taste
for imitating the style of the actors, the cost in money, the waste in time,
and all the other accessory conditions, apart from the morality of the matter
represented, are bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every
circumstance. Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in
relation to the social condition and habits of Geneva.[348] The first part of
the discussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite pleas for the
morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to pity through terror, that
comedy corrects men while amusing them, that both make virtue attractive